Arduview, a see-through handheld with a see-through screen, hits its Kickstarter goal

Specimen of the week: hold a tiny handheld up to the light, flip it around, and watch the game still running on the glass. That is the Arduview, and it has met its Kickstarter goal.¹

It is a console, not a game, roughly the size of a credit card, built on the open-source Arduino project for its hardware and software.¹ Plenty of handhelds have shipped in clear plastic shells. This one makes the screen clear too.

The plain facts: the device was created by Louis Huang, a student at Babson College in Massachusetts.¹ It comes with 400 games built in, and games made by the Arduboy community can be added.¹ The campaign is on Kickstarter with 38 days to go.¹

The trick is the display. Switched off, it looks like glass. Switched on, the lit pixels glow cyan, so it works in the dark, and everything else stays clear.¹ Look from behind and you can still see what is being played.¹ VGC has had a unit for about a month and says the screen works as shown on the Kickstarter page, with a full report to follow.¹

I like the thinking behind it. Huang believes “the inside of a device is the most interesting part of it,” so you should be able to see it.¹ He built on the open-source Arduboy platform so it could be opened, flashed and tinkered with rather than sealed shut.¹ Community-made games and tools are part of the story here, not an afterthought.

What backers get: early-bird tiers run HK$573 (around $75), HK$692 (around $89) or HK$770 (around $99), against HK$1,159 (around $147) at launch.¹ The sources do not give a ship date or a list of platforms beyond the handheld itself.

Field note: the 400 built-in games mean the device is useful before you add anything.¹

Our read: This is the kind of small-team hardware idea that lives or dies on one detail, and the transparent screen is a real one. Early-bird tiers are the cheapest way in, and the open platform suggests a tinkerer’s toy worth watching.

Worth knowing: it is on Kickstarter now, with early-bird pledges from around $75.¹

Footnotes

1. VGC, “The Arduview is the world’s first fully transparent handheld, including the screen”. Retrieved October 31, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³