OPPO teases in-screen front camera for this week's big event

"How can front cameras evolve when the full screen era comes?" That is the question that OPPO asked no one in particular over on Weibo. Over the years, it has tried different ways of answering that, from rotating cameras to elevating ones. This week, the Chinese OEM is going to attempt what is probably the most daring and riskiest design of all: putting the camera in the display without any hole.

The craze over bezel-less phones may be relatively recent but OPPO was actually ahead of the game when it came to the designs that would enable that. Back in 2013, it launched the OPPO N1 with a rotating camera that served a different purpose. Instead of making bezels disappear, it presented it as a way to use the same high-quality rear camera for taking selfies, an idea that would also be adopted in the Samsung Galaxy A90 and the ASUS ZenFone 6.

More recently, OPPO has also dabbled in all kinds of notches. Together with Vivo, it was one of the first to introduce an elevating mechanism to pop up the front cameras of the OPPO Find X. With the OPPO Reno, it reduced the component to a "shark fin" design.

This week, it will bet on a technology and design that Samsung was expected to be the first to introduce. Based on its steady flow of teasers, the front camera will be completely hidden inside the screen and will be invisible when not in use. Not like Samsung's somewhat controversial punch-hole Infinity-O screens.

How it will solve problems with occlusion and light bleeding, it will probably reveal in less than two days. OPPO has scheduled an event on June 26 to unveil this new tech. Whether it will come in a future phone is a different question entirely.