Holographic Glasses for Virtual Reality

We present Holographic Glasses, a holographic near-eye display system with an eyeglasses-like form factor for virtual reality. Holographic Glasses are composed of a pupil-replicating waveguide, a spatial light modulator, and a geometric phase lens to create holographic images in a lightweight and thin form factor. The proposed design can deliver full-color 3D holographic images using an optical stack of 2.5 mm thickness. A novel pupil-high-order gradient descent algorithm is presented for the correct phase calculation with the user’s varying pupil size. We implement benchtop and wearable prototypes for testing. Our binocular wearable prototype supports 3D focus cues and provides a diagonal field of view of 22.8° with a 2.3 mm static eye box and additional capabilities of dynamic eye box with beam steering, while weighing only 60 g excluding the driving board.