Abstract
Augmenting reality (AR) holds many benefits in how people perceive information and use it in their workflow or leisure activities. A cohesive AR experience has many components; nevertheless, the key is display technologies. The current industry standard for the core solution is still conventional stereoscopy, which has proven to be inadequate for near-work due to the caused vergence–accommodation conflict and the inability to precisely overlay the 3D content on the real world. To overcome this, next-generation technologies have been proposed. While the holographic method holds the highest potential of being the ultimate solution, its current level of maturity is not sufficient to yield a practical product. Consequently, the next solution for near-work-capable AR displays will be of another type. LightSpace Technologies have developed a static multifocal display architecture based on stacked liquid crystal-based optical diffuser elements and a synchronized high-refresh rate image projector. A stream of 2D image depth planes comprising a 3D scene is projected onto respective physically-separated diffuser elements, causing the viewer to perceive a scene as continuous and having all relevant physical as well as psychological depth cues. A system with six image depth planes yielding 6 cpd resolution and 72° horizontal field-of-view has been demonstrated to provide perceptually continuous accommodation over 3.2 Diopter range. A further optimization by using a conventional image combiner resulted in the compact and practical design of the AR display.
Highlights
Digital displays are an integral part of our everyday life, and they are still evolving in multiple directions
We briefly analyze the future prospects in the development of augmented reality (AR) display technologies and examine our own solution to yield a practical AR near-to-eye display hardware oriented towards professional work
The display technology has to at least overcome negative effects of vergence–accommodation conflict, but more preferably should be able to represent more physical depth cues—monocular focus cues being quite important not just for added realism but as a mechanism contributing to actual depth perception and driving accommodation [5]
Summary
Digital displays are an integral part of our everyday life, and they are still evolving in multiple directions. The new revolution in display technologies is brewing within the segment of personalized wearable displays. This niche is dominated by virtual reality (VR). It is expected that in the few following years augmented reality (AR) displays will rapidly catch up and overtake the dominant position in the wearable head-mounted display segment [1]. Until recently AR head-up display systems mainly could be found in military aircraft; as there is a virtually limitless potential for augmenting reality, head-up systems have creeped into the consumer automotive segment but it does not stop there. We briefly analyze the future prospects in the development of AR display technologies and examine our own solution to yield a practical AR near-to-eye display hardware oriented towards professional work
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