What Is TENEX?
Most volumetric displays rely on persistence of vision — spinning mirrors, rotating LED arrays, things moving fast enough to fool your eyes. They're impressive but mechanically fragile and genuinely dangerous if something goes wrong at speed.
TENEX takes a different approach: stack the displays instead of spinning them. Ten transparent OLED panels, each 128×56 pixels, arranged in depth. The result is a 128×56×10 voxel display — roughly 71,000 addressable points in 3D space, no moving parts required.
Hardware
The panels are CFAL12856A0 transparent OLEDs from CrystalFontz, each driven by an SSD1309 controller. I wired them all on a common SPI bus (COPI, CIPO, SCK) with individual chip-select lines — 13 connections total for all 10 displays, which is manageable.
A Feather microcontroller sits at the heart of it, with an MPU-6050 IMU (accelerometer + gyroscope) bolted on for motion input. The framebuffer alone needs ~92KB to hold all 10 layers at once, so memory management matters.
Power comes from an MPS MPX36xx series DC/DC converter on a custom FeatherWing-compatible PCB I designed for this build.
The Visual Effect
The panels aren't perfectly transparent — there's a subtle smoked-glass quality to them that actually works in the display's favour. Combined, the stack produces an infinity-mirror depth effect that makes rendered geometry look genuinely three-dimensional rather than flat.
Basic 3D primitives — cubes, spheres, wireframes — look exactly how you'd want a sci-fi terminal readout to look. The IMU lets rendered objects respond to physical tilt and rotation, which pushes it from "cool demo" into something that actually feels interactive.
What I Learned
Soldering the ribbon connectors to each panel is the fussiest part of the build — fine pitch, easily damaged, no margin for error. Get a good iron and take your time.
The SPI approach scales cleanly. Want 15 panels instead of 10? Add five more CS lines. The architecture doesn't fight you.
Transparent OLEDs are still niche and expensive, but they're becoming more available. This project would have been significantly harder to source parts for a few years ago.
Files + Code
Full source, PCB files, and 3D printable enclosure are open source.
- GitHub: idlehandsdev/volumetric_display
- Instructables: TENEX Build Guide
- Hackaday.io: Project Page