Compact and lightweight optical see-through holographic near-eye display based on holographic lens

Abstract

Optical see-through holographic near-eye display (NED) is one of the most promising augmented reality (AR) technologies for commercialization in the future. However, the conventional optical elements used in holographic NED make the optical display huge and heavy. In this paper, an optical see-through holographic NED with a compact and lightweight structure is proposed, in which the traditional optical elements are replaced by reflection-type holographic lenses (HLs). The HLs are thin and lightweight compared with the conventional optical lenses. We fabricate the HLs according to the reflection volume holographic grating theory. The HLs have high transmittance at Bragg-mismatched beam and high diffraction efficiency at Bragg-matched beam. In addition, we analyze the reason for the distortion of the holographic image caused by the HL and perform the distortion pre-compensation. In the experiment, an HL-based optical see-through holographic NED is developed, which is compact and lightweight. It can present clear holographic images at different focus depths without the vergence-accommodation conflict.