Foveated imaging for near-eye displays

Abstract

The angular resolution of current near-eye display devices is still far below human-eye acuity. How to achieve retina-level resolution while keeping wide field-of-view (FOV) remains a great challenge. In this work, we demonstrate a multi-resolution foveated display with two display panels and an optical combiner. The first display panel provides a wide FOV but relatively low resolution for the surrounding region, while the second one offers an ultra-high resolution for the central fovea region, by an optical minifying system which enhances the effective resolution by 5 ×. In addition, a switchable Pancharatnam-Berry phase deflector is employed to shift the high-resolution region. The proposed design effectively reduces the pixelation and screen-door effect in near-eye displays.