Google was on a secret project with LG, as this news was officially announced last year. After the completion of a project, both companies came forward to unveil the world’s first high-resolution OLED display for AR and VR. This high-resolution OLED display triples the pixels per inch (PPI) count of current consumer headsets from the HTC and Oculus. The screen has a 1443 PPI wide field of view which further optimizes the mobile AR and VR.
Google wanted to arrive at a point where the virtual reality experience feels completely real. To accomplish the same, Google and LG were engaged in a secret project to create VR capable OLED display with 10x more pixels than leading 2 MP consumer VR displays.
The Google high-resolution OLED VR display is 4.3 inches supporting 1443 PPI with a 120HZ refresh rate. It has a 4800 x 3840 prototype panel known to be the highest resolution OLED-on-glass display. As a research paper notes, the upper bound of human vision is 9600 x 9000 and a field of view of (FOV) 160 x 150, whereas the FOV provided by Google is 120 x 96.
If we compare this device with another leading device in the market, HTC features a 3.6-inch 1080 x 1200 pixel display per eye, and Vive Pro is equipped with 3.5 inches 1440 x 1600 pixel display per eye. Both devices have 90Hz refresh rates and 110 degrees of FOV at 448 and 615 PPI.
Google and LG fabricate this device’s custom driver integrated circuit (IC). The second powerful feature of this high-resolution OLED display is foveated rendering. This feature renders only those things a user is looking at in 4800 x 3840, while everything appears in low resolution. This also supports 150 cd/m2 @20% duty brightness > 15000:1 contrast and 10-bit color depth.
Google claims that they designed the display so that two – one for each eye – can be powered by a mobile SoC on a mobile headset. The company stated that the screens do support 120Hz, but the limitations of mobile SoC might run at 75Hz on mobile VR headsets.
