Design of two compact waveguide display systems utilizing metasurface gratings as couplers.

Abstract

We propose two approaches to design compact head mount display (HMD) systems employing metasurface gratings. In the first approach, we design and simulate a monocular optical waveguide display by applying crystalline-silicon elliptical-shaped metasurface arrays as couplers on a right trapezoid waveguide to achieve large field of view (FOV) horizontally. As such, we achieve a FOV as large as 80° that is approximately 80% higher than the FOV in traditional waveguide systems based on diffractive gratings. In the second approach, considering the polarization sensitivity feature in metasurfaces and employing the proposed structures in the first technique, we design a metasurface grating as the input coupler in a binocular HMD system. The suggested structure diffracts incident light into two opposite directions with a 53.7° deflection angle on each side. We use the finite difference time domain method to study the behavior of the proposed systems.