Analysis of Display Resolution of Volume Holographic Waveguide and High Resolution by Line-Symmetric Image Input

Abstract

To reveal the fundamental characteristic of the volume holographic waveguide for a head-mounted display (HMD), we analyzed the resolution of a virtual image. We built a mathematical model considering the off-Bragg diffraction for each ray angle of the signal light ray. The display resolution performance of the HMD depended on the thickness of the waveguide and the ray angle. At the lowest-resolution ray angle, the input-point image was broadened more than 0.1° in a viewing angle for a 1-mm-thick waveguide. Conversely, our previously proposed line-symmetric image-input method, in which the input images were symmetrically arranged with respect to the center line, improved the resolution performance and luminance uniformity. We observed that the spread of the point image was suppressed to 0.01°, which was a sufficient resolution for a person with a visual acuity of 0.8.

Keywords

• augmented reality
• head-mounted display
• waveguide
• volume hologram
• off-Bragg diffraction
• resolution