Varifocal virtuality: a novel optical layout for near-eye display

Aksit, Kaan; Ng, Ren; Banks, Martin S.; Love, Gordon D.; Lopes, Ward; Kim, Jonghyun; Spjut, Josef; Patney, Anjul; Shirley, Peter; Luebke, David; Cholewiak, Steven A.; Srinivasan, Pratul

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) has recently gained momentum in the form of a variety of available optical see-through near-eye displays (NEDs) such as the Meta 2and the Microsoft Hololens. These devices are a big step forward towards Sutherland's vision of an ultimate display [Sutherland 1968]. The device we demonstrate attempts to deal with the main limitations of current devices. First, the graphics images are at a constant virtual distance for the eyes' accommodation mechanism, while the vergence of the two eyes working in concert places the virtual object(s) at a distance other than the accommodation distance. This vergence-accommodation conflict is one of the main problems in many AR and VR systems [Kress and Starner 2013]. The second limitation is achieving a wide FOV with compact optics. Cakmakci et al. [2006] contend that achieving a wide field-of-view (FOV) is the major optical design challenge in AR NEDs.

Citation

Aksit, K., Ng, R., Banks, M. S., Love, G. D., Lopes, W., Kim, J., Spjut, J., Patney, A., Shirley, P., Luebke, D., Cholewiak, S. A., & Srinivasan, P. (2017, December). Varifocal virtuality: a novel optical layout for near-eye display. Presented at ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Emerging Technologies on - SIGGRAPH '17, Los Angeles

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Emerging Technologies on - SIGGRAPH '17
• Acceptance Date: Apr 25, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Aug 3, 2017
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2017
• Deposit Date: Sep 6, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 11, 2018
• Book Title: SIGGRAPH '17 Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference, Los Angeles, CA, USA, July 30-August 03, 2017.
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3084822.3084829
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1147846