New tech could bring affordable, hyper realistic screens with 1000+ Hz refresh rates
>
A group of researchers from Nottingham Trent University, the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales Canberra in Australia have produced a proof of concept technology that lays the foundations of the more than $100 billion monitor, display and TV could shake the industry to its foundations.
By swapping the traditional liquid crystal cells used in such devices for a new technology called metasurfaces (which are electrically tunable arrays of nanoparticles), the researchers claim will offer “significant advantages over current LCD screens”.
What benefits? Well, there are quite a few.
Metasurfaces are much smaller (up to 10 times smaller) than crystal cells, which translates into significantly smaller pixel pitches and – in theory – much higher pixel densities. Pixels tightly grouped together create more seamless, hyper-realistic images, ideal for creative professionals who crave such innovations monitors for photo editing (opens in new tab).
“Today, the main factor determining pixel size in LCD and LED displays is the limitation of liquid crystal technology: they are thick and cannot be too small and too close together due to the crosstalk of neighboring pixels. But our technology does not have this limitation,” Professor Mohsen Rahmani, leader of the Advanced Optics & Photonics (AOP) Lab at NTU and one of the contributors to the TechRadar Pro project, told me in an email exchange.
The new technology also allows for much higher refresh rates, with a press release stating, “The light can be switched almost 20 times faster than the reaction time of human aversion by changing the temperature of the material.” The human eye’s detection limit is around 13 ms or 78 Hz, but displays using metasurfaces may be able to achieve refresh rates in excess of 1000 Hz, far higher than anything currently commercially available – a boon for gaming monitors (opens in new tab).
There’s also the fact that the technology uses silicon, which translates into a much longer lifespan, lower manufacturing costs, and much lower power consumption. Switching to silicon also allows for much thinner cells, which can reduce weight and thickness (up to 99%) and pave the way for a much wider range of applications.
Availability and price unknown
The key to the transition will depend on how quickly and easily current LCD panel production lines can accommodate the new technology.
I asked Professor Rahmani how far we are from commercially available units. “With a good investment, we expect the available product in about 5 years. Our technology is compatible with the production lines of LCD and LED displays. Therefore, it does not need to develop a production line from scratch. We believe it’s very simple, because technically we just need to replace liquid crystal cells with metasurface cells. The other layers within the screen (light source, color filters, etc.) remain the same (note that we will no longer need polarization layers)”.
Therefore, metasurface cells do not affect other properties of a display panel, nor the size of the panels or the total number of pixels on a panel: a 8K TV (opens in new tab) has more than 33 million.
Metasurfaces have been hailed by many as the next big thing due to their unique light scattering properties. A quick glance at my email inbox shows that research has been done to measure its suitability in a huge range of use cases: low-cost, high-efficiency solar cells, better motion sensors, 6G-permeable materials, high-density storage, and much more .