For decades it has been expected that near-eye displays such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) glasses and headsets will eventually take over conventional displays. Nevertheless, these technologies currently have barely penetrated everyday life. This hinderance can be explained by a lack of true next-generation near-eye display architectures that overcome the critical issues of stereoscopic wearables – notably vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC). The lack of such display architectures is directly related to the slow evolution and reorientation of image source industry. A major issue is the light transmission efficiency from an image-source towards the eyes of a viewer, directly impacted by the emission angle of light sources versus the need for collimated light. Collimation is a wasteful process, therefore, there is a limit to image brightness achievable with the currently available solid-state light sources. Inevitably, designers turn to more collimated light sources – lasers. While this approach yields improvements in size, it comes at the cost of image fidelity by introducing speckle patterns. Other alternatives (such as OLED microdisplays) are possible but are also not without issues. Thus, there needs to be a breakthrough in available image-sources for AR displays to reach at least a comparable image to what the 2D display counterparts can currently offer. Be it a full-color solid state uLED microdisplay, superluminescent LEDs, or developments in photonics by integration of RGB light sources into compact packages, the key-challenge is to leverage these advancements enabling a next-generation near-eye display architecture.
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