Clear glass panel 27x34cm with gold wires, 3-core cable, 9-pin IDC—what is this?

After clearing out my brothers workshop I came across several items that I've no idea what they are.
Two clear glass panels 27 x 34 cm sandwiched together. There's a three core cable coming out from one corner that's terminated in a 9 pin female IDC connector. If you hold the panel up to the light you can see super fine gold coloured wires running from left to right in a sort of saw tooth pattern, and the same fine wires running around the edges. It says "viewing face" on a label stuck on the front and the only other marking is "2003/1577" scratched into the glass on an edge. The top of the panel has what looks like an epoxy section around 1 cm wide bonded to the top edge of the panel where the cable enters. I'm guessing there are some electronics inside this epoxy.

Anybody have any ideas or suggestions ?

Regards,
Joe

Joe - intriguing one.  Your description is pretty good but a photo might help.  It might be some sort of display but I'd expect more wires.  My guess would be some kind of electroluminescent backlight for something - those big LCD displays you get on petrol pumps comes to mind but they're even bigger than that.alternatively some mind of solar panel but if they're clear the light would go straight through.  Have you looked at the wires with a multimeter to see that resistances you get, or if anything is being generated out of them?The other possibility is some kind of heating element, a la car back windows.

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The blue plastic just peels off the front and back to reveal the glass panel. The second picture from my microscope shows the gold wires that are running around the edges and across the panel, sandwiched between the two glass plates. 

Joe - thanks for that.  Triggered another thought - a touchscreen that can be mounted over another display like this one.  There are serial versions available like this one.  The "Viewing side" label fits in with that.  Do you think that might be it?Cheers // DavidPS if you have a PC with a serial port, plug it in and set up hyperterminal and stroke your fingers over it and see if it sends anything. You'd have to play around with the serial settings and you'd probably only get gibberish, but it would prove my theory.....

Hi David,thanks for that... that idea never occurred to me.My late brother was always experimenting with weird things so it could be anything. I'll see if I can hook it to my scope and maybe pick up something.
Regards,Joe

Joe...just hooking it to a scope probably would not show anything.  to work it would have to be connected to an RS232 port from which it would get its power (unless it has a separate power jack, which I don't think you've mentioned?  I have done very little with touchscreens but I think they are pretty unique and you'd need the right driver for your particular one to do anything useful with it.If you talk to it with (eg) Hyperterminal and you hit something like the right combination of Number of bits / Baud rate / parity / stop bits then you'd see something coming back when you touch it, but as I said it would be gibberish, decipherable only by the right driver software.Just a thought - if your brother had a laptop of the same size screen as this he may have already installed the software.  You didn't find any disk or CD with them?