Arrayed beam steering device for advanced 3D displays

Abstract

An arrayed beam steering device enables much simplified system architectures for high quality multiview 3D displays by adapting time multiplexing and eye tracking scheme. An array device consisting of microscale liquid prisms is presented, where the prism surface between two immiscible liquids is electrically controlled to steer light beams by the principle of electrowetting. An array prototype with 280×280μm pixels was fabricated and demonstrated of its full optical performances. The maximum tilting angle of each prism was measured to be 22.5° in average, with a tracking resolution of less than 0.04°. In this paper, we report a design and fabrication of eletrowetting based prism array, opto-fluidic simulations, optical characterizations, as well as applications to achieve low fatigue 3D displays.