3D OLEDs

Looking Glass has been developing 3D holographic displays since 2014. The company's technology enables high-quality 3D display, without the need for any glasses. The company has now launched a crowdfunding campaign to promote its latest display, a small (smartphone-sized) portable holographic display called the Looking Glass Go.

The Looking Glass Go is based on a 6" 1440x2560 LCD display, that offers a viewing cone of 58-degrees, and 40-100 views. The display connects via a single USB-C port (for both power and data).

China-based display maker CSoT demonstrated several new OLED display prototypes and technologies at SID 2019, and this great new video shows these displays in action.

First up is a 31" 4K (3840 x 2160, 144 PPI) AMOLED that was produced using an ink-jet printing process on an IGZO substrate. The peak brightness is 200 nits and the refresh rate is 120 Hz. This seems to be the same panel announced in March 2018 by Joshua Printing Display Technology (established by CSoT and Tianma in 2016). The display has some noticable defects.

The Fraunhofer FEP institute has successfully integrated its bi-directional OLED microdisplays into an VR / AR HMD (or dataglasses, as the Fraunhofer calls it) for 2D and 3D content.

The new HMD demonstrator uses the Fraunhofer's SVGA (800x600) displays and connects via a USB interface and an HDMI connection. The bi-directional displays can be used for eye tracking to support novel user interfaces.

San Francisco based Osterhout Design Group (ODG) announced that it raised $58 million from several investors, including Shenzhen O-film Tech and Vanfund Urban Investment & Development. This is ODG's round A investment, but it is not a new company - it has been active with enterprise AR solutions for eight years, and in 2014 it sold some of its IP to Microsoft for $150 million.

ODG R-7

Why does ODG need so much money? Because it is entering the consumer market with its upcoming codename-Horizon platform, which will be an AR/VR platform that is based on OLED microdisplays. The Horizon platform will support a wide FOV, 120 fps and support for 4K 3D content.

BOE Display had a large booth at SID, and the Chinese company demonstrated several new AMOLED prototypes - including large 10" panels and bendable OLEDs.

So first up we have 4.35" bendable and foldable OLED displays. The bendable panels offer a resolution of 1120x480 (HWVGA, 280 PPI) and a bending radius of 15 mm. The brightness is 350 nits. The color gamut is 100% NTSC. The foldable panels are the same - except the bending radius is much smaller at 5 mm.

Researchers at Canada's Queen's University Human Media Lab developed a prototype phone called HoloFlex that use a holographic lightfield 3D display that can "project" 3D images.

The HoloFlex uses a flexible 5.5" Full-HD (403 PPI) OLED display (seems to be the same LGD panel used in the G Flex 2) with a 3D-printed flexible lens-array on top, that forms a 160x104 matrix (16,640 lenses). Each lens projects the 12 pixel-wide circular area directly underneath it out into space.

eMagin announced that preliminary revenue for Q4 2013 was about $6.1 million. That's about $2 million less than expected. This ends a very challenging year for the OLED microdisplay maker. Looking forward, the company wants to strengthen their manufacturing processes and reach "acceptable" yield levels, and expects to return to revenue growth in 2014.

eMagin says that demand for their microdisplays remains strong, but there was a "shortfall in anticipated product revenue" for the quarter, resulting from equipment downtime, low yield and lower average sales prices. Contract revenue in the period is still low due to fewer government R&D contracts as a result of the U.S. government sequestration.

NVIDIA unveiled a new research project that developed a near-eye light field display. A prototype unit was shown that uses two Sony ECX332A OLED microdisplays (1280x720 each). The microdisplays are covered with a micro-lens array which creates the light field.

The basic idea is that users can focus at multiple depth and create a field of view of about 70 degrees. If you wear glasses, this display can account for your glasses using software algorithms. Check out the video above for more info.

Researchers from the Imperial College in London are researching the usage of Helicenes as emitter materials in OLED panels. Helicene based PLED emit circularly polarized light (they call these CP-OLEDs) and these may be useful for 3D OLEDs and other optical and photonics applications.

Helicenes are thermally-stable polycyclic aromatics with helically-shaped molecules. These molecules has unique structural, spectral, and optical features. The researchers found that when these molecules are used as emitter materials in OLED panels, they emit a light that is circularly polarized (not 100% though).

Carl Zeiss has been showing their Cinemizer OLED head-mounted-display product for ages (since 2008 in fact), and finally they started shipping: $749 in the US and £577.90 in the UK. This is the 850x500 model (not the 720p version shown in 2010) that has HDMI (v1.4), Apple (iPhone 3/4 and iPod touch) connectors and A/V inputs.

$749 is quite expensive, considering that Sony's HMZ-T1 HMD costs only $50 more, and offer a much higher resolution at 1280x720.