Holographic optical element (HOE) can be used in many areas in optics due to its characteristics of thin structure, flexible wavefront reconstruction/control ability and angular/wavelength selectivity. In this paper, we propose a design method of off-axis reflective imaging systems based on freeform HOEs, which are fabricated by freeform wavefronts. The freeform HOEs offer many degrees of design freedom and can correct the aberrations in nonsymmetric imaging systems. The initial imaging system with freeform HOEs is generated using a point-by-point design approach, and is used for the preliminary design of the imaging system and the freeform recording system of each HOE. Then a joint optimization is conducted for all the systems, simultaneously considering the imaging performance, the diffraction efficiency, the system constraints and fabrication to get the final design results. To validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method, an off-axis reflective head-up display system with good performance based on freeform HOEs is designed and fabricated. Detailed procedures of the design and development process of the prototype are demonstrated.
Augmented reality head-mounted displays (AR-HMDs) based on diffractive waveguides have been a challenging and rewarding research topic focusing on near-eye displays. The size of the exit pupil and uniformity of the image illuminance are two important factors that affect the display performance of the diffractive waveguide. In this paper, a novel method for optimizing high uniformity of two-dimensional (2D) diffractive waveguide is proposed. A straight-line 2D surface relief grating (SRG) waveguide with divided grating regions is designed. An illuminance uniformity evaluation model of the energy propagation process is established, and non-sequential ray tracing is utilized to optimize the diffraction efficiency of multi-regions grating to achieve illuminance uniformity distribution. Then, the uniformity distribution of the diffraction efficiency in different fields of view (FOVs) is realized by combining the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and rigorous couple wave analysis (RCWA) to optimize the grating structural parameters, which further ensures the uniformity of the exit pupil illuminance and angular illuminance. The waveguide with exit pupil expansion (EPE) has exit pupil size of 16 mm × 14 mm at an eye relief (ERF) of 20 mm, exit pupil illuminance uniformity of 91%, and angular uniformity illuminance of 64%.
In this Letter, we propose a design and fabrication method for a full-color augmented reality (AR) optical system based on a freeform holographic optical element (HOE). A point-by-point design method is proposed to generate the starting point of the system. Based on the preliminarily optimized system, the recording systems of the full-color HOE are designed. A joint optimization is conducted for all the systems, simultaneously considering the overall imaging performance, the diffraction efficiency, the constraints, and fabrication. A prototype is designed and fabricated to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.
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