Last year, the Chinese microelectronics firm had shown its first VR display at the World Display Industry Conference in Chengdu. Now, it’s got Reddit wondering what is going on. It could all turn out to be an unfortunate leak.
The gist of the story is that someone got wind of a product announcement from Tianma that turned out to be no product announcement because one of the sources seems to have removed the material referenced in various posts. So, I dug a little deeper to see what I could find. And here’s what we know: Tianma has a patent for a 3D display device and display method that was filed back in 2019 and is pretty much summed up in the diagram above. It is a method for displaying multiple 2D images of a 3D scene to create a corresponding 3D image in a display device with mechanisms to manage the positioning of the lenses.
We kind of know that an actual VR headset from Tianma might be a 3.53 inch VR display with LTPS technology, a resolution of 3K x 3K, a PPI of 1200, and a 120 Hz refresh rate. We kind of know this because that is all there is on the product, which looks very similar sub-$500 devices that are on the market today.
On the other hand, the better indication is that Tianma is looking at a holographic display, which would make much more sense for the company seeing where it has the best opportunities to sell its products and touchscreens.
What seems to be happening is Tianma is testing the waters of 3D, has a number of different options including VR headsets and holographic displays, and it probably needs to find a customer for this IP. The company can certainly take advantage of its own superior manufacturing technology to deliver on these products and will probably be able to come in at competitive prices. It’s great positioning with 3 big players in 3D displays putting products out: Sony, Apple, and Meta. At least, it might be a great market for opportunistic value sellers to come out with copycat products and ride in the wake of the big three.
