I have actually done this some time ago but I used a different approach.
Instead of using transparent materials I removed the in-between strips physically. The backfaces of the strips remaining were visible until I culled those.
As stated by another contributor, the backfacing doesn't want to disappear when using Blender's built in Renderer but using the GL renderer instead will do the job on my PC at least. Perhaps the video card might give different results on different PC's(?)
I rendered a still (a video will render just as well) with the Backface Cullling ticked. Both the preview and rendered output did remove the backfaces. I also included an alpha layer on the still/video so it can be used as an overlay (Alpha Over) in the Video Sequence Editor.
I laid that over the background pic in the VSE and the result showed the front of the sphere's strips appearing, but importantly, without their backfaces.
I'm not familiar enough with Stack Exchange to upload pics/files yet but I have a zipped file which contains the Blender files, source pic and outputs if you'd like those.
It's just a matter of telling me how to get it to you through this site.
Certainly the ability to remove backfaces on transparent surfaces would be handy.