Expanded Exit-Pupil Holographic Head-Mounted Display With High-Speed Digital Micromirror Device

Abstract

Recently, techniques involving head-mounted displays (HMDs) have attracted much attention from academia and industry owing to the increased demand for virtual reality and augmented reality applications. Because HMDs are positioned near to users’ eyes, it is important to solve the accommodation-vergence conflict problem to prevent dizziness. Therefore, holography is considered ideal for implementing HMDs. However, within the Nyquist region, the accommodation effect is limited by the space-bandwidth-product of the signal, which is determined by the sampling number of spatial light modulators. In addition, information about the angular spectrum is duplicated over the Fourier domain, and it is necessary to filter out the redundancy. The size of the exit-pupil of the HMD is limited by the Nyquist sampling theory. We newly propose a holographic HMD with an expanded exit-pupil over the Nyquist region by using the time-multiplexing method, and the accommodation effect is enhanced. We realize time-multiplexing by synchronizing a high-speed digital micromirror device and a liquid-crystal shutter array. We also demonstrate the accommodation effect experimentally.