Ultrathin Metasurface Displays Take Aim at the LCD | Hacker News Reader

Ultrathin Metasurface Displays Take Aim at the LCD

spectrum.ieee.org

61 pointsrbanffy10 comments

Display technology is so absolutely fascinating. The various forms of LCD (VA/TN/IPS), the various forms of backlighting (Edge, FALD, etc), the shrinking size of the LEDs (regular, mini, micro), now OLEDs and quantum dots, etc. There's even more wild options like e-Ink.

And there's a ton of work happening on the software/firmware side too. VRR, Backlight strobing, HDR support, high refresh rates, wide color gamuts, low latency technology, pixel shifting and brightness limiting for OLED, FRC (frame rate control), DSC (display stream compression), etc.

It's an incredibly innovative field. Every year we're getting closer to an ideal display. I am so excited to see what we get in the next 10-20 years. It will be leaps and bounds above anything available today.

I hope we don’t give up on the dream of passive steroscopy. The Nintendo 3DS is still super cool despite its low resolution by modern phone standards. Games for it can’t really be ported to Switch because you can’t reproduce the display.

This is very similar to Qualcomm’s Mirasol displays right? Or am I misunderstanding the underlying technology? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometric_modulator_disp...

I'm not a materials scientist or display engineer, but the full paper[1] seems to describe something very different from an IMOD display.

* IMOD is a reflective display. This display is a replacement for the LCD layer in LCD displays, but still seems like it would require a backlight.

* The pixels in this display are controlled via heating to change the optical properties of the silicon. The pixels in IMOD are switched by moving a reflective membrane very slightly in relation to a thin film stack - a MEMS analogue of the radar-absorbing skin of stealth aircraft.

* IMOD doesn't require power to maintain the state of a given pixel, only to switch it. Since the metasurface display is controlled by heating, I imagine one state or the other (not sure if it's the "allow light through" or "block light" state) needs to be refreshed constantly.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-023-01078-6

Thanks for the explanation! Obviously I completely misinterpreted both technologies.

9:1 on off contrast. Meh. This tech is a science project looking for an application (which is generally the problem with metamaterials).

I'm more of a fan of micro LEDs which could actually be a gamechanger in display technology.

This is cool and all that, but I want to know if they got the invisibility cloak to work?

(Kind of hard to get good pics of an invisibility cloak, unless you can see Potter's hand sticking out.)

Also, could this tech (conceivably) make a better smart mirror - aside from a tinier more ingrained display for the electronics, could it modify the light before reflecting it back?

Even if it just switched the mirror between reflecting and not, I think it would be cool.

The real game-changer with visible light metamaterials is negative index of refaction, which will allow for completely flat optical lenses. Light-weight and low distortion. Hopefully coming to VR headsets in my lifetime.

>Even if it just switched the mirror between reflecting and not, I think it would be cool.

This is basically how DLP projectors work

Don't know much about the invisibility cloak. But in wireless communications the "better smart mirror" idea is being investigated to achieve arbitrary reflection directions that defy Snell's law [1][2]. The objective is to hang these "mirrors" on walls/buildings and reflect the incident power towards areas where the reception is poor.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09183

[2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9718037

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