The Society for Information Display has recently revealed the winners of its 30th Annual Display Industry Awards. These awards recognize the best displays, components, and applications introduced in the previous year. The recipients of these awards are a testament to the dynamic evolution of display and imaging products. They showcase the technological advancements prioritizing sustainability, affordability, and immersive user experiences. Apple won a few awards for their new iPad Pro and E INK with Spectra 6 this year.
Displays of the Year
This award is granted to display products with the most significant technological advances or outstanding features.
< firm>Apple: Micro-OLED Display and Lens System in the Vision Pro
Apple Vision Pro is a revolutionary spatial computer that seamlessly blends digital content with the physical world while allowing users to stay present and connected to others. Vision Pro creates an infinite canvas for apps that scales beyond the boundaries of a traditional display and introduces a fully three-dimensional user interface controlled by the most natural and intuitive inputs possible—a user’s eyes, hands, and voice. Vision Pro lets users interact with digital content in a way that feels physically present in their space.
Apple Vision Pro delivers an astonishing amount of technology in a compact design. Featuring a breakthrough ultrahigh-resolution display system built on top of an Apple silicon chip, Vision Pro uses a micro-OLED Apple silicon backplane that fits 64 pixels in a single iPhone pixel. They are 7.5 microns wide and pack 23 million pixels into two displays, each the size of a postage stamp. This technological breakthrough in displays, combined with Apple-designed three-element catadioptric lenses that enable incredible sharpness and clarity, delivers jaw-dropping experiences, rendering video at actual 4K resolution, with wide colour and high dynamic range, all at a massive scale.
< intense>E Ink: Spectra 6 Full-Color Reflective Display
E Ink Spectra 6 is a revolutionary colour product geared for in-store advertising, indoor signage, or any paper sign replacement that builds upon prior generations of the Spectra platform and is engineered to provide a level of colour saturation and vividness that is unique in a reflective display. Featuring an enhanced colour spectrum and colour-imaging algorithm to produce full colour for marketing and advertising purposes, it offers a visual performance similar to the most advanced paper colour printers on the market. It serves as a print-quality replacement for paper signage, including posters.
Digital transformation has driven retailers to accelerate adopting digital signage. E Ink reviewed the effects of CO2 emissions from paper versus LCD screens versus ePaper displays. In using a model of 10-inch displays, with 30 million of the tags deployed, an E Ink ePaper display is approximately 12,000 times more efficient in terms of kilograms of CO2 emission than LCD screens, and approximately 60,000 times more efficient in terms of kilograms of CO2 emission than using paper. Using low-power E Ink displays can enable retailers and advertisers to reach their sustainability goals while providing timely, seamless updates.
Display Components of the Year
This award is granted to a novel component significantly enhancing a display’s performance. A component is sold as a separate part destined to be incorporated into a display; it also may include display-enhancing materials or parts fabricated with new processes or display test equipment.
Cellid: Plastic Waveguide G1 for Lightweight AR Displays
Cellid Plastic Waveguide G1 (Gen1) is a full-colour, diffractive optical element (DOE)-type waveguide made from engineered plastic using proprietary nanostructure and coating technologies. While monochromatic green has been the standard in plastic DOE waveguides, Cellid has achieved a breakthrough by realizing full red, green, and blue (RGB) coloration. The full-colour plastic waveguide, given its composition, is significantly lighter than glass.
Cellid successfully reduced the waveguide’s weight without significantly sacrificing performance, including the modulation transfer function (MTF) and efficiency. This plastic waveguide is revolutionizing the AR glasses industry, shattering former paradigms. Most AR glasses manufacturers are bringing new AR products to the market that are lightweight with sleek designs, akin to regular eyeglasses and sunglasses. Next-generation AR glasses will shift from a bulky form factor to one suitable for daily use. The lightweight, ultra-thin plastic DOE waveguide will be an indispensable component in achieving this transformation, which marks the first step toward creating all-day-wearable AR glasses.
