Optical Free-Form Surfaces In Off-Axis Head-Worn Display Design

Head-worn displays are becoming a viable visual display option for mobile augmented reality. In this paper, we highlight the challenges and some recent progress towards compact and lightweight head-worn displays tending towards the eyeglass form factor. Single and dual-element eyeglass display designs that leverage the advances in free-form optics fabrication technology will be presented. There are three new contributions in this paper: first, we present a single-element eyeglass display design and the fabricated mirror prototype; second, we present our second generation dual-element eyeglass display design with the revised opto-mechanical packaging; third, we present our initial studies on the field of view limit with an 8mm pupil for the dual-element design. © 2008 IEEE