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Field-sequential color

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Field-sequential color (FSC), also called color-sequential display, is a way of producing a full-color image by showing the red, green and blue components of each frame one after another in time instead of side by side in space. A single monochrome image modulator, such as a digital micromirror device (DMD), a liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) panel or a fast LCD, is lit in turn by red, green and blue light, and the viewer's visual system blends the rapid sequence of color fields into one picture.[1][2]

Because no spatial color filters or separate red, green and blue subpixels are needed, a field-sequential panel can have about three times the resolution density and three times the optical efficiency of an equivalent color-filter panel.[3][4] This is one reason the method is used in the small microdisplays in augmented reality glasses and headsets: field-sequential LCoS lit by RGB LEDs has been used in the first Microsoft HoloLens, the Lumus Maximus and Magic Leap 2, among others.[3] A major drawback is color breakup (also written color break-up, and commonly called "rainbows" on DLP projectors): when the eye moves relative to the image, the color fields land on different places on the retina and appear as colored fringes at the edges of bright objects.[5][6] In a head-mounted display the artifact is made worse by head rotation, which is why color breakup has been studied specifically for head- and helmet-mounted displays since the 1990s.[7][8]

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Definitions, efficiency figures, CBS and Apollo history, color-breakup research, mitigation methods and AR device examples checked against the cited papers, patent, teardown and articles. About review dates.

How it works

A field-sequential display divides each video frame into a series of single-color subframes (fields). During the red field, the modulator displays the red component of the image while only red light falls on it; it then switches to the green component under green light, then to blue. If the fields follow one another fast enough, the eye integrates them into a single full-color frame.[2][5] Each subframe must be addressed and settle within a fraction of the frame time, so the method requires an image modulator that responds several times faster than the video frame rate.[9]

The sequential colors can come from a white source behind a spinning color wheel, as in the CBS television system and in single-chip DLP projectors, or from separately switched red, green and blue LEDs or lasers, as in many LCoS and DMD microdisplay light engines.[2][6][1] In their 2021 review of AR and VR displays, Xiong, Hsiang, He, Zhan and Wu note that an LCoS panel can form a color image either with RGB color filters on the panel and a white LED, or by color-sequential addressing with RGB LEDs or lasers, and that for a single-panel DMD "the color image is mainly obtained through color-sequential addressing".[1]

The advantage is efficiency and pixel density. A color-filter panel needs three subpixels for each full-color pixel and absorbs much of the light that passes through the filters. Removing the filters lets every pixel show every color, which is the basis of the "tripled resolution density and optical efficiency" that Luo and co-authors cite for field-sequential LCoS compared with color-filter LCoS.[3] The overall gain at the light-engine level is smaller than the panel-level figure suggests. Xiong and co-authors estimate that an LCoS engine using a white LED and color filters reaches a luminous efficacy of about 12 lm/W, and that a color-sequential LCoS engine using RGB LEDs ends up at around 10 lm/W, because red and green LEDs are less efficient and are driven harder; with RGB lasers instead of LEDs they estimate about 32 lm/W.[1]

Panel type How field-sequential color is applied Notes
DMD (DLP) Single-panel DMDs produce color mainly by color-sequential addressing, with a color wheel or RGB LEDs or lasers[1][6] Texas Instruments states that its micromirrors "switch in microseconds", enabling frame rates of up to 240 Hz and "high color-sequential refresh rates" in DLP Pico chipsets for AR glasses[10]
LCoS Either color filters with a white LED, or color-sequential addressing with RGB LEDs or lasers[1] Fast liquid crystal modes are needed; Luo and co-authors note that most normally white LCoS panels use a mixed-mode twisted nematic cell partly for its fast response time (about 1 ms), "to mitigate color breakup"[3]
Transmissive LCD A color-filterless panel lit by a sequentially switched RGB backlight[11] Requires very fast liquid crystal response; a 2026 study reached a submillisecond average gray-to-gray response for this purpose[9]

