Membrane AR: Varifocal, Wide-Field-of-View Augmented Reality Display from Deformable Membranes
Some of the fundamental limitations of existing near-eye displays (NEDs) for augmented reality (AR) are limited field of view (FOV), low angular resolution, and fixed focal state. Optimizing a design to overcome one of these limitations typically leads to a trade-off in the others. This project introduces an all-in-one solution: deformable beamsplitters. It is a new new hybrid hardware design created by combining hyperbolic half-silvered mirrors and deformable membrane mirrors (DMMs). The key components are two see-through DMMs controlled by airtight cavities to change the effective focal power and present a virtual image at a target depth plane. The benefits of the membranes include a wide field of view (100 diagonal) and fast depth switching (from 20 cm to infinity within 20 ms). The display promises to address vergence-accommodation conflict caused by lack of accommodative cues and offers wide-field-of-view capabilities.
Publication Date
Published in
Research Area
Uploaded Files
Copyright
Copyright by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at ACM's Digital Library http://www.acm.org/dl/.