Ultracompact and high-efficiency liquid-crystalon-silicon light engines for augmented reality glasses  

作　　者：Zhenyi Luo Yuqiang Ding Fenglin Peng Guohua Wei Yun Wang Shin-Tson Wu 

机构地区：[1]College of Optics and Photonics,University of Central Florida,Orlando FL 32816,USA [2]Meta Reality Labs,9845 Willows Road NE,Redmond,WA 98052,USA

出　　处：《Opto-Electronic Advances》2024年第10期15-26,共12页光电进展（英文）

摘　　要：In lightweight augmented reality(AR)glasses,the light engines must be very compact while keeping a high optical efficiency to enable longtime comfortable wearing and high ambient contrast ratio.“Liquid-crystal-on-silicon(LCoS)or micro-LED,who wins?”is recently a heated debate question.Conventional LCoS system is facing tremendous challenges due to its bulky illumination systems;it often incorporates a bulky polarizing beam splitter(PBS)cube.To minimize the formfactor of an LCoS system,here we demonstrate an ultracompact illumination system consisting of an in-coupling prism,and a light guide plate with multiple parallelepiped extraction prisms.The overall module volume including the illumination optics and an LCoS panel(4.4-μm pixel pitch and 1024x1024 resolution elements),but excluding the projection optics,is merely 0.25 cc(cm3).Yet,our system exhibits an excellent illuminance uniformity and an impressive optical efficiency(36%–41%for a polarized input light).Such an ultracompact and high-efficiency LCoS illumination system is expected to revolutionize the next-generation AR glasses.

关 键 词：liquid-crystal-on-silicon light guide plate illumination system augmented reality 

分 类 号：TS959.6[轻工技术与工程] O753.2[理学—晶体学] TP391.9[自动化与计算机技术—计算机应用技术]