MIT Researchers Stack Red, Green, and Blue Micro-LEDs to Build "Completely Immersive" VR Displays - Hackster.io

Researchers astatine the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), moving with collaborators from different planetary universities, person travel up with a mode to marque screens higher solution than ever earlier — by stacking red, green, and bluish LEDs vertically, 1 atop the other.

"This is the smallest micro-LED pixel, and the highest pixel density reported successful the journals," says Jeehwan Kim, subordinate prof of mechanical engineering astatine MIT and corresponding writer connected the insubstantial describing the breakthrough. "We amusement that vertical pixellation is the mode to spell for higher-resolution displays successful a smaller footprint."

Each colour pixel of a modern show is made up of 3 oregon much sub-pixels — typically red, green, and blue. By varying the airy output for each subpixel, the colour of the wide pixel tin beryllium controlled — but having to enactment 3 subpixels side-by-side limits conscionable however tiny a pixel tin be.

Rather than putting the subpixels side-by-side, then, the probe squad opted to stack them vertically — uncovering a mode to forestall the subpixels connected the precocious furniture occluding the airy from those below. In doing so, they've considerably shrunken the size of each pixel. For aboriginal displays, that means a large boost successful solution — from the 600-or-so pixels per inch of modern smartphone screens to a whopping 5,000 pixels per inch utilizing vertical micro-LEDs.

“For virtual reality, close present determination is simply a bounds to however existent they tin look," explains archetypal writer Jiho Shin of a cardinal exertion for the caller show technology. "With our vertical micro-LEDs, you could person a wholly immersive acquisition and wouldn't beryllium capable to separate virtual from reality."

In summation to stacking the LEDs vertically, the team's attack uses a caller fabrication method designed to "grow" the LEDs onto a wafer past peel them escaped for stacking — thing which they assertion is faster than rival approaches, contempt the size of the idiosyncratic pixels going arsenic debased arsenic 4 microns.

At present, though, the exertion has lone been proven connected a tiny standard — and creating a big-screen show of the pixel density the micro-LEDs tin theoretically marque imaginable remains an unsolved problem. "You request a strategy to power 25 cardinal LEDs separately," Shin explains. "Here, we've lone partially demonstrated that. The progressive matrix cognition is thing we'll request to further develop."

The team's enactment has been published nether closed-access presumption successful the diary Nature, with much accusation disposable connected MIT News.

Main nonfiction representation courtesy of Younghee Lee.