New tech for 3 times higher TV, smartphone screen resolution

New York: Scientists have developed a new tunable colour-changing surface, a breakthrough that may triple the resolution of televisions, smartphones and virtual reality devices.

Video screens are made up of hundreds of thousands of pixels that display different colours to form the images. With current technology, each of these pixels contain three subpixels - one red, one green, one blue.

Researchers from University of Central Florida (UCF) in the US have come up with a way to tune the colour of these subpixels.

By applying differing voltages, researchers were able to change the colour of individual subpixels to red, green or blue - the RGB scale - or gradations in between.

By eliminating the three static subpixels that currently make up every pixel, the size of individual pixels can be reduced by three, researchers said.

That would have major implications for not only TVs and other general displays, but augmented reality and virtual reality headsets that need very high resolution because they are so close to the eye, they said.

"A subpixel-less display can increase resolution drastically. You can have a much smaller area that can do all three," said Daniel Franklin from UCF.

"We can make a red subpixel go to blue. In other displays that is not possible because they need three static colour filters to show the full RGB colour. We do not need that now a single subpixel-less pixel can be tuned across a given colour gamut," said Debashis Chanda, assistant professor at UCF.