Deformable Beamsplitters: Enhancing Perception with Wide Field of View, Varifocal Augmented Reality Displays

An augmented reality head-mounted display with full environmental awareness could present data in new ways and provide a new type of experience, allowing seamless transitions between real life and virtual content. However, creating a light-weight, optical see-through display providing both focus support and wide field of view remains a challenge. This dissertation describes a new dynamic optical element, the deformable beamsplitter, and its applications for wide field of view, varifocal, augmented reality displays. Deformable beamsplitters combine a traditional deformable membrane mirror and a beamsplitter into a single element, allowing reflected light to be manipulated by the deforming membrane mirror, while transmitted light remains unchanged. This research enables both single element optical design and correct focus while maintaining a wide field of view, as demonstrated by the description and analysis of two prototype hardware display systems which incorporate deformable beamsplitters. As a user changes the depth of their gaze when looking through these displays, the focus of virtual content can quickly be altered to match the real world by simply modulating air pressure in a chamber behind the deformable beamsplitter; thus ameliorating vergence–accommodation conflict. Two user studies verify the display prototypes’ capabilities and show the potential of the display in enhancing human performance at quickly perceiving visual stimuli. This work shows that near-eye displays built with deformable beamsplitters allow for simple optical designs that enable wide field of view and comfortable viewing experiences with the potential to enhance user perception.Doctor of Philosoph

Computational See-Through Near-Eye Displays

See-through near-eye displays with the form factor and field of view of eyeglasses are a natural choice for augmented reality systems: the non-encumbering size enables casual and extended use and large field of view enables general-purpose spatially registered applications. However, designing displays with these attributes is currently an open problem. Support for enhanced realism through mutual occlusion and the focal depth cues is also not found in eyeglasses-like displays. This dissertation provides a new strategy for eyeglasses-like displays that follows the principles of computational displays, devices that rely on software as a fundamental part of image formation. Such devices allow more hardware simplicity and flexibility, showing greater promise of meeting form factor and field of view goals while enhancing realism. This computational approach is realized in two novel and complementary see-through near-eye display designs. The first subtractive approach filters omnidirectional light through a set of optimized patterns displayed on a stack of spatial light modulators, reproducing a light field corresponding to in-focus imagery. The design is thin and scales to wide fields of view; see-through is achieved with transparent components placed directly in front of the eye. Preliminary support for focal cues and environment occlusion is also demonstrated. The second additive approach uses structured point light illumination to form an image with a minimal set of rays. Each of an array of defocused point light sources is modulated by a region of a spatial light modulator, essentially encoding an image in the focal blur. See-through is also achieved with transparent components and thin form factors and wide fields of view (>= 100 degrees) are demonstrated. The designs are examined in theoretical terms, in simulation, and through prototype hardware with public demonstrations. This analysis shows that the proposed computational near-eye display designs offer a significantly different set of trade-offs than conventional optical designs. Several challenges remain to make the designs practical, most notably addressing diffraction limits.Doctor of Philosoph

High Performance Liquid Crystal Devices for Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

See-through augmented reality and virtual reality displays are emerging due to their widespread applications in education, engineering design, medical, retail, transportation, automotive, aerospace, gaming, and entertainment. For augmented reality and virtual reality displays, high-resolution density, high luminance, fast response time and high ambient contrast ratio are critically needed. High-resolution density helps eliminate the screen-door effect, high luminance and fast response time enable low duty ratio operation, which plays a key role for suppressing image blurs. A dimmer placed in front of AR display helps to control the incident background light, which in turn improves the image contrast. In this dissertation, we have focused three crucial display metrics: high luminance, fast motion picture response time (MPRT) and high ambient contrast ratio. We report a fringe-field switching liquid crystal display, abbreviated as d-FFS LCD, by using a low viscosity material and new diamond-shape electrode configuration. Our proposed device shows high transmittance, fast motion picture response time, low operation voltage, wide viewing angle, and indistinguishable color shift and gamma shift. We also investigate the rubbing angle effects on transmittance and response time. When rubbing angle is 0 degree, the virtual wall effect is strong, resulting in fast response time but compromised transmittance. When rubbing angle is greater than 1.2 degree, the virtual walls disappear, as a result, the transmittance increases dramatically, but the tradeoff is in slower response time. We also demonstrate a photo-responsive guest-host liquid crystal (LC) dimmer to enhance the ambient contrast ratio in augmented reality displays. The LC composition consists of photo-stable chiral agent, photosensitive azobenzene, and dichroic dye in a nematic host with negative dielectric anisotropy. In this device, transmittance changes from bright state to dark state by exposing a low intensity UV or blue light. Reversal process can be carried out by red light or thermal effect. Such a polarizer-free photo-activated dimmer can also be used for wide range of applications, such as diffractive photonic devices, portable information system, vehicular head-up displays, and smart window for energy saving purpose. A dual-stimuli polarizer-free dye-doped liquid crystal (LC) device is demonstrated as a dimmer. Upon UV/blue light exposure, the LC directors and dye molecules turn from initially vertical alignment (high transmittance state) to twisted fingerprint structure (low transmittance state). The reversal process is accelerated by combining a longitudinal electric field to unwind the LC directors from twisted fingerprint to homeotropic state, and a red light to transform the cis azobenzene back to trans. Such an electric-field-assisted reversal time can be reduced from ~10s to a few milliseconds, depending on the applied voltage. Considering power consumption, low manufacturing cost, and large fabrication tolerance, this device can be used as a smart dimmer to enhance the ambient contrast ratio for augmented reality displays