I am writing this Display Daily on board the Taiwan high speed rail on my return trip back from a visit with Chi Mei-Innolux. So far, I have talked with them and ITRI about the 3D industry and I plan to meet with AUO and Delta on the same topic before the week it through. I have learned a lot so far and expect to be even more educated by week end.

Chris Chinnock
Senior Analyst and Editor
for Insight Media

The week started at ITRI where I participated in their Technology Advisory Committee (TAC) meeting. This meeting of outside advisers and ITRI managers was geared toward evaluating, critiquing and advising the ITRI 3D team on their development strategy. The first day consisted of demonstrations of 3D technology and a review by ITRI managers of the 3D markets, 3D development strategy and 3D projects underway at the research institute.

One project is focused on developing an autostereoscopic display using an array of pico-projectors and a lenticular array. A second project will develop a scanning backlight based upon an electronically scanning prism array. Other projects are looking at fast blue-phase LCD materials, an autostereoscopic front projection screen, 3D camera concepts, gesture recognition processing and human factors research.

ITRI’s charter is to develop technology and transfer it to industry (they are even encouraged to spend 10% of their time "independently innovating"). One success story appears to be a project that uses ITRI-developed conversion software that is being applied for use in endoscopic surgery to convert the 2D images to 3D. The demo of this was quite good.

The following day, the advisory committee sat down to summarize our observations about the presentations, demos and development directions, offering some constructive criticism and suggestions for consideration. This was well received. Next, we heard presentations on activities at NICT and at Kodak. I followed this with a 4-hour workshop on the entire 3D ecosystem. The audience consisted of about 70 experts in 3D. While many attendees were quite knowledgeable about their subject areas, I was happy to hear from one participant that the workshop had, "helped him stitch together all the pieces of knowledge he knew into a more complete picture of the 3D ecosystem." I hope this applied to most attendees. We relaxed that evening at a wonderful traditional Chinese restaurant that we had all to ourselves as everyone was home with family throwing money into flaming fires and celebrating "ghost day".

The next day included a trip to Tainan in southern Taiwan to visit with Chi Mei-Innolux (CMI). Here, I saw demonstrations of a 23" TN-based shutter glass display that was excellent. There were also two 46" TVs that used VA-mode LCD with an edge lit design and direct backlight design. These seemed to be more representative of current 3D LCD TVs with some ghosting, but maybe a little dimmer that other models I have seen in 3D mode.

The company also showed a glass-type patterned retarder display in a 31.5" size and a 47" 9-view lenticular-type autostereoscopic display. CMI would like to commercialize passive LCD solutions, but believes a film-type patterned retarder or active retarder solutions are needed to be price-performance competitive with active shutter glass solutions. Both technologies are being developed by multiple suppliers, and limited products could reach the market in 2011 (active retarder in displays above >55" and film retarder in displays under 20"). For 2012, the active retarder will need to reduce costs aggressively to get into the mainstream while the film retarder approach will need to solve its reliability issues to expand into mainstream TV sizes. How this will play out remains to be seen.

Finally, I was asked several times about my thoughts on the "passport issue." In case you hadn’t heard, three of AUO’s top executives had their passports taken from them while they were in California defending the company in a litigation issue. AUO is being accused of LCD price fixing. Other companies in Korea, Taiwan and Japan have pleaded guilty to similar charges and 17 are now in jail, but AUO maintains its innocence. Since there is no extradition treaty between the US and Taiwan, the judge evidently felt the three were a flight risk and took their passports away. This action has caught the attention of the Taiwanese government, and is now seeking ways to help its stranded executives.

This case could be huge. AUO faces fines of up to $100M. Indictments of other companies from other jurisdictions could follow, and if they lead to convictions, this could be a billion dollar case before all is said and done. And that ain’t chicken feed, as they say.