Pupil-aware Holography

TL;DR

This paper introduces pupil-aware holography for near-eye displays, addressing eye pupil sampling issues to improve image quality and reduce artifacts in augmented reality holographic displays.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel pupil-aware holography method that adapts to eye pupil variations, enhancing image quality in large etendue holographic displays.

Findings

Eliminates severe artifacts caused by eye pupil variations.

Significantly outperforms existing holography approaches.

Validated on both simulations and a prototype display.

Abstract

Holographic displays promise to deliver unprecedented display capabilities in augmented reality applications, featuring a wide field of view, wide color gamut, spatial resolution, and depth cues all in a compact form factor. While emerging holographic display approaches have been successful in achieving large etendue and high image quality as seen by a camera, the large etendue also reveals a problem that makes existing displays impractical: the sampling of the holographic field by the eye pupil. Existing methods have not investigated this issue due to the lack of displays with large enough etendue, and, as such, they suffer from severe artifacts with varying eye pupil size and location. We show that the holographic field as sampled by the eye pupil is highly varying for existing display setups, and we propose pupil-aware holography that maximizes the perceptual image quality irrespective of the size, location, and orientation of the eye pupil in a near-eye holographic display. We validate the proposed approach both in simulations and on a prototype holographic display and show that our method eliminates severe artifacts and significantly outperforms existing approaches.