Comment by qnleigh

Being a key technology architect for it (not the core inventor), I know all about it, and then some more!

I cannot however talk publicly about it. :-(

It has been a disappointment for me as well. I had worked on it for nearly eight years. The idea was so interesting--using thin-film interference for creating images is akin to shaping Newton's rings into arbitrary images, something which even Newton would not have imagined! The demos and comparisons we had shown to various industry leaders and sometimes publicly were often instantly compelling. The people/engineers in the team were mostly the best I have ever worked with, and with whom I still maintain a great connection. But unfortunately, there were problems (not saying how much tech how much people) that were recognized by some but never got (timely) addressed. And a tech like it does not exist till date.

I do not think anything on it is being developed further.

The earliest of the patents would have expired by now.

Liquavista, Pixtronics, etc., have been alternative display technologies that also ultimately didn't make the impact desired, AFAIK.

Meanwhile, LCDs developed high pixel densities (which led to pressures on mirasol tech too), Plasma got sidelined. EInk displays have since then made good progress, though, in my opinion, are still far from colors and speeds that mirasol had. And of course, OLED, Quantum dots, ...

Correct.

I myself have been privy to similar R&D going on for more than a decade.

Total column line capacitance is impacted by the number of pixels hanging onto it as each transistor (going to the pixel capacitance) adds some parasitic capacitance of its own. Hope that answers your question. You are right in the sense that a part of the total column capacitance would depend on just the length and width of it, irrespective of the number of pixels hanging onto it.

I had back then developed what was perhaps the most sophisticated system-level model for display power, including refresh, illumination, etc., and it included all those terms for capacitance, a simplified transistor model, pixel model, etc.

I did not carefully distinguish pixel density vs. pixel count while writing my previous comments here, just to keep it simple. You can perhaps imagine that increasing display size without changing pixel count can lead to higher active pixel area percentage, which in turn would lead to better light generation/transmission/reflection efficiency. There are multiple initially counter-intuitive couplings like that. So it ultimately comes down to mathematical modeling, and the scaling laws / derivatives depend on the actual numbers chosen.

Addition:

Another important point -- Column line capacitances do not necessarily need full refresh going from one row of the pixels to the next, as the image would typically have vertical correlations. Not mentioning this is another simplification I made in my previous comments. My detailed power model included this as well -- so it could calculate energy spent for writing a specific image, a random image, a statistically typical image, etc.

How often is that used? Is there a way to check?

With the amount of bullshit animations all OSes come with these days, enabled by default, and most applications being webapp with their own secondary layer of animations, and with the typical developer's near-zero familiarity with how floating point numbers behave, I imagine there's nearly always some animation somewhere, almost but not quite eased to a stop, that's making subtle color changes across some chunk of the screen - not enough to notice, enough to change some pixel values several times per second.

I wonder what existing mitigations are at play to prevent redisplay churn? It probably wouldn't matter on Windows today, but will matter with those low-refresh-rate screens.

The PCWorld story is trash and completely omits the key point of the new display technology, which is right in the name: "Oxide." LG has a new low-leakage thin-film transistor[1] for the display backplane.

Simply, this means each pixel can hold its state longer between refreshes. So, the panel can safely drop its refresh rate to 1Hz on static content without losing the image.

Yes, even "copying the same pixels" costs substantial power. There are millions of pixels with many bits each. The frame buffer has to be clocked, data latched onto buses, SERDES'ed over high-speed links to the panel drivers, and used to drive the pixels, all while making heat fighting reactance and resistance of various conductors. Dropping the entire chain to 1Hz is meaningful power savings.

[1] https://news.lgdisplay.com/en/2026/03/lg-display-becomes-wor...

Copying , Draw() is called 60 times a second .

for small screen sizes and low information density displays, like a watch that updates every second this makes a lot of sense

it would make a lot of sense in situations where the average light generating energy is substantially smaller:

pretend you are a single pixel on a screen (laptop, TV) which emits photons in a large cone of steradians, of which a viewer's pupil makes up a tiny pencil ray; 99.99% of the light just misses an observer's pupils. in this case this technology seems to offer few benefits, since the energy consumed by the link (generating a clock and transmitting data over wires) is dwarfed by the energy consumed in generating all this light (which mostly misses human eye pupils)!

Now consider smart glasses / HUD's; the display designer knows the approximate position of the viewer's eyes. The optical train can be designed so that a significantly larger fraction of generated photons arrive on the retina. Indeed XReal or NReal's line of smart glasses consume about 0.5 W! In such a scenario the links energy consumption becomes a sizable proportion of the energy consumption; hence having a low energy state that still presents content but updates less frequently makes sense.

One would have expected smart glasses to already outcompete smartphones and laptops, just by prolonged battery life, or conversely, splitting the difference in energy saved, one could keep half of the energy saved (doubling battery life) while allocating the other half of the energy for more intensive calculations (GPU, CPU etc.).