Realfiction, PlayNitride Unveiling New Kind Of Glasses-Free 3D Display Based Around MicroLED

April 15, 2025 by Dave Haynes

Touch Taiwan starts tomorrow in Taipei and among the announcements advancing manufacturers’ showcases is one involving a tie-up between a domestic company, PlayNitride, and Danish specialty display company Realfiction, for a new kind of glasses-free 3D display that uses MicroLED.

What is touted as the world’s first MicroLED-based 3D display is a 9-inch unit that is powered by Realfiction’s Directional Pixel Technology. “Developed through close cooperation with PlayNitride, the display combines their world-class MicroLED expertise with Realfiction’s latest-generation Spatial Light Modulator (SLM)-a key enabler of immersive multi-view, glasses-free 3D experiences.”

Realfiction’s directional Pixel Technology, the PR continues, does not rely on lenticular sheets, making it uniquely well-suited for MicroLED and enabling reliable, high-performance glasses-free 3D displays for the first time.

Following strong interest from recent presentations in Asia and the upcoming Touch Taiwan exhibition, Realfiction is currently refining discussions with potential partners with the goal of establishing NRE (non-recurring engineering) and license agreements for commercial display development based on its Spatial Light Modulator.

The modulator tech is not specific to MicroLED, and also works with OLED, LCD, and LED. But that’s where the buzz is. The companies also say while the 9-inch unit is a proof of concept, the “technology is inherently scalable and suitable for a wide range of display sizes and applications.”

Using microLED, the PR adds, gets the tech over a barrier. “While MicroLED offers exceptional brightness and speed, its high heat output and modular structure makes it incompatible with traditional lenticular approaches to 3D. These lens-based displays suffer from heat-related degradation, alignment inaccuracies, and resolution loss – issues that are worsened by the intensity of MicroLED panels.” 

Realfiction, you may recall, has been around for ages with novel displays, like little glass pyramids that create hologram-ish visuals using a variation of the age-old Pepper’s Ghost illusion. PlayNitride is one of few companies working very specifically in microLED display development.

Directional Pixel Technology is almost certainly one of those things that needs to be seen to be fully understood and appreciated. I read the explainer page, and while that gets me a little further along, I’m still in rapid eye-blink mode trying to grasp what’s up.

This basically means the ability to produce multiple views at the same time by displaying each view for only a fraction of a second before switching to the next one. Combined with a clever software driver package, unique and dynamic Spatial Light Modulators that can deliver views in many different directions, and eye position tracking, DPT is able to calculate and present correct views for each eye of each viewer, even when the viewers move around in front of the display, creating a holographic “look-around” effect.  

DPT is thus able to offer the holy grail of 3D: different 3D views at the same time for multiple people moving freely in front of the display, with great viewing angles, full resolution and look-around capability.

I couldn’t find a video, and this may well be one of those cases when video capture can’t really do the job.

It’s interesting, but the real question is business application and market demand. Glasses-free lenticular tech has been around for maybe 20 years (or more) and has not exactly caught marketplace fire. Magnetic 3D is the one company I can think about that is still somewhat doggedly selling that dream. I’ve seen Sony’s spatial reality stuff and similar R&D tech from BOE, and thought they were yet more cases of interesting tech with elusive use-cases.

3D displays tend to have more boosters than buyers, but we’ll see.