SID Display Week played host to a number of big names in display technology showing off their respective high pixel density VR panels. UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton was on the scene, and managed to get a pretty good capture of both Samsung’s and JDI’s panels with his iPhone 8 camera.
Samsung showed off their 2.43-inch, 3,840 × 2,160 resolution (120Hz) panel through the lenses of a VR headset, although it appears from UploadVR‘s video that only static imagery was shown to SID Display Week attendees. The panel on display features 1,200 pixels per inch (PPI), and although not explicitly mentioned, is probably a derivation of their OLED VR panel first shown at Mobile World Congress last year.
Japan Display Inc. (JDI), a display conglomerate created by Sony, Toshiba, and Hitachi, debuted their high pixel density display at Display Week, showing off the 3.25-inch, 2,160 × 2,432 resolution TFT-LCD (120Hz). JDI’s panel features 1,001 PPI. As opposed to Samsung’s display, attendees were treated to a moving scene.
According to a recent tweet by Hamilton, the screen door effect (SDE) was is still apparent on Samsung’s display, while JDI’s display had a marked reduction of SDE to the point where he couldn’t see it at all.
These displays likely take a good amount of graphical rendering power to run at such high resolutions and fresh rates, so it makes sense why they were displayed in cases rather than a wearable VR headsets.
Foveated rendering is touted as a solution to the current ‘brute force’ method of displaying the full resolution of a scene across the majority of the display, and utilizes eye-tracking and a dedicated rendering pipeline in order to show the highest resolution image in the center of the photoreceptor-dense part of the eye, the fovea, making these sorts of panels viable even for mobile VR headsets.
As an added bit of info: both panels were shown using standard refractive lenses, like those found in Gear VR, and not the more common Fresnel lenses found in current generation mobile VR headsets such as Google Daydream, Oculus Go, and HTC Vive Focus—something likely done to not muddy the view with visual artifacts associated with Fresnel lenses such as ‘god rays’, or faint streaks or glares of light that are most noticeable when looking at bright objects against a dark background.
Our friends over at UploadVR also have an interesting piece on Google And LG’s new 1,443 PPI VR display, also debuted at SID earlier this week.