Alternate optical designs for head-mounted displays with a wide field of view

Abstract

The most widely applied design form for mixed reality head-mounted display (HMD) systems is generally a prism with one surface in total internal reflection (TIR). This, however, limits the angle of the incident rays, and thus decreases the design freedom and affects the performance. To obtain better performance of the HMD optics, in this paper two seldom used design forms of HMD systems are presented and compared to the standard TIR HMD optics. One of them is a catadioptric HMD system, consisting of one lens and two mirrors; the other is a prism HMD with a different folding geometry. The designs are compared for a field of view of 40°×30°; however, they are also investigated for an increased field of view of 50°×30°. The evaluation indicates good performance of our systems. In particular, the prism with an alternate folding geometry has advantages in both performance and size.