Korea-based LED developer Lumens is developing a Micro-LED based HUD for the automotive aftermarket, and at CES the company demonstrated two prototypes, a Direct-HUD and a project-based one.

Lumen's HUDs use three monochrome (RGB) Micro-LED panels, which combined can reach 100,000 nits. The project one uses a projection lens for the image magnification. The smaller HUD uses the Micro-LED directly as the output to the combiner.

Yole Developpement published an interesting article discussing the patent landscape of the MicroLED industry. As of today, almost 1,500 MicroLED patents were filed by 125 companies and organization. The overall corpus has an average of 3.2 years, which makes these patents quite new.

The initial micro-LED patents, filed at around 2000-2001, were mostly by a variety of research institutes, by large companies such as Sony and Sharp but also by startups such as Luxvue (acquired by Apple). The activity in this field is still led mostly by startups, and with the exception of Sony and Sharp, mature display makers are relative latecomers.