Slim near eye display using pinhole aperture arrays

We report a new technique for building a wide-angle, lightweight, thin form factor, cost effective, easy to manufacture near-eye Head-Mounted Display (HMD) for virtual reality applications. Our approach adopts an aperture mask containing an array of pinholes and a screen as a source of imagery. We demonstrate proof-of-concept HMD prototypes with a binocular field of view (FOV) of 70◦ × 45◦, or total diagonal FOV of 83◦. This FOV should increase with the increasing display panel size. The optical angular resolution supported in our prototype can go down to 1.4 − 2.1 arcmin by adopting a display with 20 − 30 μm pixel pitch.