History

Color television

The best-known early use of field-sequential color was the color television system developed at CBS by Peter Goldmark's group. It placed a rotating disk of red, green and blue filters in front of the camera tube and a matching wheel in front of the receiver, and relied on the eye's persistence of vision to merge the sequential images.[2][12] CBS demonstrated the system in 1940.[2][12] On 11 October 1950 the Federal Communications Commission adopted it as the United States color television standard. The version used for broadcasting ran at 144 fields per second (24 complete color frames per second) with 405 lines per frame, and no standard black-and-white receiver could show an intelligible picture from it.[13] Regularly scheduled commercial colorcasts began on 25 June 1951 and ended with a football game on 20 October 1951, after the Defense Production Administration asked CBS to halt receiver production to conserve materials.[13] The system was later abandoned in favor of a competing system developed by RCA, and the NTSC color standard was adopted in late 1953.[12][2]

The technique survived in specialized cameras. The Westinghouse color television camera carried on Apollo missions, beginning with Apollo 10 in May 1969, used a self-contained color wheel unit that slipped over the lens to produce field-sequential color, the same basic approach as Goldmark's CBS system, and a converter in Houston turned the received signal into standard NTSC color.[14]

Microdisplays and head-mounted displays

Field-sequential color was later adopted in fast-switching microdisplays. According to a 2018 review of LCoS devices by Chen and co-authors, Displaytech produced a 254 by 254 pixel LCoS panel in 1993 that used fast-switching ferroelectric liquid crystal and "implemented the field-sequential color system to generate a full color display".[15] Single-chip DLP projectors also use the method, with a spinning color wheel in front of one DMD.[6]

By the 1990s field-sequential color was being considered for head-mounted and helmet-mounted displays. A 1995 patent application by Brian L. Welch and Andrew Fernie, assigned to CAE Electronics and granted in 1997, states that "it can be desirable in head mounted displays to use field sequential color display devices" to improve picture quality or reduce weight or cost, but that "color fringes are seen on objects during angular head motion".[8] In a 1997 SPIE paper on head-mounted displays, Post, Monnier and Calhoun wrote that designers of color head- and helmet-mounted displays were considering field-sequential color "because it offers higher resolution than conventional color displays in a compact package", but that the viewing conditions under which breakup occurs "have not been established very well".[7]

Color breakup

Color breakup degrades the image quality of field-sequential displays and has limited their practical use.[4][11] Johnson, Kim and Banks describe the mechanism: "When the eye tracks a moving object on such a display, different colors land on different places on the retina, and this gives rise to visible color fringes at the object's leading and trailing edges." They also found that breakup appears when the eye is stationary and an object moves past, although it was somewhat more visible when viewers tracked the object.[5] On DLP projectors the same artifact appears as brief flashes of red, green and blue. ProjectorCentral's Evan Powell wrote in 2005 that sensitivity varies widely: some viewers are never bothered, while others cannot watch a DLP projector at all.[6]

Head-worn displays add another cause. The CAE patent explains that when the wearer turns their head while fixating an object, "the rotation of the eye results in a break-up of the object image into its color components", because each color field is drawn at the same place on the display while the eye has moved between fields.[8] Post, Monnier and Calhoun measured breakup thresholds for a simple field-sequential stimulus as a function of luminance, contrast and retinal velocity, and fitted equations to predict whether breakup would be visible under given viewing conditions.[7]

Mitigation

Published approaches fall into a few groups:

  • Higher field rates. Shorter fields reduce the spatial separation between colors on the retina. In 2005 ProjectorCentral reported that 2x-speed color wheels caused the most complaints, and that 4x wheels with two sets of red, green and blue segments "substantially" reduced the number of affected viewers without eliminating the problem.[6] Karl Guttag reported that the Compound Photonics LCoS device in the Lumus Maximus supports "up to a 1440Hz field sequence rate to prevent color breakup".[16] In a 2024 dissertation on VR and AR light engines, Zhiyong Yang reported simulation results indicating "that a 600-Hz subframe rate can help mitigate the CBU dramatically" in field-sequential LCDs with mini-LED backlights.[17]
  • Motion-compensated color fields. The CAE patent shifts each color field "by an amount equivalent to the angular motion of the observer's head in that field", using measured head velocity, so that the fields line up on the retina.[8] Johnson, Kim and Banks showed in a psychophysical experiment that offsetting the green subframe by one third, and the blue subframe by two thirds, of an object's per-frame displacement eliminated breakup both when viewers tracked the object and when they did not.[5]
  • Backlight and primary schemes. Zhang, Lin and Langendijk built a 180 Hz LCD with a matrix LED backlight that controls the backlight colors locally; in their perceptual test, breakup went "from very annoying to not annoying and even invisible".[11] Cheng, Rao and Wu proposed using five LED primaries instead of three, with a chosen color sequence and weighting, to suppress breakup without raising the subframe rate.[4]

