Hybrid holographic Maxwellian near-eye display based on spherical wave and plane wave reconstruction for augmented reality display

Abstract

The holographic Maxwellian display is a promising technique for augmented reality (AR) display because it solves the vergence-accommodation conflict while presenting a high-resolution display. However, conventional holographic Maxwellian display has the inherent trade-off between depth of field (DOF) and image quality. In this paper, two types of holographic Maxwellian displays, the spherical wave type and the plane wave type, are proposed and analyzed. The spherical wavefront and the plane wavefront are produced by a spatial light modulator (SLM) for Maxwellian display. Due to the focusing properties of different wavefronts, the two types of display have complementary DOF ranges. A hybrid approach combining the spherical wavefront and plane wavefront is proposed for a large DOF with high image quality. An optical experiment with AR display is demonstrated to verify the proposed method.