Ostendo has been quietly working on a micro-LED display they call a Quantum Photonic Imager. This consists of red, green and blue LED with some near-collimating optical structures fabrication with extremely small pixel pitches – typically 5-10 microns (see video for details). This is essentially an LED microdisplay that can serve as the engine for augmented or virtual reality headsets, projectors, HUDs or 3D displays. In fact, they demonstrated the technology in a light field 3D display (more on that soon).
Since the QPI device is fabricated from LEDs, it has extremely high contrast of over 1 million to one and very fast response speed at <5 nsec. Brightness of very high too a >20,000 nits with frame rate modulation at 60 or 120 Hz. And, the device only consumes 300 mW and has a greater than 40K hour lifetime. That’s impressive.
On display were several demos. One was a new 1280×720 prototype imager that fits on your fingertip and has a 5 micron pixel pitch. Others consisted of red, green and blue dedicated color QPI devices with a pixel pitch of 10 microns and resolution of nHD (426×240).
The company also uses 8 nHD resolution modules to create a 3D light field display. For this project, funded by DARPA, they added a lens array on top of each image. Each QPI used an lens array of 20×16 lenses. When configured for the demo in a 2×8 arrangement of modules, that make for 80×32 lenses to create the light field image. The images are created in a computer with 2500 views and include both horizontal and vertical parallax. The three dice in the display will create a real image in front of the display, at the display plane and a virtual image in back of the display plane. To prove this display works and creates a light focused in space in front of the display, they placed a diffuser that clearly shows a real image at that point in space. –Chris Chinnock
