Smartphone screens not good enough for VR, says display maker

Technology News | December 6, 2016

By Rich Pell

The company says that while sensors, signal processing and signal transmission have greatly improved over the last few years, making VR an attractive consumer proposition, the displays typically used in VR lack the qualities required for a really immersive experience.

This is because they are not designed for VR applications but instead for smartphones and then only adapted to VR.

The new LTPS TFT LCD that JDI has specifically developed for VR applications provides the required display performance and characteristics including ultra-high resolution, high-speed response time, high refresh rate, and blinking backlight.

These features, explains the Japanese company, enable the new VR-HMD LCD to show more life-like images and create a more immersive experience than other VR-HMD displays currently available in the market.

JDI has developed an ultra-high resolution display at 651ppi, with which the user can hardly see the pixel structure even through the VR-HMD’s lenses which magnifies the display image, and the company also plans to develop and sample an even higher resolution 800ppi display next.

The 3.42″ display packs 1440xRGBx1700 pixels and supports a brightness of 150cd/m² (with 10% duty rate blinking backlight). Contrast ratio is 700:1, typical.

Comparison of motion blur between a
smartphone display (left) and a VR display (right)

In order to suppress motion blur, JDI has employed a high refresh rate of 90Hz, a high-speed IPS LCD with a response time of 3ms (black-to-white), and blinking backlight technology (with a 10% duty rate, typical).

JDI says it can reduce the overal system latency of VR headsets thanks to the high refresh rate and a high-speed of its IPS LCD, which contributes to shorten the latency of the display, a significant part of the overall system latency.

Visit Japan Display Inc. at www.j-display.com/english/