Fraunhofer CMOS-OLED Headmounted display with integrated eye tracker

"The Fraunhofer IPMS works on the integration of sensors and microdisplays on CMOS backplane for several years now. For example the researchers have developed a bidirectional microdisplay, which could be used in Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) for gaze triggered augmented-reality (AR) aplications. The chips contain both an active OLED matrix and therein integrated photodetectors. The combination of both matrixes in one chip is an essential possibility for system integrators to design smaller, lightweight and portable systems with both functionalities." (Press release)

"Rigo Herold, PhD student at Fraunhofer IPMS and participant of the development team, declares: This unique device enables the design of a new generation of small AR-HMDs with advanced functionality. The OLED microdisplay based Eyetracking HMD enables the user on the one hand to overlay the view of the real world with virtual contents, for example to watch videos at jog. And on the other hand the user can select the next video triggered only by his gaze without using his hands." (Press release)

Sensor integrates both OLED display and CMOS imaging sensor. 

Rigo Herold will present the system at the SID 2011 exhibitor forum at May 17, 2011 4:00 p.m.: Eyecatcher: The Bi-Directional OLED Microdisplay with the following specs:

• Monochrome 
• Special Eyetracking-Algorithm for HMDs based on bidirectional microdisplays
• Front brightness: > 1500 cd/m²

Poster was presented at ISSCC 2011 : Industry Demonstration Session (IDS). Click to enlarge

In addition there is a paper titled "Bidirectional OLED microdisplay: Combining display and image sensor functionality into a monolithic CMOS chip" published with the following abstract:. 

"Microdisplays based on organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) achieve high optical performance with excellent contrast ratio and large dynamic range at low power consumption. The direct light emission from the OLED enables small devices without additional backlight, making them suitable for mobile near-to-eye (NTE) applications such as viewfinders or head-mounted displays (HMD). In these applications the microdisplay acts typically as a purely unidirectional output device [1–3]. With the integration of an additional image sensor, the functionality of the microdisplay can be extended to a bidirectional optical input/output device. The major aim is the implementation of eye-tracking capabilities in see-through HMD applications to achieve gaze-based human-display-interaction." Available at IEEE Xplore.