Design of an ultra-thin near-eye display with geometrical waveguide and freeform optics

Small thickness and light weight are two important requirements for a see-through near-eye display which are achieved in this paper by using two advanced technologies: geometrical waveguide and freeform optics. A major problem associated with the geometrical waveguide is the stray light which can severely degrade the display quality. The causes and solutions to this problem are thoroughly studied. A mathematical model of the waveguide is established and a non-sequential ray tracing algorithm is developed, which enable us to carefully examine the stray light of the planar waveguide and explore a global searching method to find an optimum design with the least amount of stray light. A projection optics using freeform surfaces on a wedge shaped prism is also designed. The near-eye display integrating the projection optics and the waveguide has a field of view of 28 degrees, an exit pupil diameter of 9.6mm and an exit pupil distance of 20mm. In our final design, the proportion of the stray light energy over the image output energy of the waveguide is reduced to 2%, the modulation transfer function values across the entire field of the eyepiece are above 0.5 at 30 line pairs/mm (lps/mm). A proof-of-concept prototype of the proposed geometrical waveguide near-eye display is developed and demonstrated. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America