I Know the Way to San Jose

Abstract

Each time Display Week comes back to San Jose, I can’t help recalling the Dionne Warwick song (written by Burt Bacharach) “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” about losing your dreams in LA and finding your way back home. It’s a bit of a metaphor for us because SID was originally founded in LA, and for a couple of decades that area was rich with display work. More recently, the Bay Area has been the home of many key display-related milestones and feels like the center of the industry, at least in North America. Display Week was last held in San Jose in 2015, and one of the biggest topics that year was OLED devices, materials, and displays. Quantum dots, microLEDs, and touch technology also claimed a lot of space in the program. Now, as we return in 2019, there continues to be much interest in OLED and microLEDs, but by far the biggest buzz is around augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) display systems. It’s a field of research that seems to have exploded in the last few years, spurring all kinds of innovations and breathing new life into older topics, such as near-to-eye (NTE) displays. Just as you probably need to be a certain age to actually remember the San Jose song, you probably need to have some history in this business to remember that NTE displays were a focal point of research back in the early 2000s. The displays were good then, but not good enough. In the intervening years, a lot of supporting tech such as micro-processors and software have evolved to enable a new generation of devices that now have a compelling application named AR/VR to pull them into the marketplace. To get a handle on all that is coming this year at Display Week, please read “A First Look at Display Week 2019” (page 26) and start making your travel plans. This month, we also have the distinct privilege of announcing the winners of the 2019 SID Honors and Awards, which recognize professionals whose contributions or technical achievements have helped to advance the field of displays. This year’s honorees include a cross-section of great innovators whose contributions are like fingerprints that can be seen in many places and in many products today. Their stories are chronicled in “SID Salutes Industry Standouts” (page 21). Our issue theme is Applied Vision, and our guest editor Yi-Pai Huang, Ph.D., director of the Display Center at National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in Taiwan, found us a great lineup of Frontline Technology features. It begins with “Temporal Requirements for VR Displays to Create a More Comfortable and Immersive Visual Experience,” an important discussion of the issues around temporal artifacts in head-mounted displays and opportunities to improve their performance, from Google researchers David M. Hoffman, Ph.D., and Grace Lee, Ph.D. Yi-Pai also brought us an in-depth story on the nature of color breakup assessment for field sequential color (FSC) displays by his NCTU colleagues Zong Qin, et al. FSC may be an emerging solution for high-performance NTE displays and, along with temporal artifacts, is a critical aspect of the user experience with AR and VR systems. We extend our heartfelt thanks to Yi-Pai for his hard work on this package, and don’t forget to read his guest editorial and introduction to these topics. Color and the science of color spaces are topics that regularly prompt questions and confusion from even deeply experienced display engineers. We were very pleased when Abhay Sharma, Ph.D., a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, volunteered to do a series on this subject for our readers. His first installment, “Understanding RGB Color Spaces for Monitors, Projectors, and Televisions,” covers some very important ground, including color spaces for HDR displays. Abhay put in a lot of valuable hours on this article, pulling data from many sources and answering endless editorial questions from us along the way. We are very grateful for his time and I think you will benefit greatly from his efforts. There are many more wonderful elements to our issue this month and I hope you find them all enjoyable. Up next is our Display Week show issue in May, and with that I hope to see you all in San Jose.