A multi-plane optical see-through head mounted display design for augmented reality applications

Augmented reality (AR) display technology greatly enhances users' perception of and interaction with the real world by superimposing a computer-generated virtual scene on the real physical world. The main problem of the state-of-the-art 3D AR head-mounted displays (HMDs) is the accommodation-vergence conflict because the 2D images displayed by flat panel devices are at a fixed distance from the eyes. In this paper, we present a design for an optical see-through HMD utilizing multi-plane display technology for AR applications. This approach manages to provide correct depth information and solves the accommodation-vergence conflict problem. In our system, a projector projects slices of a 3D scene onto a stack of polymer-stabilized liquid crystal scattering shutters in time sequence to reconstruct the 3D scene. The polymer-stabilized liquid crystal shutters have sub-millisecond switching time that enables sufficient number of shutters to achieve high depth resolution. A proof-of-concept two-plane optical see-through HMD prototype is demonstrated. Our design can be made lightweight, compact, with high resolution, and large depth range from near the eye to infinity and thus holds great potential for fatigue-free AR HMDs.