Meta has created a new flat ultra-thin panel laser display that may pave the way for lighter, more immersive augmented reality (AR) glasses and enhanced picture quality on smartphones, tablets, and televisions. The new display is just two millimeters thick and has bright, high-resolution images.
Flat panels, especially those lit by LEDs, are everywhere, from smartphones and TVs to laptops and computer displays. But however good the technology is now, there is always the quest for it to be even better. Lasers offer higher brightness and the potential to miniaturize the technology and make it more efficient by substituting heavy and power-wasting parts with tiny energy-efficient laser-based ones.
But existing laser displays are still reliant on big, complicated optical systems to project light onto screens. Earlier attempts to create flat-panel laser displays have fallen short because they involved complicated configurations or were simply too hard to produce in great quantities.
The breakthrough
Meta’s innovation does better than this, though, by applying a novel approach to developing a flat and ultra-thin display. So what did they do? The researchers worked on the project for about three years, and their fix is a centimeter-scale photonic integrated circuit, a type of chip that bundles thousands of pieces with various optical functions. That is, there are no blocky components.
The new display combines the sub-millimeter photonic chip with a 5-by-5-millimeter liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCoS) display. The resulting device is one-eightieth thicker than traditional LCoS displays and features a significantly greater palette of colors.
The scientists outlined their study in a paper in the journal Nature. “Our research is an achievement in the integration of nanophotonics with display technology, making possible a variety of new display concepts, ranging from high-performance immersive displays to thin-panel 3D holography.”
But even with the advancements, there are certain limitations of the technology. For instance, laser speckle in which grainy or speckled images occur in those produced by a laser. Also, the light of the display can only be either switched on or off altogether and not controlled for certain regions of an image. This is extremely wasteful of power if the screen remains largely blank or when only displaying a handful of words or icons.
Once the outstanding issues are addressed, there may be a whole raft of innovations. One of the most intriguing uses is more interactive AR glasses. The Meta crew developed a prototype see-through augmented reality system that integrated virtual images smoothly into real environments in an office setting, providing a new way of engaging with our world and viewing the world.