High-resolution additive light field near-eye display by switchable Pancharatnam-Berry phase lenses

Conventional head-mounted displays present different images to each eye, and thereby create three-dimensional (3D) sensation for viewers. This method can only control the stimulus to vergence but not accommodation, which is located at the apparent location of the physical displays. The disrupted coupling between vergence and accommodation could cause considerable visual discomfort. To address this problem, in this paper a novel multi-focal plane 3D display system is proposed. A stack of switchable liquid crystal Pancharatnam-Berry phase lenses is implemented to create real depths for each eye, which is able to provide approximate focus cue and relieve the discomfort from vergence-accommodation conflict. The proposed multi-focal plane generation method has great potential for both virtual reality and augmented reality applications, where correct focus cue is highly desirable. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement