Manufacturing Application-Driven Foveated Near-Eye Displays

Title: Manufacturing Application-Driven Foveated Near-Eye Displays

Teams: Nvidia；UNC

Writers: Kaan Akşit；Praneeth Chakravarthula (UNC)；Kishore Rathinavel (UNC)；Youngmo Jeong (NVIDIA)；Rachel Albert (NVIDIA)；Henry Fuchs (UNC)；David Luebke (NVIDIA)

Publication date: March 25, 2019

Abstract

Traditional optical manufacturing poses a great challenge to near-eye display designers due to large lead times in the order of multiple weeks, limiting the abilities of optical designers to iterate fast and explore beyond conventional designs. We present a complete near-eye display manufacturing pipeline with a day lead time using commodity hardware. Our novel manufacturing pipeline consists of several innovations including a rapid production technique to improve surface of a 3D printed component to optical quality suitable for near-eye display application, a computational design methodology using machine learning and ray tracing to create freeform static projection screen surfaces for near-eye displays that can represent arbitrary focal surfaces, and a custom projection lens design that distributes pixels non-uniformly for a foveated near-eye display hardware design candidate. We have demonstrated untethered augmented reality near-eye display prototypes to assess success of our technique, and show that a ski-goggles form factor, a large monocular field of view (30o×55o), and a resolution of12cycles per degree can be achieved.