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NVIDIA working on ways to quadruple display performance in low-res LCDs

By Marcus Wong - on 1 Aug 2014, 12:00pm

NVIDIA working on ways to quadruple display performance in low-res LCDs.

Demonstration of the resolution gain from using offset layers.

In this age of ever increasing resolution demands, it’s easy to imagine how many low-resolution displays have fallen by the wayside as unsold inventory. NVIDIA researchers may have found a way to give these displays new life, while lowering the cost of producing high-resolution screens – stack two low-resolution screens on top of each other to create a “cascaded” display.

Rather than pursue a "brute force" method, the researchers found that by having a lateral offset of about half a pixel or less along each axis, each pixel on one one layer modulates multiple pixels on another, allowing greater control of the intensity of each subpixel fragment - defined by the geometric intersection of a pixel display on one layer with another on the other (layer), thus allowing for greater effective display resolution.

The prototype they constructed supports head-mounted displays like the Oculus Rift, and they’ve also found a way to implement the technique in projectors, slightly offsetting the pixels in each case, and adding a filter to resolve polarization conflicts. Software was developed to get two disassembled 1280 x 800 LCD panels to work synchronously, and in tests, this seems to have quadrupled the spatial resolution without introducing any reconstruction artifacts using a heuristic four-frame factorization.

While the technology still isn’t perfect yet – current prototypes aren’t as bright as typical screens and apparently has poor viewing angles, but this research could lead the way to substantially reduce the cost of high-resolution displays.

Check the video below for more information.

 

Source: Engadget, Nvidia

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