The Vision Pro was officially launched in the United States with a silicon-based OLED screen.
On February 2, local time, with the official launch of Vision Pro in the United States, Apple once again stood in the global spotlight. Many reviewers have praised the Vision Pro as "the best known headset in the world", but also pointed out that "the colors are not realistic enough", "the display is not good", and "*perspective may be blurry", ......
Because of this, Apple has launched a starting sale of up to $3499 (about RMB 2.)50,000 yuan) vision pro, only to willingly spend about half of the cost on two pieces of 13-inch silicon-based OLED display. But other headset manufacturers have chosen a different technology route than Apple. Meta Quest3 is equipped with a 2064 2208 resolution Fast-LCD dual display, Sony PlayStation VR2 is equipped with an OLED screen, Thunderbird AR glasses X2 uses binocular full-color Micro-LED + light waveguide technology, and Rokid Max chooses the Micro-LED route.
Among all kinds of VR AR headsets, the display screen is the most core component, and it is the first hurdle to enter the era of spatial computing. "Display technology is one of the most critical factors and the narrowest bottleneck. Dr. Dai Jingwen, chief technology officer of Suiguang Technology, pointed out to the reporter of China Electronics News that in the process of promoting the development of the virtual reality industry, optical problems are fundamental.
Fast-LCD dominates the world?
At present, various AR VR headsets on the market use a wide variety of near-eye display technology solutions, including fast-LCD, micro-LED, silicon-based OLED, LCOS (liquid crystal on silicon), OLED, DLP (digital light processing), LBS (laser beam scanning), etc.
The current main display technology is FAS-LCD, followed by OLED and silicon-based OLED, followed by Micro-LED. Dong Min, secretary general of the China Electronic Video Industry Association, told the China Electronics News that silicon-based OLED and Micro-LED are most suitable for XR equipment. AR devices are mostly used outdoors, and the advantages of micro-LED are high brightness, high definition, long life, etc., unlike organic OLED, inorganic LED is relatively stable, and has high barrier to moisture and oxygen.
Meta has equipped the Quest3 with a fast-LCD dual-display VR device, which has long been plagued by the "screen window effect". Due to the smaller sub-pixel pitch of the FAST-LCD screen, the screen screen effect can be effectively mitigated. At the same time, the improved FAST-LCD technology uses new liquid crystal materials and drive technology, and the refresh rate can be increased to 90Hz, which has high mass production performance and stable production capacity.
In addition, the FAST-LCD display can be significantly improved by superimposing the mini LED backlight. Compared with the traditional backlight, the Mini LED backlight can greatly improve the overall brightness of the display, effectively shorten the OD distance and reduce the thickness of the whole machine. At the same time, combined with the fine local dimming partitioning scheme, higher contrast can be achieved.
In the VR field, OLED screens used to occupy the mainstream, but after FAST-LCD came out, the cost was much lower than OLED, so now FAST-LCD has basically dominated the VR field. Dai Jingwen told reporters.
According to the research data of Sigmaintell, in 2022, the global shipment of display panels for XR equipment will be about 11.77 million pieces, of which FAST-LCD accounts for 94% and silicon-based OLED accounts for about 4%.
Silicon-based OLED avoids becoming a spare tire
Silicon-based OLED uses CMOS substrate, which can achieve a pixel density (more than 3000 ppi) that cannot be achieved by ordinary OLED, and has the advantages of stable performance, long life, low power consumption, high pixel density, and fast response time.
Most importantly, the overall weight of silicon-based OLED screens is one-tenth that of LCD and OLED, so it can greatly improve the experience of VR devices, but its manufacturing process is not mature enough, the yield level is low, and the production cost is high.
Because silicon-based OLED is a close combination of CMOS technology and OLED technology, it is a high degree of integration of inorganic semiconductor materials and organic semiconductor materials, and the process technology requirements are very strict, which is also the direct cause of its limited production capacity and high cost.
Previously, in order to bring users a "real and illusory sense of immersion", Apple has put forward higher requirements for the MR display panel ** chain - to increase the original 2800PPI (unit pixel density) of silicon-based OLED to 3500PPI.
Although the fat of Apple Vison Pro is right in front of you, this difficult requirement has undoubtedly become a major challenge for panel manufacturers. From the perspective of comprehensive cost performance, silicon-based OLED is not a very ideal technical solution.
Will Micro-LED be a potential stock?
Micro-LED is known as the "ultimate display", and it is no exception in the field of near-eye display, for example, it performs better than silicon-based OLED in terms of pixel size, luminous efficiency, brightness and other characteristics, but the biggest problem is that the technology is immature, difficult to make full color, and high cost.
Because Micro-LED is still in the early stage of development, full-color technology can only achieve single color filtering when it encounters a bottleneck, while silicon-based OLED technology can achieve full-color, so silicon-based OLED has more advantages in AR VR applications at this stage. The deputy general manager and chief analyst of Qunzhi Consulting pointed out to reporters that the Micro-LED solution is better than silicon-based OLED in most specifications such as contrast, power consumption, reaction rate, and service life, so it will still be a better choice of display solution after its technological breakthrough.
Thunderbird X2 Lite is equipped with binocular full-color MicroLED+ optical waveguide solutionIn fact, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and other global technology manufacturers have high hopes for Micro-LED. Over the past decade, Apple has invested at least $1 billion in research and development of micro-LED related technologies, and has achieved a series of results.
Samsung Display has started to develop LED OS technology that can be used in AR devices in 2023, and revealed that the size of Micro-LED chips can be in the level of a few microns. Microsoft filed a new patent last year to develop a Micro-LED display solution to enhance the VR AR MR experience.
With the release of Apple's Vision Pro with silicon-based OLED, the proportion of silicon-based OLED displays will increase rapidly in the future, and Micro-LED is also expected to gain a certain market share after 2024.
*：omdiaWhich is better or worse depends on the choice of the market
There is no so-called superiority or disadvantage of various optical schemes, in fact, it depends on everyone's choice. Dai Jingwen told reporters that in fact, the various optical design schemes we are currently seeing may have existed as early as thirty or forty years ago, and many patents have even expired, and the main difference now lies in the continuous improvement of technology and materials.
In the arena of near-eye display, the cost-effective LCD initially prevailed, and OLED also came to dominate, and then the upgraded version of FAST-LCD gradually gained the upper hand in the VR field. Silicon-based OLED became famous overnight by Apple, and more and more manufacturers began to enter the game, but Micro-LCD, which has greater potential, has always been pinned on high hopes, and the future is very promising.
In this seemingly "feng shui rotation" technology evolution, there is no definitive ultimate answer to which near-eye display technology can be the ultimate winner.
Obviously, there is no display scheme that meets the elements of "large field of view, high resolution, low power consumption, high brightness, small size, and light weight" at the same time. It's impossible to tick all of these performance metrics, so you can only choose the most important ones. Taking Apple as an example, although its long-term bet on Micro-LED has obvious advantages, the technical maturity is not enough, and silicon-based OLED can already meet its needs for the original MR headset Vision Pro, on the contrary, the high brightness advantage of Micro-LED is wasteful in VR-like products, but it can play its value more in AR products.
For manufacturers in the industry, especially terminal manufacturers, the most important thing is to start from the demand side, start from the product characteristics, and select models according to application scenarios and the pursuit of performance. "Dai Jing ** tune.
Author丨Yang PengyueEditor丨Qiu Jiang YongmeiEditor丨Maria Producer丨Lian Xiaodong