Samsung & Stanford's New OLED Display with 10,000 PPI Will Open Doors for Advance VR Headsets

Samsung and researchers at Stanford University have developed a new OLED display with resolutions of up to 10,000 pixels per inch (PPI) that is 20 times more than what average smartphones offer these days. According to the Stanford researchers, such a high-pixel-density display will open doors for advancement in virtual and augmented reality technologies as it would provide a more detailed and realistic viewing experience. The new OLED display was a result of an existing solar panel tech that the researcher used for its creation. The “metaphotonic” OLED display technology as the researchers call, would be brighter and have better colour accuracy than existing versions. They are said to be “much easier and cost-effective to produce” as well.

For the development of the new 10,000 PPI OLED display, Stanford University materials scientist Mark Brongersma collaborated with Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT). In a press note, it was explained that the crucial innovation behind the new OLED is a base layer of reflective metal with nanoscale (smaller than microscopic) corrugations called an optical metasurface. The note adds, “The metasurface can manipulate the reflective properties of light and thereby allow the different colours to resonate in the pixels. These resonances are key to facilitating effective light extraction from the OLEDs.”

Samsung and Stanford researchers highlight that the new 10,000 PPI OLED panel also aims to provide alternatives to the existing OLED technologies – red-green-blue OLED and white OLED that are used widely for commercial purposes. At the moment, researchers produced miniature proof-of-concept pixels during the lab test. As the moment, the development is at its early stages, the availability of the technology for commercial purposes is still years away. Similarly, even with development, there are still bigger challenges that lay with hardware like VR headsets that would still require high-level GPU to render images on the new OLED display. Popular headsets like Valve Index and HTC Vive Cosmos offer PPIs well under 800.

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