Researchers at Stanford University, in collaboration with Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), have created a new architecture for OLED displays. This expands upon the designs for electrodes in ultra-thin solar panels, and repurposes them for OLED technology.
This could enable screens with resolutions of up to 10,000 pixels per inch (PPI), a number that blows current technology completely out of the water. This would be excellent for microdisplays, virtual reality, and augumented reality.
According to the Stanford news site, this research is set to offer an alternative to the two current OLED displays that are commercially available. The innovation behind this research is a layer of reflective metal with nanoscale corrugations, called an optical metasurface.
This metasurface can change the reflective properties of light and will thereby allow the different colours to resonate in the pixels. These are key to facilitating effective light extraction from the OLEDs themselves.
Yahoo News reports that Samsung is already working on a full-size display using the 10,000 PPI technology and the design of it makes large-scale manufacturing viable.