Doubling the optical efficiency of VR systems with a directional backlight and a diffractive deflection film

We demonstrate an approach to double the optical efficiency of virtual reality (VR) systems based on a directional backlight and a diffractive deflection film (DDF). The directional backlight consists of a commercial collimated light-emitting diode (LED) array and a two-layer privacy film, while the DDF is a three-domain Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) phase lens. Such a PB phase lens was fabricated by the zone exposure and spin-coating method. The focal length of each domain is designed according to the imaging optics of the VR system. Our approach works well in both Fresnel and pancake VR systems. We also build the corresponding models in LightTools, and the simulation results are in good agreement with experiment. In experiment, we achieved a 2.25x optical efficiency enhancement for both systems, which agrees with the simulation results (2.48x for Fresnel and 2.44x for pancake systems) well. Potential application for high efficiency VR displays is foreseeable. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

Automated summary

The study demonstrates a method to double the optical efficiency of VR systems using a directional backlight and a diffractive deflection film, which has been successfully validated through experiments.