Design of achromatic augmented reality visors based on composite metasurfaces
Elyas Bayati, Andrew Wolfram, Shane Colburn, Luocheng Huang, Arka Majumdar
Abstract
A compact near-eye visor (NEV) system that can guide light from a display to the eye could transform augmented reality (AR) technology. Unfortunately, existing implementations of such an NEV either suffer from small field of view or chromatic aberrations. See-through quality and bulkiness further make the overall performance of the visors unsuitable for a seamless user experience. Metasurfaces are an emerging class of nanophotonic elements that can dramatically reduce the size of optical elements while enhancing functionality. In this paper, we present a design of composite metasurfaces for an ultracompact NEV. We simulate the performance of a proof-of-principle visor corrected for chromatic aberrations while providing a large display field of view ( <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD"> <mml:mo>></mml:mo> </mml:mrow> <mml:msup> <mml:mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD"> <mml:mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD"> <mml:mn>77</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:mrow> <mml:mo>∘</mml:mo> </mml:msup> </mml:math> both horizontally and vertically) and good see-through quality [ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD"> <mml:mo>></mml:mo> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD"> <mml:mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD"> <mml:mn>70</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:mrow> <mml:mi mathvariant="normal">%</mml:mi> </mml:math> transmission and less than a wavelength root mean-square (RMS) wavefront error over the whole visible wavelength range] as needed for an immersive AR experience.