Large-scale Huygens metasurfaces for holographic 3D near-eye displays

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel large-scale Huygens metasurface hologram for 3D near-eye displays, enabling high-resolution, continuous depth, and large viewing angles, thus advancing immersive virtual reality experiences.

Contribution

It introduces a new design method for holographic near-eye displays using large, high-resolution Huygens metasurfaces fabricated on glass wafers, overcoming current limitations in 3D display technology.

Findings

Achieved a large exit pupil of 10mm x 8.66mm for the display.

Generated high-quality 3D scenes with ~50,000 data points.

Demonstrated continuous depth from 0.5m to 2m with real-world overlay.

Abstract

Novel display technologies aim at providing the users with increasingly immersive experiences. In this regard, it is a long-sought dream to generate three-dimensional (3D) scenes with high resolution and continuous depth, which can be overlaid with the real world. Current attempts to do so, however, fail in providing either truly 3D information, or a large viewing area and angle, strongly limiting the user immersion. Here, we report a proof-of-concept solution for this problem, and realize a compact holographic 3D near-eye display with a large exit pupil of 10mm x 8.66mm. The 3D image is generated from a highly transparent Huygens metasurface hologram with large (>10^8) pixel count and subwavelength pixels, fabricated via deep-ultraviolet immersion photolithography on 300 mm glass wafers. We experimentally demonstrate high quality virtual 3D scenes with ~50k active data points and continuous depth ranging from 0.5m to 2m, overlaid with the real world and easily viewed by naked eye. To do so, we introduce a new design method for holographic near-eye displays that, inherently, is able to provide both parallax and accommodation cues, fundamentally solving the vergence-accommodation conflict that exists in current commercial 3D displays.