Design of a wide-angle, lightweight head-mounted display using free-form optics tiling

Opt Lett. 2011 Jun 1;36(11):2098-100. doi: 10.1364/OL.36.002098.

Abstract

We present a concept of a wide-angle, lightweight, optical see-through head-mounted display (HMD) using free-form optics tiling. Free-form optics tiling can potentially address several critical problems in existing tiled HMD designs that use rotationally symmetric optics. The optical design of our tiled optical see-through HMD achieves a field of view (FOV) of 56° × 45° and an angular resolution of 3.2 arcmin with two display channels. We demonstrate a proof-of-concept prototype and present some of its manufacturing details. The FOV can be further enlarged by tiling more display channels together at their bottom and side surfaces.