Applications in VR and AR

AR microdisplays

Field-sequential LCoS is used in the optical engines of several waveguide AR headsets. Luo and co-authors list the Microsoft HoloLens, Lumus Maximus and Magic Leap 2 as AR headsets that used field-sequential-color LCoS with RGB LEDs.[3] Teardowns and independent analyses identify the following examples:

Device Reported field-sequential display Source
Google Glass A reflective LCoS panel; display analyst Karl Guttag concluded in 2013, from frame-by-frame analysis of a Google video showing separate red, green and blue images and color breakup, that it used field-sequential color, most likely from Himax. Network World reported in 2014 that Himax supplied the Glass display. [18][19]
Microsoft HoloLens (first generation) Field-sequential-color LCoS with RGB LED illumination; Guttag wrote that it uses two Himax-made field-sequential LCoS microdisplays [3][20]
Magic Leap One An OmniVision OP02222 field-sequential color LCoS device, likely a customized OP02220, lit by a ring of six LEDs (red, green and blue for each of two focal planes) [21]
Magic Leap 2 Field-sequential-color LCoS with RGB LED illumination [3]
Lumus Maximus A Compound Photonics 2048 by 2048 pixel field-sequential LCoS microdisplay with 3-micron pixels [3][16]

Guttag wrote in 2021 that the high field rate of the Compound Photonics panel "helps prevent the color breakup seen with say the Hololens 1".[16] Texas Instruments markets DLP Pico chipsets, which also form color sequentially, for AR glasses, citing high color-sequential refresh rates and low display latency.[10] Other AR display approaches, such as laser beam scanning, which scans modulated RGB laser beams with a micromirror, and self-emissive micro-OLED and microLED panels with their own colored subpixels or color conversion, form color in different ways.[1]

