Comment by kurthr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kurthr | Hacker News Reader

Well at 8k per eye (horizontal?) and 57pix/deg (retina resolution) that would be 140deg, which seems a bit of overkill (although it's close to max FOV). This is made especially difficult since latency is so critical to preventing VR nausea (120-180Hz). However, the bandwidth required to drive such (a pair) of displays would exceed 200Gbps (5 Thunderbolt per eye) so I assume going over the air there'd be a lot of compression? That's ignoring the GPU requirements which also scale... so seems like overkill.

More likely it's 8k total (4k per eye foveated rendering), and a single 20x9 display, but that's just a guess. You can do lots of things for a demo.

Edit- note the pictures are from MagicLeap and the idea that there are miniaturized high resolution microLED displays is pretty funny... perhaps they mean microOLED? Those top out below 8K even for max reticle size (30mm) die with 8um sub-pixels.

"Micro LED" is a relatively new display tech that's pretty much the same idea as OLED but made with metals instead of organic materials.

Yes, the microLEDs (I've heard of) are InGaN on Sapphire which are diced and placed in arrays. Apple bought a company doing this several years ago, but the densities they are capable of (30-100um pitch) and yields (1dppm?) are not a match for head mounted 8k displays (100mm/8000 = 12um pixel =>6um subpixel).

There are microOLED manufacturers like eMagin which integrate the active matrix into a Si substrate and use a color filter over white OLED, but even they are limited to ~2k RGB (per eye) at 9um pitch.

8K with H.265 compression over WiGig could work.

And as for driving the displays it's possible today for a single 8K monitor. So maybe Apple has internal technology (or assumes the technology will improve) to drive dual displays.

Also, just because the screen is 8k doesn’t mean the entire image needs to be rendered at 8k. They could track the eyes and render the focus point at native resolution while the periphery could be reduced (foveated rendering).

What’s the latency like with H265? H264 has ‘zero latency’ mode apparently - but I’d assume that the more advanced the codecs are the more temporal information is required which would increase latency.

Human horizontal FOV is about 210 degrees on average. 140 does not seem like overkill.

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