The first Arduview units are shipping to their backers, and the handheld is now heading to Kickstarter as what its maker calls the world’s first fully transparent video game console. It isn’t just another clear-shell novelty in the mould of the Game Boy Color’s Atomic Purple or the Nintendo 64’s Funtastic line, both of which stopped at a tinted plastic shell: the transparent handheld console carries the concept through the whole device, with a see-through shell, a see-through circuit board and a transparent OLED display, so the internals are visible front to back.
Inside the transparent handheld console
Arduview founder Louis Huang, a student at Babson College, told Tom’s Hardware that he has always liked transparent consoles and clear-shell mods, but was frustrated that the transparency usually stopped at the frame. “So we pushed it further with a transparent OLED screen, board, and case. You can see straight through the whole device,” he said.
Underneath the see-through casing, the Arduview is built on the open-source Arduboy platform: an Arduino-derived design meant for DIY electronics tinkering rather than raw power. It runs on an ATmega32u4 microcontroller with just 2.5KB of RAM and 32KB of storage, and ships with 400 preloaded 8-bit games alongside USB-C connectivity for adding more from the Arduboy community library.
That combination of modest resources and an open toolchain is the trade-off for the transparent build: owners can code and load their own 8-bit games rather than being locked to a fixed library, in exchange for giving up the horsepower of a modern handheld SoC. The whole unit weighs 50g, light enough that the transparent build reads as a design statement rather than a bulky showcase.
Pricing and what to watch next
Arduview’s early access page is still taking $5 reservations at a founder price of $49, even though the site describes the programme as running in August 2026. By our arithmetic, the wider pricing structure Arduview has published for its Kickstarter configurations runs from $80 for the base unit to $100 for the top tier, a $20 step that makes the highest configuration 25 percent more expensive than the entry-level one. That gap is worth watching once the Kickstarter page goes live, since backers will need to weigh whether the pricier tier’s extras justify a quarter more than the base price.
A full Kickstarter listing hasn’t gone up yet, and Arduview is currently pointing early backers to its own site for reservations ahead of that launch. The project is aiming for a full release in 2027, which leaves a long runway between the founder units now shipping and a general retail version. For an audience used to seeing transparent hardware announced as a rendering exercise, having actual founder units already shipping before the Kickstarter page is even live is itself notable: it suggests the transparent PCB and display were manufacturable in small batches, not just a concept image.
Anyone tracking transparent hardware more broadly has plenty of recent company: Commodore’s Starlight edition of the C64U and Microsoft’s translucent green Xbox Series X25 both leaned on the same see-through aesthetic this year, though neither pushed the transparency down to the circuit board the way Arduview has.
What to watch next is whether Arduview’s Kickstarter campaign confirms that $80-to-$100 pricing structure, sets a firm shipping window ahead of the 2027 release target, and whether the transparent OLED panel holds up to the durability questions that inevitably follow any see-through electronics project once it leaves the founder batch and reaches a wider crowdfunding audience.
