Dewen Cheng

Design of an optical see-through head-mounted display with a low f-number and large field of view using a freeform prism

It has been a challenge to design an optical see-through head-mounted display (OST-HMD) that has a wide field of view (FOV) and low f-number (f/#) while maintaining a compact, lightweight, and nonintrusive form factor. In this paper, we present an OST-HMD design using a wedge-shaped freeform prism cemented with a freeform lens. The prism, consisting of three freeform surfaces (FFSs), serves as the near-eye viewing optics that magnifies the image displayed through a microdisplay, and the freeform lens is an auxiliary element attached to the prism in order to maintain a nondistorted see-through view of a real-world scene. Both the freeform prism and the lens utilize plastic materials to achieve light weight. The overall dimension of the optical system per eye is no larger than 25 mm by 22 mm by 12 mm, and the weight is 8 g. Based on a 0.61 in. microdisplay, our system demonstrates a diagonal FOV of 53.5 degrees and an f/# of 1.875, with an 8 mm exit pupil diameter and an 18.25 mm eye relief.

Design of a wide-angle, lightweight head-mounted display using free-form optics tiling

We present a concept of a wide-angle, lightweight, optical see-through head-mounted display (HMD) using free-form optics tiling. Free-form optics tiling can potentially address several critical problems in existing tiled HMD designs that use rotationally symmetric optics. The optical design of our tiled optical see-through HMD achieves a field of view (FOV) of 56° × 45° and an angular resolution of 3.2 arcmin with two display channels. We demonstrate a proof-of-concept prototype and present some of its manufacturing details. The FOV can be further enlarged by tiling more display channels together at their bottom and side surfaces.

Design, tolerance, and fabrication of an optical see-through head-mounted display with free-form surface elements

Free-form surfaces (FFSs) provide more freedom to design an optical system with fewer elements and hence to reduce the size and weight of the overall system than rotationally symmetric optical surfaces. In this paper, an optical see-through (OST), head-mounted display (HMD) consisting of a free-form, wedge-shaped prism and a free-form lens is designed and fabricated through the injection molding method. The free-form prism for the projection system is designed with a field-of-view (FOV) of 36°; the free-form lens is cemented to the prism for the see-through system to achieve a FOV of 50°. The free-form prism and lens are expanded at the edge area during the design stage in order to reduce the effects of surface deformation in the working area in molding fabrication process and to improve ergonomic fit with the head of a user. The tolerance analyzes considering the mold design for the free-form optical systems are carried out using the Monte Carlo method. The FFS optical elements are successfully fabricated and the system performance is carefully examined. The results indicate that the performance of the OST-HMD is sufficient for both entertainment and scientific applications.

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°, 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.

Light field head-mounted display with correct focus cue using micro structure array

A new type of light field display is proposed using a head-mounted display (HMD) and a micro structure array (MSA, lens array or pinhole array). Each rendering point emits abundant rays from different directions into the viewer’s pupil, and at one time the dense light field is generated inside the exit pupil of the HMD through the eyepiece. Therefore, the proposed method not only solves the problem of accommodation and convergence conflict in a traditional HMD, but also drastically reduces the huge data in real three-dimensional (3D) display. To demonstrate the proposed method, a prototype is developed, which is capable of giving the observer a real perception of depth.

Design and fabrication of a holographic head-up display with asymmetric field of view

It is difficult to design and fabricate a head-up display (HUD) with a large asymmetric field of view (FOV) while maintaining a good image quality. In this paper, we design and develop such a holographic HUD system. To improve luminance and enhance the environmental adaptability of the HUD, we use a liquid crystal display with high brightness as well as a holographic reflection element. The vertical FOV is tilted to an angle of -7°, which is consistent with the actual view of the pilot. The decentration and tilt of the optical relay system effectively compensate for the distortion and off-axis aberration due to the asymmetric FOV and tilted, curved combiner. The transition plates used in the mechanical structure significantly decrease the difficulty in fabrication and alignment, and virtual prototyping greatly reduces the risk and shortens the development cycle. Experimental results demonstrate that this prototype achieves a total FOV of 30° (horizontal) ×24° (vertical), a resolution of 1280×1024, and a 5% distortion.

Free-form illumination of a refractive surface using multiple-faceted refractors.

We report a design method based on multiple-faceted refractors for free-form illumination of a refractive surface. The free-form surface is constructed as a set of primitive surface elements, which provide flexibility to satisfy the requirements of practical design problems. An extended light source can be considered, and a smooth free-form refractive surface can be established by adding feedback to the design process for a point source. Moreover, the performance can be improved by iterating this feedback process. Illumination systems with a point source and an extended source are designed and analyzed, resulting in uniform illuminance distribution, which demonstrates the validity of the method.

Design of an ultrawide angle catadioptric lens with an annularly stitched aspherical surface

We present an ultrawide angle catadioptric lens with a field of view (FOV) of 360° × 270° and F/# of 2.5. The lens consists of two optical configurations: the center configuration is all-refractive and has a FOV of ± 50° and the catadioptric configuration covers the remaining FOV. The MTF at 119lp/mm of the rear FOV (90° to 135°) can be improved by 0.15 via applying an annularly stitched aspherical surface (ASAS) to the rear surface of the catadioptric element. The developed lens presents smaller marginal distortions and higher relative illuminations compared with traditional panoramic lenses. A proof-of-concept prototype producing acceptable image quality is developed.

Design of a novel panoramic lens without central blindness

The panoramic lenses are getting more and more popular in recent years. However, these lenses have the drawback of obscuring the rays of the coaxial fields, thus cause blind area in the center field of vision. We present a novel panoramic system consisting of two optical channels to overcome this issue, the system has a field of view (FOV) reaching 200 in vertical and 360 in horizontal direction without blindness area. The two channels have different focal lengths, providing design flexibility to meet application requirements where the center FOV or the marginal FOV is of more interest. The system has no half-reflecting surfaces to ensure high transmission ratio, but this feature greatly increase the design difficulty. The distortion of the novel lens is much smaller than traditional panoramic lenses since the distortion has two node points. Due to the ability of information acquisition in real-time and wide-angle, the novel panoramic lens would be very useful for a variety of real-world applications such as surveillance, short-throw projector and pilotless automobile.

Simplified freeform optics design for complicated laser beam shaping

Control of the optical fields of laser beams, i.e., laser beam shaping, is of great importance to many laser applications. Freeform optics offers plenty of advantages for complex beam shaping requirements, including precise beam control, energy efficiency, compact structure, and relatively low cost. We present a modified ray-mapping method to simplify the freeform optics design for complicated optical field control and achieve a challenging task of producing two prescribed beam profiles on two successive target planes. This method begins by calculating an approximate output ray sequence that connects the two prescribed beam profiles and a corresponding input ray sequence. After setting an initial profile of the first freeform optical surface on the input ray sequence, we can obtain the second freeform optical surface based on the optical path length constancy between the given input wavefront and the computed output wavefront. Then, we can acquire all the normal vectors of the first freeform optical surface using Snells law and approximately reconstruct the first freeform optical surface by solving a relationship between the surface points and normal vectors using a fast least squares method. The surface construction process is repeated until the stop criterion is satisfied. We design three freeform lenses, and Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate their abilities of simultaneously producing two challenging beam profiles from a divergent Gaussian beam.