OLED is not new new technology, it is relatively new but its been around a few years now – at least in tv’s and small flatscreens. The benifits of OLED over standard liquid crystal or plasma are several fold, including more efficient power use (increasingly an important factor in electronics purchases), better resolutions, better picture quality, colour tones, brightness, contrast ratio’s and higher refresh rates – and if that wasn’t enough to ensure OLED continues to be the TV limelight hardware its show-piece is the fact it can do all this in an even thinner form, allowing for envelope thick television screen’s and minute displays that can be easily integrated.

But signs show as well as this wonderful use OLED is also shrinkable as we have seen with the tiny high resolution lcd display’s that will power the next generation of micro projector’s. While you would not think it strictly possible to have a OLED Micro projector (where’s the light driving the projection?!) – it is possible, but only currently in a small scale. When multimedia projectors where very expensive there was a huge upshot in the sales of “home projector building kits” designed to allow anyone to build there own home multimedia projector from an lcd screen and parts from an overhead projector – these kits proved that people are prepared to alter available technology if none is suitably in their budget, but even before then people were making these projectors using the same lenses but with crt (cathode ray tube) televisions – the results were not very good. Based however off a somewhat similar process it may be possible to develop (at least in a small scale) a micro projector that runs from a flat display unit like an OLED display. You might be thinking with laser and current lcd based micro projectors that OLED is a great development in TV’s but why try to include it as a pico projector driver? well OLED is unbeaten in image quality and power consumption as it stands as well as being producible as thin as paper, so potentially while the development curve to get a oled micro projector bright enough might be a high one, the projection quality might be of such a high standard and the size invaluable to certain product’s design, that this investment would pay off.

There are some interesting ideas already gaining steam, combining the new minified oled displays (micro displays) with wifi and integrating them into pico projectors! A research institute in Germany is developing around the idea of a micro oled display that is held close to the eye, coupled with a micro projector system to provide augmented reality and a heads up display for life. The Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Micro systems (damn thats a cool name!) has some fantastic ideas such as what they are calling a “Media Box” – a micro projector capable of linking up to the internet via wifi no bigger than a star trek communicator – a cool idea you might think, but they actually do have a working prototype!

Fraunhofer is definitely a name you want to keep track of, their micro display project should lead to some great developments in OLED that should allow for complete miniaturisation of the oled display and put is far closer to an augmented reality. HYPOLED is the project name for this (these names get better) and its goal is to put real life heads up displays within reach of the end consumer, and being oled they will likely be amazingly clear, bright and energy efficient when they arrive!