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

Opt Lett. 2023 Nov 15;48(22):5919-5922. doi: 10.1364/OL.503343.

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.