One of the most expensive components of Apple's Vision Pro headset is the display. The twin 4K displays offer enhanced color accuracy for a seamless AR experience. While Apple announced the Vision Pro at its WWDC 2023 event on June 5, Sony revealed the technology a year ago at its technology day. Sony is Apple's sole supplier for the headset's display, and the company is having a hard time managing its production capacity above a million units.

Sony revealed the Vision Pro's display technology last year, but it did not gain enough traction

The demo video showcases the display in a wired headset that looks nothing like the Vision Pro. However, the purpose of the video is not the headset itself but the display within. In the video, Sony calls the display "OLED Microdisplay." The purpose of the video is to show the sharpness of the display and how the pixels are invisible to the naked eye. Each display is 4K which makes a total of 8K resolution for both eyes. Sony says that the details in the image or videos are close to reality, which is achieved by making the pixel dots invisible.

Apart from the invisible pixel dots, it is challenging to fit that many pixels in a smaller display. The smaller display is necessary to serve the purpose it is intended for - the Vision Pro in Apple's case. To fulfill these requirements, the company developed a 4K OLED microdisplay for each eye.

For these two requirements we developed a 4K OLED microdisplay which is an ultra high 4K per inch resolution. This 4K OLED microdisplay has more than double the number of dots compared to smartphone OLED and reduces the panel size by almost 20 times.

Apart from the resolution, the company also worked to lower the latency of the display. Lowering the latency is a cumbersome task that requires multiple sensor data and latency compensation technology. This allows the latency to drop from 0.1 to 0.01 seconds. The video notes that the image is converted and created before the person's head turns in a specific direction.

While the technology behind the display is nothing short of amazing, it makes the display one of the most expensive components. The demo video of the Vision Pro display was posted on YouTube last year, and surprisingly it did not gather enough traction. Now that it is uncovered, we can see the amount of hard work and talent that went into creating the Vision Pro.