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OnePlus has a new phone concept to show off, which is its way of poking fun at technology that maybe, just maybe, could become one of the company’s future phones. The OnePlus 8T Concept is a similar phone to the OnePlus 8T that was launched a couple of months ago, but it has a rather unique rear design that changes color along with a motion-tracking radar module.
According to OnePlus, this color-changing effect is achieved with a film containing metal oxide, which is placed under the back of the phone’s glass and changes color as different voltages are applied to it. At its most basic, it could change color to display phone notifications, such as an incoming phone call, just like the notification light that you have included on your phones in the past. But where things get really interesting is when paired with the concept phone’s rear-mounted radar module.
This module, which is built into the camera top on the back of the phone, uses millimeter wave radar to bounce electromagnetic waves off its surroundings and enables the phone to “sense, view, locate and track objects.” Although OnePlus says that this mmWave technology is “borrowed from 5G,” it adds that the radar module is separate from any mmWave communication module in the phone.
Functionally, it sounds similar to the Pixel 4’s radar-enabled Motion Sense technology, allowing you to slide your hand over the phone to skip music tracks or silence alarms. It could also detect your presence to show you the time and notifications. The functionality was interesting, but Google hasn’t included it in later phones.
This phone concept can also use this motion tracker to do simple things like answer a phone call with a gesture, or offer more advanced functionality like detect a user’s breath. This can be combined with its color-changing back to offer some interesting use cases. For example, its back could change color to indicate an incoming call, and then you could accept or reject it with a gesture, without having to touch the phone. Or the radar could sense your breath and then change the color of your back at the same time, “making the phone a biofeedback device,” says OnePlus.
It’s an ambitious collection of features, but there’s no guarantee we’ll ever see them make it to a consumer device. After all, just under a year ago OnePlus was showing off the OnePlus Concept One, an interesting device that used electrochromic glass to make its rear cameras disappear (and which also acted as a pretty neat little ND filter). However, the technology has yet to appear on any of the company’s flagship phones.
As with the previous Concept One, OnePlus says it has no plans to commercially sell the OnePlus 8T Concept, so it is best seen as a small sample of what the company is working on. But hopefully, the technology could one day make it to one of its true smartphones.
