OLED lifetime simulation for VR displays

Abstract

This paper introduces a new methodology for simulating the burn-in of an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) microdisplay used in a virtual reality (VR) headset. The proposed simulation employs the stretched exponential decay (SED) model, which is widely used to predict the degradation of the OLED device over time. Furthermore, the model integrates the impact of user head motion on VR display image content. The study defines productivity and gaming mode surrogate image content from which to simulate burn-in and applies image processing correlating to head motion data collected from a user study. The results of this study indicate that head motion has a significant impact on OLED burn-in. Given a conservative assumption for image content and head motion, the time for visual failure due to burn-in artifacts is 4 times slower than a case with stationary image content.