VR displays

Field-sequential LCDs are a research topic for virtual reality headsets because of the potential resolution and power gains. Yang's 2024 dissertation proposes field-sequential LCDs for high-end VR devices, stating that "such an FSC LCD can triple the resolution density and optical efficiency via eliminating color filters", and combines them with mini-LED backlights to reduce breakup.[17] A 2026 Optics Express paper by Chiu and co-authors reports a fringe-field-switching LCD with a submillisecond average gray-to-gray response time at 40 degrees Celsius, achieved with a low-viscosity liquid crystal mixture and overdrive and undershoot driving. The authors state that this enables field-sequential operation to mitigate color breakup, and that removing the color filters triples resolution density and optical efficiency "to fulfill 1-arcminute visual acuity and low power requirements of virtual reality (VR) headsets".[9]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Jianghao Xiong, En-Lin Hsiang, Ziqian He, Tao Zhan, Shin-Tson Wu (2021). "Augmented reality and virtual reality displays: emerging technologies and future perspectives". Light: Science & Applications, vol. 10, art. 216. doi:10.1038/s41377-021-00658-8. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-021-00658-8. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 "CBS Color System". Early Television Museum. https://www.earlytelevision.org/cbs_color_system.html. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 Zhenyi Luo, Yuqiang Ding, Fenglin Peng, Guohua Wei, Yun Wang, Shin-Tson Wu (2024). "Ultracompact and high-efficiency liquid-crystal-on-silicon light engines for augmented reality glasses". Opto-Electronic Advances, vol. 7, no. 10, art. 240039. doi:10.29026/oea.2024.240039. https://doi.org/10.29026/oea.2024.240039. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Hui-Chuan Cheng, Linghui Rao, Shin-Tson Wu (2010). "Color Breakup Suppression in Field-Sequential Five-Primary-Color LCDs". Journal of Display Technology, vol. 6, no. 6, pp. 229-234. doi:10.1109/JDT.2010.2042678. https://doi.org/10.1109/JDT.2010.2042678. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Paul V. Johnson, Joohwan Kim, Martin S. Banks (2014). "The visibility of color breakup and a means to reduce it". Journal of Vision, vol. 14, no. 14, art. 10. doi:10.1167/14.14.10. https://doi.org/10.1167/14.14.10. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 Evan Powell (2005-05-24). "LCD vertical banding or DLP rainbows?". ProjectorCentral. https://www.projectorcentral.com/banding_rainbows.htm. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 David L. Post, Patrick Monnier, Christopher S. Calhoun (1997). "Predicting color breakup on field-sequential displays". Head-Mounted Displays II, Proc. SPIE 3058. pp. 57-65. doi:10.1117/12.276660. https://doi.org/10.1117/12.276660.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Brian L. Welch, Andrew Fernie (1997-11-04). "US5684498A - Field sequential color head mounted display with suppressed color break-up". Google Patents. CAE Electronics Ltd.. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5684498. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Po-Sheng Chiu, Yuge Huang, Yizhou Qian, Yi-Chien Chen, Zhiyong Yang, Fenglin Peng, Ying Geng, Dan Hu, Chih-Lung Lin, Shin-Tson Wu (2026). "Submillisecond-response LCD for low power field-sequential-color virtual reality displays". Optics Express, vol. 34, no. 2, p. 2117. doi:10.1364/OE.587078. https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.587078. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 "TI DLP Pico Technology for AR Glasses (Application Brief DLPA121A, revised March 2023)". Texas Instruments. 2023-03. https://www.ti.com/lit/pdf/dlpa121. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Yuning Zhang, Fang-Cheng Lin, Erno H. A. Langendijk (2011). "A field-sequential-color display with a local-primary-desaturation backlight scheme". Journal of the Society for Information Display, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 258-264. doi:10.1889/JSID19.3.258. https://doi.org/10.1889/JSID19.3.258. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 "Peter Goldmark". Engineering and Technology History Wiki. IEEE History Center. https://ethw.org/Peter_Goldmark. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Ed Reitan (1997). "CBS Field Sequential Color System". Early Television Museum. https://www.earlytelevision.org/Reitan/color_sys_cbs.html. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  14. ↑ James E. O'Neal (2009-07-21). "Equipping Apollo for Color Television". TV Technology. https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/equipping-apollo-for-color-television. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  15. ↑ Huang-Ming Philip Chen, Jhou-Pu Yang, Hao-Ting Yen, Zheng-Ning Hsu, Yuge Huang, Shin-Tson Wu (2018). "Pursuing High Quality Phase-Only Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) Devices". Applied Sciences, vol. 8, no. 11, art. 2323. doi:10.3390/app8112323. https://doi.org/10.3390/app8112323. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 Karl Guttag (2021-05-24). "Exclusive: Lumus Maximus 2K x 2K Per Eye, >3000 Nits, 50 FOV with Through-the-Optics Pictures". KGOnTech. https://kguttag.com/2021/05/24/exclusive-lumus-maximus-2k-x-2k-per-eye-3000-nits-50-fov-with-though-the-optics-pictures/. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Zhiyong Yang (2024). "Next-generation High-performance Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Light Engines". Doctoral dissertation, University of Central Florida. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd2023/107. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  18. ↑ Karl Guttag (2013-03-11). "Google Glass Is Using Field Sequential Color (FSC) LCOS (Likely Himax)". KGOnTech. https://kguttag.com/2013/03/11/google-glass-is-using-field-sequential-color-fsc-lcos-likely-himax/. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  19. ↑ Martyn Williams (2014-02-13). "Many big names working on head-mounted gear, Glass display maker says". Network World. https://www.networkworld.com/article/687080/smb-many-big-names-working-on-head-mounted-gear-glass-display-maker-says.html. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  20. ↑ Karl Guttag (2016-12-20). "Magic Leap and Hololens and LCOS". KGOnTech. https://kguttag.com/2016/12/20/magic-leap-and-hololens-and-lcos/. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
  21. ↑ "Magic Leap One Teardown". iFixit. 2018-08-23. https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Magic+Leap+One+Teardown/112245. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
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