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Extending eyebox with tunable viewpoints for see-through near-eye display

Xueliang Shi, Juan Liu, Zhiqi Zhang, Zijie Zhao, and Shijie Zhang

Open Access Open Access

Abstract

The Maxwellian display presents always-focused images to the viewer, alleviating the vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC) in near-eye displays (NEDs). However, the limited eyebox of the typical Maxwellian display prevents it from wider applications. We propose a Maxwellian see-through NED based on a multiplexed holographic optical element (HOE) and polarization gratings (PGs) to extend the eyebox by viewpoint multiplication. The multiplexed HOE functions as multiple convex lenses to form multiple viewpoints, which are copied to different locations by PGs. To mitigate the imaging problem that multiple viewpoints or no viewpoints enter the eye pupil, the viewpoints can be tuned by mechanically moving a PG. We implement our method in a proof-of-concept system. The optical experiments confirm that the proposed display system provides always in-focus images within a 12 mm eyebox in the horizontal direction with a 32.7° diagonal field of view (FOV) and a 16.5 mm eye relief (ERF), and its viewpoints are tunable to match the actual eye pupil size. Compared with other techniques to extend the eyebox of Maxwellian displays, the proposed method shows competitive performances of a large eyebox, adaptability to the eye pupil size, and focus cues within a large depth range.

© 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

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Supplementary Material (3)

NameDescription
Visualization 1       This video is to show the movement of viewpoints. It is a supplement to Figure 9.
Visualization 2       This video is to show that the images are clear at different points of view. It is a supplement to Figure 10.
Visualization 3       This video is to show that the proposed system can solve the vergence-accommodation conflict. It is a supplement to Figure 11.

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Figures (11)
Fig. 1.
Fig. 1. Illustration of a PG with the diffraction angle for the first-order (θ) when the incident light with (a) RCP; (b) LCP; (c) LP. If the incident light is linearly polarized, the number of light beams is doubled.

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Fig. 2.
Fig. 2. Illustration of eyebox expansion by PGs. The vertical position changes, while its propagation direction remains unchanged, when the incident light with (a) RCP; (b) LCP. (c) When the incident light beam with LP, there will be two parallel light beams leaving PG2.

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Fig. 3.
Fig. 3. Schematic diagram of the proposed configuration.

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Fig. 4.
Fig. 4. Partial optical path diagram of (a) HOE_in; (b) HOE_out; (c) PG1 and PG2 for the light beam converging at P1; (d) PG1 and PG2 for the light beam converging at P2. (e) The optical path diagram for real scenes. QWP: Quarter-wave plate.

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Fig. 5.
Fig. 5. The spacing between PGs (h1) and the eye relief are determined by the diffraction angle of PGs (θ) under the assumption that the eye pupil diameter is 3 mm.

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Fig. 6.
Fig. 6. Schematic diagram for the manufacture of (a) HOE_in; (b) HOE_out. (c) The samples of HOE_in and HOE_out attached to a waveguide; (d) focal spots on the eye pupil plane.

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Fig. 7.
Fig. 7. Experimental setup of the proposed Maxwellian see-through NED.

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Fig. 8.
Fig. 8. (a) A FOV measurement results mixed with a target paper; (b) focal spots on the eye pupil plane; (c) the diffraction order distribution of a PG.

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Fig. 9.
Fig. 9. The distribution of viewpoints when the spacing between P11 and P12 is (a) 2 mm; (b) 3 mm; (c) 4 mm (Visualization 1).

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Fig. 10.
Fig. 10. Virtual images captured at different viewpoints when the distribution of viewpoints is changed. The letter “d” means the spacing between P11 and P12, and the spacing between P21 and P22 (Visualization 2).

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Fig. 11.
Fig. 11. Images at different focal distance (Visualization 3) and different viewpoints when the spacing between viewpoints is 3 mm.

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Equations (5)

Equations on this page are rendered with MathJax. Learn more.

d = 2 h 1 tan ⁡ ( θ ) ,
F O V = 2 arctan ⁡ ( w 2 f ) .
E R F = h 2 = f − h 1 ,
d = 2 h 1 tan ⁡ ( θ ) .
d c = l 0 − d .
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