Cross talk-free retinal projection display based on a holographic complementary viewpoint array

Abstract

In near-eye displays (NEDs), retinal projection display (RPD) is one kind of promising technology to alleviate the vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC) issue due to its always-in-focus feature. Viewpoint replication is widely used to enlarge the limited eyebox. However, the mismatch between viewpoint interval and eye pupil diameter will cause the inter-viewpoint cross talk when multiple viewpoints enter the pupil simultaneously. In this Letter, a holographic complementary viewpoint method is proposed to solve this cross talk problem. Instead of avoiding observing multiple viewpoint images simultaneously, it is designed that multiple complementary viewpoints jointly project the complete image on the retina without cross talk. To do this, the target image is segmented into multiple sub-images, each multiplied with a corresponding partial spherical phase to converge to a specific complementary viewpoint. A group of complementary viewpoint enter the eye pupil simultaneously, and each viewpoint project a corresponding sub-image on a specific area of the retina and splice to a complete image. All of the complementary viewpoints are duplicated to an interlaced two-dimensional array to extend the eyebox in both horizontal and vertical directions. Optical experiment verifies that the proposed method could present smooth transition between viewpoints to avoid both inter-viewpoint cross talk and blank image issues.