Currently, Mid-Air Display (MAD) technology is of a great interest to practitioners. Potential application in consumer products with large aperture “floating” image displays, like TV, monitor, ATM, vending machine, home appliance, etc., and contactless user interface for remote control increase their attractiveness. In order to obtain enlarged mid-air image size at maintaining large horizontal Field of View (FoV) and high light display efficiency, the following challenges are to be solved: developing high fill-factor Diffractive Optical Elements (DOE) architecture with optimal size of out-coupling aperture and designing custom-made projection optics with specified exit pupil matched to in-coupling DOE. As a possible solution to abovementioned problems, the authors propose a MAD based on commercially available projector source, custom-made projection optics and designed corner DOE waveguide architecture with focusing Fresnel lens. The mid-air image is formed at the back focal plane of the Fresnel lens, between the viewer and the display. For mid-air image with five-inch diagonal and 32° horizontal FoV, we take waveguide out-coupling aperture of 245 x 145 mm2 and Fresnel lens with back focal length of 220 mm and obtain image brightness ~1000 cd/m2 due to custom projection optics. Basic contactless user interaction was also implemented.
Mid-air display (MAD) technology is attractive to practitioners nowadays. The interest is due to the potential application in consumer products with embedded floating image displays, like smartphones, smartwatches and dock-stations, and as a part of new holographic user interfaces for safe and contactless control. Some of the problems to solve on the way to compact and light efficient MAD include small field of view, small image size, low image resolution, low image contrast, absence of image magnification, low perceived sense of depth, etc. In order to overcome these challenges, the authors propose a MAD based on a DMD pico-projector and a DOE waveguide with a positive Fresnel lens, placed near the out coupling aperture of the DOE waveguide. The developed MAD forms a real image with a positive relief from the display surface so that the viewer perceives this image floating in front of it, at the back focal plane of the Fresnel lens. For mid air image with ≥ 1-inch diagonal with 57 mm image relief horizontal field of view was 35 degrees, with image brightness 100 cd/m2 . The proposed mid-air image display has a compact form factor with dimensions 100 mm × 50 mm × 3 mm, without dimensions of the DMD pico-projector. It can be used in consumer products to provide a new kind of experience including contactless holographic user interaction
We report on a novel state-of-the-art diffraction optical elements (DOE) based waveguide architecture for aug- mented reality (AR) display with increased field of view and method for analytical design of such an architecture. The effectiveness of the architecture results from the multiple usage of the same propagation directions inside the waveguide by different field of view parts. Unlike in previous solutions, where such approach would lead to crosstalk generation, the proposed architecture different field of view parts are propagated in different waveguide locations, separated by the corresponding DOEs. The architecture can be applied either for increasing the verti- cal field of view size or the horizontal field of view size with compensation of chromatic dispersion resulting from the diffraction. The architecture configuration, analytical derivations of the DOEs parameters, and modeling results are discussed. The architecture satisfies market demands for the form-factor, size and weight, as well as allows up to four times increase of the field of view size in comparison with the conventional solutions. For the DOEs refractive index of 1.5, the architecture provides 48x44 degrees white-light field of view within two waveguides and 56x56 degrees white-light field of view within three waveguides. For the DOEs refractive index of 1.9, the architecture provides 58x58 degrees white-light field of view within only one waveguide.
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