Organic Materials make various new devices for the information technology possible. Displays based on organic light-emitting diodes are already established on the market. Further applications are among others OLED lighting solutions, signage, and organic solar cells. OLEDs are integrable into different substrates. Especially the OLED-on-CMOS integration offers, for the first time ever, the possibility to integrate highly efficient light sources with photo detectors on a single CMOS chip. This enables monolithically integrated optoelectronic applications based on standard silicon. Besides classic optoelectronic sensor applications, this also enables innovative solutions for personalized information systems. To bring these novel technology to market and to discover their intriguing possibilities, the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft has promoted a project. The Fraunhofer institutes IOF, IITB, IGD and IPMS work on the development of:

Interactive See-Through Augmented-Reality Displays – iSTAR

To avoid an information overload and to provide the right information at the right time in a manageable manner, Fraunhofer scientists work on several solutions since long time.

As usually the user perceives his environment through glasses, however additional information is projected into his field of view (Augmented Reality AR). So it's possible, that the technician always assembles the right parts into changing products, the tourist knows the facts about a contemplated building and the surgeon can always control the circulation of the patient without stoping his work. The visual information is consciously and unconsciously adaptable to the current situation and the user can interact without any manual or acoustic actions just by moving the eyes. OLED display pixels and photo detectors for the detection of the eye movement are interleaving in a mosaic style at the same chip. This allows to provide visual information to the user, at the same time the device is capable of sensing eye movements of the user. The information can be controlled by the eye like using an optical mouse.

Within the collaboration of the four Fraunhofer institutes a miniaturized system is under development, which is integrated into more or less normal eyeglasses. The aim of the project is to provide a reference technology demonstration system of a personalized mobile interactive see-through AR display. Based on this, industrial partner are able to develop their own information eyeglasses according to their special applications. First evaluation samples can be purchased in early 2011.

Concrete project results will be presented at the SID ME 2010 (Mid-Europe Chapter), from the 18th to the 19th of March 2010, in Dresden. The goal of the iSTAR project is directly related to the topics of the SID ME conference. The goals of the project are steered by an industrial advisory board with prominent members. Moreover, quite a large number of industrial and scientific partners have already shown interest in the iSTAR results. Participation at SID ME allows for direct access to the latest results in the emerging field of see-through head mounted displays with novel features.

iSTAR:

The aim of this Fraunhofer project is the development of a bidirectional display-terminal worn like glasses which provides information by eye-tracking interactions to the user's field of view.

Within this project promising technologies for the system of the innovative personal information displays shall be developed and IPR shall be generated to establish a new business unit »personalized information devices«.

The consortium consists of:

• Fraunhofer IPMS (Dresden): bi-directional OLED microdisplay, project coordinator
• Fraunhofer IOF (Jena): head-mounted see-through optics
• Fraunhofer IITB (Karlsruhe): eye/gaze-controlled interaction
• Fraunhofer IGD (Darmstadt): augmented reality