Abstract
An accommodation-free displays, also known as Maxwellian displays, keep the displayed image sharp regardless of the viewer's focal distance. However, they typically suffer from a small eye-box and limited effective field of view (FOV) which requires careful alignment before a viewer can see the image. This paper presents a high-quality accommodation-free head mounted display (aHMD) based on pixel beam scanning for direct image forming on retina. It has an enlarged eye-box and FOV for easy viewing by replicating the viewing points with an array of beam splitters. A prototype aHMD is built using this concept, which shows high definition, low colour aberration 3D augmented reality (AR) images with an FOV of 36°. The advantage of the proposed design over other head mounted display (HMD) architectures is that, due to the narrow, collimated pixel beams, the high image quality is unaffected by changes in eye accommodation, and the approach to enlarge the eye-box is scalable. Most importantly, such an aHMD can deliver realistic three-dimensional (3D) viewing perception with no vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC). It is found that viewing the accommodation-free 3D images with the aHMD presented in this work is comfortable for viewers and does not cause the nausea or eyestrain side effects commonly associated with conventional stereoscopic 3D or HMD displays, even for all day use.
Highlights
Wearable displays that seamlessly blend the real and virtual world have been topics of research, in both academia and industry for decades
A stereoscopic 3D effect can be created by the head mounted displays (HMD) through binocular disparity, where the image displayed to the left and right eyes is varied slightly
This leads to 3D perception problems such as vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC) where the ocular focal distance conflicts with the intersection distance of the left and right eyes
Summary
Wearable displays that seamlessly blend the real and virtual world have been topics of research, in both academia and industry for decades. The major challenge of Maxwellian displays is that the collimated image must be focused through the pupil of the eye [29,30,31] This requires precise alignment between user and display, causes vignetting as the eyeball rotates, and becomes increasingly challenging as the pupil contracts in bright ambient light. At each beam splitting surface a fraction of the image beam light is reflected to form an additional exit pupil, with the separation of the viewing points determined by the distance between the surfaces
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