The Fraunhofer Institute for Organic Electronics, Electron Beam and Plasma Technology FEP (Fraunhofer FEP) has presented OLED microdisplays for VR glasses and introduced a tool set for AR applications using its OLED microdisplays. The German institute has showcased a prototype of VR glasses and the new displays at AWE Europe 2018 and will debut the AR application tool kits during electronica 2018 in Munich Germany.

Researchers at Fraunhofer FEP combined large-area OLED microdisplays with free-form optics to provide an ergonomic and lightweight solution for VR glasses, aiming to reduce the motion sickness for users.

(Image: Fraunhofer FEP)

The researchers integrated one inch OLED microdisplays with a resolution of 1920 × 1200 pixels (WUXGA, 2300ppi) and a frame rate of 120Hz and ultra-compact optics to make a headset with two display chips per eye. This design facilitates very high effective display resolutions with its total resolution of 4800 × 1920 pixels, which is close to 5k. It also offers a wide field of view (>100°) for an excellent immersive VR sensation. With OLED-on-silicon microdisplays inside the system, the headset comes with reduced weight and increased resolution which is not easily achieved by using conventional TFT-based AMOLED displays due to their pixel density limits.

Aside from hardware design, Fraunhofer FEP has also developed tool set for wearables using OLED microdisplays to bring them into real applications. Fraunhofer’s Bluetooth kit features ultra-low-power electronics and suits applications under harsh environmental conditions such as disaster management and telemedicine, where long battery runtime without interruption for re-charging is indispensable.

(Image: Fraunhofer FEP)

The ultra-low-power design implements information transmission via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). The connection to narrow-band low-power radio data networks such as the Narrow-Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) and LoRaWAN (long-range wide-area network) are also conceivable.

Philipp Wartenberg, head of the Department IC and System Design at Fraunhofer FEP, commented, “We offer our industrial partners a complete system concept for controlling ultra-low-power OLED microdisplays over a universal Bluetooth connection. This enables direct and wireless communication with the display out-of-the-box from various input devices such as smartphones, laptops, and wristbands.”

Besides the display, the development kits contain everything required, from the optics up to the graphical user interface (GUI) for Windows or Android devices. The kits are tools for product developers as well as app developers to test their ideas in a simple and easier way and to play with the technology.