Compact foveated AR displays with polarization selective planar lenses

Abstract

The rapid development of powerful microprocessors, high-pixel density display panels, thin and small formfactor optics, and precise device fabrication capabilities enable wearable near-eye displays for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications. However, in traditional near-eye displays, there is often a trade-off between field of view (FoV) and angular resolution when a single microdisplay light engine is employed. A high-resolution display panel helps overcome this conflict, but the device fabrication remains a challenge, not to mention the issues like huge data transfer, circuit overheating, and high computational load. Here, we propose a Maxwellian-type foveated AR display based on a single microdisplay light engine by using a temporal polarization multiplexing method, enabled by two polarization selective flat cholesteric liquid crystal lenses. One polarization lens provides a large FoV while the other realizes a high angular resolution imaging in a small fovea region. Moreover, the vergence-accommodation conflict issue is inherently nonexistent in the Maxwellian display, and the aberration can be eliminated for each view by matching the recording and reconstructing signals. In an experiment, we constructed a display breadboard and demonstrated that the angular resolution of the foveal view is enhanced by 3.12× while maintaining a compact formfactor. This work paves the way for implementing high-performance foveated AR displays while keeping a compact formfactor.