Pixelligent: PixCor High-Refractive-Index Nanocomposite Materials for XR Displays
PixCor is the newest addition to Pixelligent’s extended reality (XR) product line. It is a high-index nanocomposite material that, when enabled, functions as an optical combiner to merge virtual images with real-world content in XR displays. The novel core-shell material helps manufacturers overcome critical technical obstacles that have created challenging bottlenecks for next-generation XR displays. The product was developed to boost the functionality of titania (TiO2)—a crucial nanoparticle that drives optical performance in these devices. Exclusively formulated into Pixelligent’s HRI PixNIL formulations, it is the only commercially available material that combines high-index and optical clarity while dramatically improving UV stability.
With the proprietary shell that surrounds the PixClear titania particle, PixCor offers improved UV stability while still delivering advantages: HRI (1.85), low haze (<0.1 percent), and high transparency (>95 percent). Furthermore, PixCor-enabled PixNIL products have demonstrated excellent patterning properties with leading nanoimprint tool makers and can deliver high aspect ratio (6:1) features and slanted and blazed gratings. The result is much better optical fidelity, image quality, and light output efficiency. Beyond enabling advanced XR devices, Pixelligent’s HRI materials are being used by industry leaders to boost performance in next-generation consumer electronics products, such as brighter OLED displays and more efficient 3D sensors.
Display Applications of the Year
This award is granted to a novel and outstanding product or application leveraging a display that significantly impacted the market. In contrast, the display itself is not necessarily a new device.
7thSense: Sophisticated Management, Control, and Pixel Processing System in the “Sphere” Internal LED Display Installation
7thSense’s Performer Range of products, combined with clever engineering, are behind the sophisticated media management, playback, control, and pixel-processing system for the internal LED display in Sphere—a next-generation entertainment medium. Fundamentally, the display is a collection of synchronized 4K systems, each with media servers for playback and generative content, and a low-latency pixel processor for signal switching and layering/windowing additional sources (such as camera feeds) outputting to the LED panels for each section of the display plane.
Managing massive amounts of media across dozens of servers can be time-consuming, so 7thSense developed a workflow where the Actors stream media from a high-speed network attached storage (NAS) array over a separate fibre network. Streaming media from a centralized storage array eliminates the need to manage media on the local drives of each Actor and provides a great deal of flexibility when creating shows from master media clips. There is no need to wait for rendering time or file transfers when an edit is made to the timeline; all media is available at full resolution and can be played immediately.
Flanders Scientific: XMP550 QD-OLED Professional Reference Monitor
The XMP550 is an ultra-high definition (UHD)-resolution 55-inch professional quantum dot (QD)-OLED reference monitor. This display has been designed for professional colour grading and mastering high and standard dynamic range (HDR and SDR) content. It features a peak luminance of 2,000 nits, a contrast ratio of 4 million:1, and an extensive colour gamut for precise and vivid colour depiction.
The XMP550 qualifies as a Dolby Vision master monitor, bridging the gap between the precision of previous smaller reference-grade HDR displays and the scale of larger client monitors. The size and performance of the XMP550, paired with its industry-leading off-axis performance, enables a new paradigm in professional colour grading by giving post-production facilities the flexibility to build out single-monitor viewing environments. Colorists and clients in a grading session can reliably reference the same image on the same large-format display. The XMP550 uses Samsung Display’s latest QD-OLED technology, representing the first adoption in the professional monitoring space of a large-format OLED technology that is genuinely RGB additive for white, a critical factor in delivering reference-grade HDR imagery that does not suffer from display colour volume collapse.
Each of this year’s winners offers exciting and innovative contributions toward improving the human experience with display technology, said Stephen Atwood, DIA committee lead. “The Apple Vision Pro is an example of what human interaction with the digital world should be. It’s an exciting and deeply personal experience for each user. 7thSense provided the playback, pixel processing, and ST2110 video distribution network for the interior display of the Las Vegas Sphere, an incredible example of audio and visual immersion.”
He continued, “For years, we have loved ePaper for its many virtues, including low power and ease of scalability. However, achieving full colour and all the other benefits from E Ink brings a new world of creative ideas and applications to life. Accurate rendering of colour and dynamic range in video production is crucial to producing the final results that the creators envision. Flanders Scientific has elevated the state of the art with their QD-OLED reference monitors. The success of AR/VR/MR displays also lies in making experiences so lifelike you hardly know they are simulated. Pixelligent and Cellid have created critical components to enable more efficient and realistic optical solutions for this rapidly growing space.”
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
