Sony today showcased work on its own 4K OLED microdisplay for possible use in a future VR headset.
The display, which was developed at Sony’s R&D Center and not under the PlayStation division called Sony Interactive Entertainment, was showcased in a video as part of ‘Sony Technology Day’. You can see the footage below.
Sony Reveals 4K OLED Microdisplay VR Prototype
In the clip, engineers Yasuka Ishihara and Kei Kimura present a VR headset prototype that features two 4K microdisplays and new low latency technology. The microdisplays achieve 4K resolution whilst being only a fraction of the size of most current VR displays. This would allow the size and weight of a headset itself to be significantly reduced.
This isn’t the first work we’ve seen with VR and microdisplays – Panasonic has repeatedly shown off its own compact VR goggles that use the technology, though there’s also no sign of a consumer release. Work on lower latency, meanwhile, apparently combines different data to deliver response times of under 0.01 seconds.
To be clear, this technology seems to be in the prototype stages of design and certainly won’t feature in the new PS5 VR headset expected to release in 2022.
There’s also a render of a slim VR headset to open up the footage but, again, we highly doubt this is the PSVR 2 design. You can follow everything we know about the upcoming headset right here.
That said we reported last year that the wider Sony Corp was hiring for work on new ‘next-generation VR headsets beyond the launch of PSVR 2. It’s quite possible that, given VR’s applications beyond game, Sony plans to release a non-PlayStation branded VR headset in the future. In fact, the video above talks a lot about remote collaboration and live events. But, given the nearing arrival of PSVR 2, we wouldn’t expect to see any such product for a long time yet.
