See-through display combined with holographic display and Maxwellian display using switchable holographic optical element based on liquid lens

We report a switchable holographic optical element based on a liquid lens for a see-through display. For the switchable holographic optical element, we recorded two optical components in the holographic film in two steps. A numerical simulation was also done to define the recording and reconstruction conditions. After the recording process, the entire system was changed from 4f optics to Maxwellian optics by changing wavefront of the reference wave using a liquid lens. The diffraction efficiency was 0.46 for a single element recording and around 0.14 for a double element recording. The holographic display and the Maxwellian display were successfully switched without any crosstalk. The field of view and eye box of the holographic display were 1 degrees and 4.36 mm, respectively, and the field of view and the eye box of the Maxwellian display were 3.8 degrees and 23.2 um, respectively. In the proposed system, spatial frequency filtering by the liquid lens and image shape distortion seriously affected the hologram image. However, we successfully verified the feasibility of our proposed switchable holographic optical element using a liquid lens. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement