One of the most anticipated features of this week’s Display Week event in LA is a new screen built by Google and LG, designed specifically for VR. At its booth LG is showing off a 4.3-inch OLED panel with a pixel density of 1443 pixels per inch (PPI). We’ve just gone hands-on with it and you can see the results below.
Senior Editor Ian Hamilton is on the ground at the show and took the below images of two displays LG is exhibiting (click to enlarge or open in a new tab for the full size). Inside each lens, which is fitted to a wall and not embedded inside a headset, there’s the same image of a map with text both big and small text. The new OLED display has a resolution of 3840 x 4800 and a refresh rate of 120Hz. It’s being shown next to a ‘conventional’ 538 PPI display for comparison’s sake.
These images were both taken with an iPhone 8 camera.
Even at first glance, the near-tripled pixel density seems to make a huge difference. Smaller text is far clearer on the 1,443 PPI display and the screen-door effect is hugely reduced, too. Obviously taking a picture through a camera can’t compare with seeing the display for yourself, though, so don’t draw any conclusions just yet.
While it’s exciting to see a leap in VR display tech, we don’t actually know when we’ll see this type of screen integrated into headsets. It’s likely to be some time before we can dive into VR with this kind of clarity.
