Samsung, Stanford's 10,000PPI Display Will Eliminate 'Screen Door' Effect

One of the biggest immersion breakers in virtual reality (VR) today is the "screen door" effect, that mesh-like appearance users see on their screens due to the fact they're so close to the display and they can see lines between individual pixels.

Now, if new research by Samsung and Stanford University is anything to go by, we might soon see an end to that bothersome effect. They have developed OLED technology that supports resolutions up to 10,000 pixels per inch, specifically with VR in mind.

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Solar panel innovation used for OLED

As a point of comparison, the resolutions of new smartphones are generally around 400 to 500 PPI. Impressively, the people over at Stanford, alongside researchers in Korea, expanded on existing designs for electrodes of ultra-thin solar panels for their 10,000 PPI displays.

The main innovation in the new OLED technology is a base layer of reflective metal with nanoscale corrugations, called an optical metasurface. This metasurface is able to manipulate the reflective properties of light, allowing different colors to resonate in the pixels.

The base layer corrugations make it so that each pixel can be positioned at the exact same height, unlike in other OLED manufacturing processes where there are minuscule differences in height. This allows a simpler process for large-scale as well as micro-scale fabrication.

'Stunning images with true-to-life detail'

In a Stanford University press release, the researchers say that "such high-pixel-density displays will be able to provide stunning images with true-to-life detail – something that will be even more important for headset displays designed to sit just centimeters from our faces."

The VR and AR industry is already seeing great strides in entertainment, medical uses, and even military and medical training via VR.

This new technology from Stanford and Samsung might be a few years from becoming commercially available, but it may well be the next big step in virtual reality immersion.