Cascaded transflective liquid crystal planar lenses enable multi-plane augmented reality

Abstract

In this Letter, we report and experimentally demonstrate the multi-plane augmented reality (AR) by combining the reflective polarization volume lens (PVL) and electrically controlled transmissive Pancharatnam–Berry (PB) liquid crystal (LC) lens. This strategy is based on the electrically controlled power-based approach, which significantly alleviates the challenge of vergence–accommodation conflict (VAC) of the current near-eye display (NED). As a proof of concept, a birdbath architecture dual-plane optical see-through (OST) display was implemented experimentally by changing the power of the lens. The proposed method is expected to be a novel, to the best of our knowledge, NED that is compact, light, and fatigue-free.