A team at ETH Zurich has built a pixel that both emits and absorbs light, doing the job of a screen and a camera in a single component.
Researchers at ETH Zurich published findings in Nature describing what they call the first bidirectional pixel. Display pixels and image-sensor pixels have always been separate: one converts electricity to light, the other converts light to electricity. This device does both within the same structure. The paper carries no announced commercial partner or production timeline.
If the approach scales, it could eliminate the front-facing camera cutouts that phone makers have spent years shrinking or hiding beneath displays. In principle, every pixel on a future screen could double as a sensor, capturing images, depth data, or biometric information without any dedicated camera hardware alongside it.
A long road runs from a Nature paper to a factory floor, so treat this as a proof of concept, not a product announcement.