For decades the displays industry has been focused on achieving high quality black levels to optimize contrast. However, today’s emerging ‘real’ AR displays have different requirements driven by the need for providing a see-through display with a digital overlay on top of the real world. DigiLens CEO Chris Pickett will discuss the requirements of high-quality waveguide displays, such as efficiency, eye glow, and transparency – and why these constitute the ‘New Black.’ He’ll also dive into how the DigiLens platform has been integrated at the product level for enterprise applications with DigiLens ARGO, an SPIE Prism Award nominee, and how DigiLens waveguide technology can also be used for consumer AR smartglasses due to the core technology that is fundamentally scalable at low consumer price points.
Waveguide displays provide a transparent optical solution to deliver a digital layer to augment the physical world. Consideration is given to the importance of artifacts that arise within waveguide displays that affect social acceptability, the importance of which is critical for the mass adoption of waveguide displays, particularly in the consumer market space. This includes consideration of optical see-though transmission, eye glow, and the causes and impacts other glints an interactions of stray light both within the waveguide and from external illumination sources. Particular consideration is given to DigiLens’ high efficiency holographic waveguide displays with which the author is most familiar, with comparisons drawn against other technologies in the space.
DigiLens is a leader in holographic waveguide displays and has developed solutions optimized for consumer AR applications. Alastair will provide an overview of DigiLens’ waveguide technology developments including holographic materials, waveguide architectures and manufacturing techniques developed to support consumer volumes of AR products.
Wide field of view color waveguide display reference designs for low-cost consumer AR displays using high index modulation photopolymer and liquid crystal material for providing compact wide-angle, displays are presented.
Waveguide technology for providing compact wide-angle, low-cost HUDs for partially autonomous road vehicles with scalability to meet future HUD requirements, extending beyond safety and vehicle informatics, to fully autonomous vehicles will be presented.
DigiLens Switchable Bragg Grating (SBG) waveguide technology for transportation AR HUD consumer products enables switchable, tunable and digitally reconfigurable color HUDs with a field of view, brightness and form factor surpassing those of competing technologies. DigiLens waveguide gratings are printed into a proprietary polymer and liquid crystal mixture that can provide any required combination of diffraction efficiency and angular bandwidth in a thin waveguide with high transparency and very low haze. DigiLens waveguides can be laminated to integrate multiple optical functions into a thin transparent device. Our current reference designs for dashboard mounted and wearable ARHUDs will be presented.
DigiLens’s Switchable Bragg Grating (SBG) waveguides enable switchable, tunable and digitally reconfigurable color waveguide displays with a field of view, brightness and form factor surpassing those of competing technologies. DigiLens waveguides can be laminated to integrate multiple optical functions into a thin transparent device. DigiLens waveguide gratings are printed into a proprietary polymer and liquid crystal mixture that can provide any required combination of diffraction efficiency and angular bandwidth in a thin waveguide with high transparency and very low haze. The waveguide combines two key components: an image generation module, essentially a pico projector, and a holographic waveguide for propagating and expanding the image vertically and horizontally. Color is provided by a stack of monochrome waveguides each capable of addressing the entire field of view, incorporating an input rolled K-vector grating, a fold grating, and an output grating. Rolling the K-vectors expands the effective angular bandwidth of the waveguide. Fold gratings enable two-dimensional beam expansion in a single waveguide layer, which translates into lower manufacturing cost, reduced haze, and improved image brightness. The design of these complex SBGs is complicated by their birefringent properties, taking the design of DigiLens waveguides well beyond the frontiers of established ray-tracing codes. Our paper summarizes the key features of DigiLens waveguide technology and discusses our optical design methodology, with examples from DigiLens’s current waveguide HUD products.
To study the quantitative impact of diffractive optical elements on lens design and glass selection, a Zeiss Tessar lens (f/6) with and without a diffractive optical element is optimized with respect to the wavefront performance by a Zemax(R) Hammer routine. Optimization includes the selection of glasses as well as the geometry of the optical elements. In a first run, these are all refractive elements. In a second run, one refractive element is replaced with one diffractive surface. In a third run, the diffractive surface is introduced as an additional feature.
It is found that one refractive element can be replaced with a diffractive surface at a moderate loss of lens performance. This holds, however, only for an optimized glass selection, which is found to be particularly important. In the case of four refractive elements plus diffractive surface, an according result is obtained. The diffractive surface will improve the overall system performance if and only if the glass selection is appropriate.
Glass selection tends to be both a science and an art. It is the intent of this paper to remove the "mystique" surrounding glass selection, primarily based on the chromatic properties of the glass, and to show via careful parametric analyses how we can optimally select glasses for lenses of different f/numbers, spectral bands, and performance requirements. The important roles of refractive index and Abbe number as well as partial dispersion will be considered. Using the SCHOTT glass map, six separate and identifiable regions along with glasses within each region will be discussed. The goal for this paper is to make glass selection easier to understand.
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