Surface relief grating near-eye display waveguide design

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel, easy-to-machine surface relief grating waveguide design for near-eye display devices, achieving wide field of view, high diffraction efficiency, and uniform illumination through optimized optical simulation.

Contribution

It introduces a new surface relief grating waveguide design that enhances performance and manufacturability of near-eye displays with large field of view and uniform pupil extension.

Findings

Achieves 40° full-field view angle

Diffraction efficiency of 80% on average

Angular uniformity error of 20%

Abstract

A near-eye display device (NED) is a visual optical system that places a miniature display in front of the human eye to provide an immersive viewing experience. NEDs have been playing an irreplaceable role in both early military flight applications and today's civil and entertainment applications. In this paper, we propose an easy-to-machine design of a near-eye display based on surface relief grating waveguides, taking into account the experience of previous designs of near-eye displays, the superior performance of the design, and the accuracy level of existing grating processing. The design is designed to meet the requirements of large field of view and large outgoing pupil extension as much as possible. The design is insensitive to the incident angle and achieves a full-field field-of-view angle of 40{\deg}, an angular uniformity error of 20% for diffraction efficiency, and an average diffraction efficiency of 80% for the full field of view. Based on the design, the overall simulation of the optical path of the NED device is completed, and the illumination uniformity of the outgoing pupil expansion of the device is analyzed through simulation.