3‐4: Near‐eye Display with Curved Waveguide for Fashionable Form Factor

Abstract

Various near‐eye displays have been commercialized over the past decade. They are approaching to be a form of ordinary eyeglasses. The majority of researchers use planar waveguides as combiner, which do not distort the image beam while being transferred along the waveguide. However, planar combiners do not look like eyeglasses because they are flat, not curved. In this work an optical architecture with curved waveguide for near eye display is proposed. Two conditions for image transfer through curved waveguide are defined. These conditions have been satisfied using a compensator and grating with a law of variation of the grating period in the optical architecture. It was verified by prototyping to aim for eyeglasses with 150 mm radius of curvature of the curved waveguide with a thickness of 2 mm, which performs RGB full color, 30 degrees of field of view and 12×10 mm of eye box for all day use.