While most people interested in VR/XR don’t want to pay for a Vision Pro, they all likely want something that Apple’s $3,500 has: a premium display. Apple’s Vision Pro, like the recently released Samsung Galaxy XR, incorporates a micro OLED screen, which is one of the gadget’s biggest selling points. For context, OLED panels have superior contrast, blacks, and better performance when it comes to motion clarity compared to LCD displays in cheaper headsets like Meta’s Quest 3. Having used the Vision Pro a bit and the Quest 3 quite a lot, I can say for sure that it makes a big difference.
The other advantage of OLED is power efficiency. Since each pixel is essentially on or off (black), OLED screens for VR/XR headsets could also bring longer battery life—an area the Vision Pro and other similar headsets still need to improve on.
There’s just one hitch: micro OLED is much more expensive than LCD since it’s difficult to manufacture. The result is a premium headset that costs a hell of a lot more money. But OLED might not be cost-prohibitive for long. TCL just showed off a new OLED panel (that’s regular and not the micro OLED in the Vision Pro) made specifically for XR headsets that it says is the highest density OLED-on-glass display yet.
There are a few things that could make TCL’s new regular OLED panels a big upgrade over LCD, and the biggest of which is the resolution. According to TCL, its newest OLED panel has a resolution of 2,560 x 2,740, which is notably higher than the 2,064 x 2,208 resolution of the Quest 3, though lower than the 3,660 x 3,200 resolution of the micro OLED panel on the Vision Pro.
That’s not the only benefit, though. As noted by UploadVR, there are already VR headsets using regular OLED (PSVR 2, for example), but in its current iteration, that display tech isn’t suitable for higher-end VR lenses. TCL’s panel, however, is suited for premium lenses, given its high pixel density of 1,512 PPI. That means anyone using this panel can opt for pancake lenses as opposed to Fresnel lenses, which, in VR-speak, means you’ll get less distortion and sharper images.
Ultimately, the benefit here isn’t just that you’d get a more performant display than LCD (we already have that in micro OLED), but that you’d get VR/XR headsets with better-than-LCD displays that theoretically would be much cheaper to manufacture and hopefully result in headsets that are a lot more affordable. That could open the door to a whole new world of midrange headsets that look and feel a lot more premium than the Quest 3, but cost a lot less than the Vision Pro. We all love a middle ground, don’t we?
Whether the OLED panel actually finds its way to headsets remains to be seen. There are still some unanswered questions, like how bright TCL’s new displays are (though we do know it has a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, 120Hz refresh rate, and 110% wide color gamut) or how much they’d cost to manufacture at scale, but on the surface, it seems like a step in the right direction. Because, as nice as Apple’s Vision Pro is, I think it’s clear not many people are willing to spend several thousand dollars on a “spatial computer.”
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