Abstract— A wedge plate can be used as the screen of a display, and the thickness of the display can be incredibly thin. In this paper, a basic formula for ray tracing in such a wedge plate is deduced. The fundamental limitation on the display quality of a wedge plate is explored, and the formation of a dark zone on the display screen is analyzed and verified numerically. Experimental exploration and confirmation of one 14‐in. acrylic wedge plate with a white‐light‐emitting diode is also provided. Two approaches to eliminate the dark zone are proposed, and the corresponding numerical demonstration of a 52‐in. wedge‐plate display is also shown.
The aberration characteristics of a wedge-plate display optical system are analyzed. The study shows that a kink-like feature is inherent in the ray-intercept curve due to either the onset of the dark zone in imaging or the coincidence of the ray direction with the vertex. Third-order aberration coefficients are deduced, and the total amount of aberration is investigated to illustrate the basic limitations of image quality in this type of display. The issue of design optimization is also investigated based on the aberration characteristics. A numerical example of a 50 in. display with a 1:10 thickness and a diagonal screen length ratio is also provided.
The general aberration behavior of an ultra-thin wedge-plate display is analytically analyzed and numerically verified. Experiment over a plastic Acryl wedge plate with incident-controlled light from a collimated diode laser is also performed to identify the aberration. As an exploration, a 2.5-inch thick wedge display that with 50-inch screen diagonal, in which the ratio of the thickness versus the screen diagonal is 1:20, is analyzed.
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