eMagin has announced the company recently demonstrated for the first time in public a direct patterned OLED microdisplay that can reach a maximum luminance of 4,500 nits with vivid colours and in full video mode. The new full colour DPD display, designated OLED-ULT, provides brightness that meets or exceeds the requirements for the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) markets.
The details of the direct patterned OLED microdisplay was presented by Dr. Amal Ghosh, Senior Vice-President of R&D, in a paper entitled, "Directly Patterned 2645 PPI Full Color OLED Microdisplay for Head Mounted Wearables" at the recent held Society for Information Displays annual conference during Display Week 2016.
The active matrix OLED-ULT delivers crisp, high-contrast imagery via eMagin's True Black pixel technology. The screen turns on instantly at low temperatures without the need for heaters and is built to high commercial and military ruggedness standards OLED. The OLED-ULT display exhibits much lower color shift with angle than standard OLED microdisplays. This approach offers a high-resolution microdisplay with extended luminance performance without the need for a back light, illuminator, or separate drive circuitry which are necessary for LCOS or LCD technology microdisplays.
Andrew G. Sculley, President and CEO of eMagin Corporation, said, "eMagin's ultra-high brightness OLED-ULT technology is at the cusp of enabling the next generation of AR/VR applications which demand ultra-high brightness, full color imagery with extremely high contrast, compact size and very low power." Andrew, added, "This demonstration generated tremendous interest from hundreds of attendees including a number representing Tier 1 display companies. We are currently shipping our OLED-ULT displays as engineering samples to a few key customers that are interested in ultra-high brightness microdisplays for applications as diverse as aviation head mounted displays to AR and VR applications. Our current expectation is that we will begin shipping additional engineering samples to other customers in the fourth quarter of 2016."