Foveated near-eye display using computational holography

Abstract

Holographic display is the only technology that can offer true 3D with all the required depth cues. Holographic head-worn displays (HWD) can provide continuous depth planes with the correct stereoscopic disparity for a comfortable 3D experience. Existing HWD approaches have small field-of-view (FOV) and small exit pupil size, which are limited by the spatial light modulator (SLM). Conventional holographic HWDs are limited to about 20° × 11° FOV using a 4 K SLM panel and have fixed FOV. We present a new optical architecture that can overcome those limitations and substantially extend the FOV supported by the SLM. Our architecture, which does not contain any moving parts, automatically follows the gaze of the viewer’s pupil. Moreover, it mimics human vision by providing varying resolution across the FOV resulting in better utilization of the available space-bandwidth product of the SLM. We propose a system that can provide 28° × 28° instantaneous FOV within an extended FOV (the field of view that is covered by steering the instantaneous FOV in space) of 60° × 40° using a 4 K SLM, effectively providing a total enhancement of > 3 × in instantaneous FOV area, > 10 × in extended FOV area and the space-bandwidth product. We demonstrated 20° × 20° instantaneous FOV and 40° × 20° extended FOV in the experiments.