Nvidia hacks together two displays to build better VR goggles
Nvidia — and Oculus and Sony and a bunch of other companies — are working feverishly to come up with virtual reality hardware that feels a lot more R and a lot less V. Nvidia has come up with a novel solution: sandwich parts from two display panels together.
They refer to their system as a cascaded display. Nvidia’s team started by ripping the components they needed out from two off-the-shelf panels — no fancy new hardware needed here. By offsetting the spatial light modulators from the panels, they were able to effectively quarter the size of the pixels on the resulting display. If a single pixel on the already-crisp iPhone 5s measures just .0078 of a centimeter, we’d perceive (maybe “perceive” should be in quotes) them as just .0019cm on a cascaded display.