OLED Panels for distortion-free VR?

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AdamMunich
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OLED Panels for distortion-free VR?

Post by AdamMunich »

Hi all, good to meet you!

I've been experimenting with an optical arrangement that outperforms those used in the current generation of VR/AR headsets, where there's no chromatic aberration or significant "screen door" effect. Pixels aren't barrel distorted, which means you can make the most out of the display panel. I can barely see the pixels :-D.

As well, I've been ray tracing some designs that allow for 130 * 60 degree FOV per eye, without any of the nasty smearing you see from Fresnel lenses, etc. I have not yet been prototyping this particular optic IRL though, as I'd like to get the aforementioned simpler geometries prototyped first.

--Anyway!--

I'm looking for some OLED panels to build a demo headset with. I've purchased the Topfoison TF38101A dev kit, and it *appears* to be just an STM32, a MIPI-DSI converter IC & some other supporting hardware. However, the company has been reluctant to collaborate with "western DIY people", as it seems they have tried working with flakes in the past. :-(

http://glados.adammunich.com/index.php/ ... x2ArqXIOG9 X-Ray of PCB

They have not overclocked the MIPI-DSI bridge, so I need to do some register tweaking to get this guy to support 90Hz. As far as I can tell, the board simply programs the Toshiba TC358870XBG during "boot" over an i2c bus, so theoretically, it should be possible to rip the instructions off and rewrite the code for the STM32, as the TC3x does not have non volatile memory from what I can tell.

http://glados.adammunich.com/index.php/ ... 8SEIom9zhD (Datasheet)


Does anyone see a path to success here? Would love to hear from the forum!

Cheers,
-Adam
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Dilip
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Re: OLED Panels for distortion-free VR?

Post by Dilip »

AdamMunich wrote: Hi all, good to meet you!
I've been experimenting with an optical arrangement that outperforms those used in the current generation of VR/AR headsets, where there's no chromatic aberration or significant "screen door" effect. Pixels aren't barrel distorted, which means you can make the most out of the display panel. I can barely see the pixels
How did you achieve this? Are you optician? What is system it's multi elements system or single?
Have you produced hybrid optic or cobbled through ots parts?

You must contact HTC or OC or Samsung if u hv invention..
AdamMunich
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Re: OLED Panels for distortion-free VR?

Post by AdamMunich »

Dilip wrote: How did you achieve this? Are you optician? What is system it's multi elements system or single?
Have you produced hybrid optic or cobbled through ots parts?

You must contact HTC or OC or Samsung if u hv invention..
I'm what you could call an applied physicist I suppose :-)

It is a multi element system of a custom design, should be straightforward to produce. It's not quite perfect yet as I need to get some better optics software (in progress).

As for contacting Samsung or HTC, that's not in my wheelhouse at the moment, as I have heard quite a few horror stories about Samsung's attitude towards small teams. I do not know HTC well enough to comment. As well, Facebook never replied to my emails about working at building 8. :-p

Anyway, topfoison has not been responsive about working in concert, so I suppose they lose out on that opportunity. Sensics however has been a great help, and it looks like I'll be modifying the HDK2 to support Samsung OLEDs for this experiment.

Will keep y'all posted as things progress.
Master of the screaming electron | http://adammunich.com
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Dilip
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Re: OLED Panels for distortion-free VR?

Post by Dilip »

AdamMunich wrote: Sensics however has been a great help, and it looks like I'll be modifying the HDK2 to support Samsung OLEDs for this experiment.

Will keep y'all posted as things progress.
That's great choice OSVR HDK2 is indeed nice product almost on par with HTC VIVE and OC RIFT yet it cost half of them.. there are some loose ends in experience overall
and its kind of work in progress, but its tru modular, its for hacking officially and really work in progress (**they indeed covered up what they were lacking really fast)

When you use your optic system to tinker with OSVR HDK2, you can be assured what ever out come you get that can easily be applied to any consumer grade VR Hmd.

If your experiment do not turn out to be viable for any reason, you still will have NICE VR HMD to play with for no loss..Real win win situation..
And you can use it for real vr experiences in your spare time another bonus.

Thanks for posting, will keep eye on this thread, good luck on your experiments.
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brantlew
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Re: OLED Panels for distortion-free VR?

Post by brantlew »

Why not scavenge the panels from a Rift or Vive ?
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Dilip
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Re: OLED Panels for distortion-free VR?

Post by Dilip »

brantlew wrote:Why not scavenge the panels from a Rift or Vive ?
Are Rift or Vive really old enough to get Scavenged parts from discarded hmds?

<<IMO people might discard current Rift/Vive units only when they break the panels as other parts seem to
be sturdy enough to not to break the entire HMD thus make you dump it, so imo getting Scavenged panels is really HARD>>
AdamMunich
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Re: OLED Panels for distortion-free VR?

Post by AdamMunich »

Howdy Forum!

I've made a lot of progress these past few months in figuring out how to drive OLED and LCD panels!

I have, among other things, written some firmware that may be flashed on the OSVR HDK2 board which allows me to initialize arbitrary panels, provided I have the proper MIPI ad timing specifications. Not only that, I managed as well to get the HDK to support intel integrated graphics, where it wasn't capable of doing so before. I've as well modified the circuit design to be a bit more robust, and handle lost frames and what not much more gracefully.

However, I am overclocking the toshiba bridge IC to do all this, and unfortunately the maximum resolution we can support on that chipset seems to be 1200 * 2100. This is not future proof, and thus, I will drop the development there.

Among other adventures, I made a trip to CES early this year, and partnered with a company which will be working on new display controller chipsets, which should support much higher resolution panels, and, operate on Displayport instead of HDMI. In the coming months I hope to get a bunch of high-rez panels lit up on a new board design and evaluate their performance (just finished the schematic!).

As well, I've partnered with a local computer vision company to help a bit with 3D tracking and optics prototyping. We're working on some really neat stuff I hope to announce and share later this year.


/ an aside /

Personally, I'm not very thrilled with how the Oculus adventure played out (going close-source, getting derailed by facebook and all). I hope that this will be the start of a new page in VR development, where enthusiasts keep leading the way in advancement of this field :-)
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