When the Nintendo Virtual Boy was released in 1995, it was perhaps the earliest consumer product to use LEDs in a display. It used only a 1D row of 224 red-colored pixels for its monochrome, stereoscopic 3D display. The display’s oscillating mirror scanned the row of pixels through 384 lines, resulting in a resolution of 384 × 224 pixels.1 The Virtual Boy, however, was a commercial failure—it is Nintendo’s only game console to sell fewer than a million units—and the development of LED display technology stagnated.
LEDs were not traditionally used for displays, lighting, or any of their other modern applications. Rather, they were limited to simple indicator lighting in electronics. The history of LEDs dates back to the 1960s, with red and green LEDs made from the semiconductor materials of gallium arsenide and gallium phosphide, respectively. Higher costs, inefficient energy consumption, and low brightness limited the usefulness and...
