Video of Woman Scrolling Through Invisible Phone Racks Up Over 50 Million Views

A video of a woman scrolling on a totally transparent ‘smartphone’ while waiting in line at a bubble tea shop in San Francisco has blown up on TikTok, but what exactly is going on?

The comments on the TikTok video strongly speculate that it is a transparent phone touted by Nokia last year, but that isn’t the case.

The woman who posted the video, CatGPT, later followed up her viral video explaining her newfangled device is something called a ‘methaphone.’

“It is exactly what it looks like, a clear piece of acrylic shaped like an iPhone,” Cat says. “My friend is actually the inventor and creator of these.”

The so-called methaphone was created by Cat’s friend as a response to widespread phone addiction and to see if a clear piece of plastic could “potentially curb somebody’s addiction by replacing the feeling of having a phone in your pocket with something that feels exactly the same.”

Cat says she has been testing out the methaphone to see if it could alleviate phone addiction — it appears that it hasn’t.

“Have I used my phone less in the past week that I’ve been carrying this around with me? Probably not,” she says. “But just the idea that I could have something in my life, something I can touch and hold, and the conversation that this little guy is sparking online, that’s what really matters.”

Cat admits that it could be “just a weird party trick” but given the attention the video has received online, it at least shows how obsessed everyone is with their devices.

Will Smartphones Ever Be Replaced?

Last year, the much-hyped Humane AI Pin was released; a device with no screen that was initially marketed as the next evolution of the smartphone. However, things did not pan out that way, reviewers hated the $700 wearable Pin and earlier this year the project was shut down for good.

Nevertheless, there is clearly some appetite to rid the world of its smartphone addiction which, as Cat says, “are meant to make us more connected are actually having the exact opposite effect.”