Effects of image focal depth in geometrical lightguide head mounted displays

摘要

Waveguide or lightguide has the advantages of light weight, small volume and relatively high efficiency and thus isconsidered as one of the promising solutions to the optical combiner required for optical see-through augmented realitydisplays. Although there exist a few commercial products utilizing lightguides as the optical combiners, few worksdiscussed the potential image artifacts caused by the ray bundle collimation errors in lightguides. In this paper, wediscussed three causes of collimation errors in the geometrical waveguide: lightguide manufacture tolerance, change ofimage focal depth, and curved lightguide substrate. Based on the simulation and experiment results of the first twocauses, we demonstrated two different types of image artifacts in the geometrical-waveguide-based AR displays.