Chris Chinnock, Insight Media
SID’s Display Week taking place in San Jose, California is the best place to see the future of the display industry. The Young Leadership session provided an opportunity for some of the industry’s brightest young minds to showcase the research they are doing. Such developments may be in future display products – a pretty good reason to attend Display Week in general.
All of the presenters in the Young Leadership session were students at leading Universities with display-related programs. Most are Ph.D. candidates or in post-doc positions so they may soon be in the workforce – maybe even pursuing their research with commercial companies. While the presentations are also mostly duplicated in the regular symposium sessions, the Young Leadership session was held on Monday – a day reserved for special seminars and short courses. This is helpful as it is often difficult to attend interesting symposium papers while also attending sessions at the Business Conference, Center Stage, Showcase Stage, the India Business Forum, or visiting exhibitors. There is just too much good overlapping content.
The Young Leadership session, sponsored by 3M, was kicked off by a student from North Carolina State University (paper 60-3). He pointed out that head-tracked lenticular-based 3D displays start to show color and aliasing issues as you start to move off the center line. His group has developed new algorithms that can correct these geometric errors that he says can be applied to many existing head-track 3D displays, such as the ones from Looking Glass Factory, Leia, Samsung or Sony without hardware changes.
Next, a student from Sun Yat-Sen University showed how a novel optical configuration called Alvarez Lenses, can allow for a variable virtual focal length in AR/VR headsets or in automotive Head-up Displays (HUDs) (paper 58-4). The concept is shown in the image.
By sliding the two lenses horizontally one can change the light path from collimated to expanding or focusing, thus enable different focal plane imaging in a headset or HUD. They can also be displaced laterally while adding personalized corrective optics. Very clever.
Utsunomiya University described their aerial display (paper 60-1). Such displays create an image that appears to “float” in free space and can include touch and interactive activities. It is a touchless interface that avoids any need to sterilize and conventional display surface. Their particular implementation of such a display uses retroreflectors.
Researchers at Seoul National University want to help advance the state of stretchable and conformable displays (paper 77-4). To do so, they are developing mesh electrode technology to replace conventional electrodes which are a uniform sheet of conductive material. The latter are prone to breakage when stretched or deformed. Their research looked at different configurations for the mesh, like square or hexagonal, along with various deposition methods to optimize transmissivity and durability with low resistance. A novel electrohyrodynamic inkjet printing technique looks very promising, they noted.
A student from The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology is working on an OLED-based treatment method for wound healing, skin rejuvenation and neonatal jaundice treatment (paper 65-3). They fabricated a dual stacked OLED device on a flexible substrate with green on one side and red emitting on the other. They confirmed an improvement in wound closure compared to a control group.
The control of the phase and amplitude for a holographic display was the topic of a student from Kent State University (paper 42-1). Holographic displays and elements typically control the phase or the amplitude of the light, but it is better to control both. That is exactly what his research results showed along with the improvements in image quality. This has applications for AR/VR along with direct-view displays and HUDs. He also showed a solution for wide-angle full-color holographic elements for AR waveguides.
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology presented a paper on advancements in LIDAR (paper 86-3). These light-ranging solutions are designed to create a 3D map or point cloud and have uses in automobiles and smartphones (like face ID). They are developing an optical solution that will expand the current narrow field of view of such systems.
Zhejiang University students want to improve the uniformity and efficiency of free-form AR display solutions (paper 93-4). As a result, they are working on methods to better control the polarization propagating through the optics. Their design showed a 28% improvement in polarization efficiency and better luminance uniformity.
A paper on compression methods for hologram was described by a student from University of Hong Kong (paper 83-3). Compression of phase-only holograms is a computationally intensive task and suffers image quality issues upon decompression. In the paper, the student described a new method to optimize the encoding and decoding of phase-only holograms for low bit-rate transmission with good quality.
These students are clearly very smart and produce cutting-edge research that can be valuable to the display industry. And they will likely eventually take leadership roles in the industry to continue the remarkable development of the display industry. We are in good hands.
