High Refresh Rate Displays
Last updated
Last updated
This page needs a bit more structure, but is meant to cover some sources on high refresh rate displays and their applications. There is a lot of creative potential in a high refresh rate display that is still largely untapped. Most displays run at 60hz/frames per second which comes out to about 16.8ms per visible frame. Very fast, but not exactly a speed limit - real life doesn't have a frame rate and your eyes and brain don't exactly process in discrete frames either - 60hz just feels "comfortable" to most and was the minimum of what was technically achievable years ago.
Most manufacturers are pursuing effects in the spatial/resolution dimension (8K, 16K, 3D, etc), but as monitors get 240hz and beyond, there are new untapped areas of visual exploration and information delivery that can be explored. Additionally, as reoslution gets higher and higher, a higher framerate will also become critical for improved visual fidelity and realness as it becomes harder and harder to tell the difference between 16K and beyond in close-up viewing scenarios. In smartphones and tablets we're starting to see a lot more 120hz displays than just the standard 60hz, and a lot of this is for a smoother animation experience. Outside of standard LCD and OLED, LED video walls do have the capability to change at very fast speeds in the 500hz range, but their driver electronics are usually designed to interface with standard 60hz output devices.
Most of the conversation around high refresh rates is dominated by gaming displays and applications to gaming, so it can be hard to find interesting updates that are outside of that space. There are a lot of advantages to high refresh rates for smoothness of animation, but there is also the potential for nearly invisible information transmission to another digital device (think of it as QR code that can hold more information than just a URL).
The Voxon VX1 volumetric display uses a specialized graphical pipeline to project images at nearly 4000 frames per second onto a mechanical surface that moves up and down. As the surface moves, the persistence of vision effect allows people to see those "slices" as more of a light volume.
There are some discussions out there of what a 1000hz/frames per second display could do for visual fidelity and reaction time as well. There are a lot of technical hurdles to overcome to get to something even close to that kind of display that would also be commercially viable, but I suspect we'll see something like it in the next decade.
Some refresh rate comparisons on a 390hz display:
There aren't really commercially available examples of these kinds of tools, but they allow for a lot of interesting capabilities when it comes to real-time projection mapping and volumetric displays. One of the leading research groups looking at this stuff is the Watanabe Latent Sense Lab in Japan. They have a number of resources on their highspeed projection as well as high speed 3D sensing and deformation: https://www.vision.ict.e.titech.ac.jp/projects/dynaflashv2/index.html
Most of the tricks that lead to high speed projection tend to go to hacking how images are sent to a standard projector over a normal display path since it would be difficult to engineer a whole signal path from computer to projector. For example, you can send 3 black and white frames per frame if they are encoded in red/green/blue for a single frame. There is some other wizardy involved, but that is one of the main elements.