Optical see-through head-mounted display including transmittance-variable display for high visibility

Abstract

This paper presents an optical see-through head-mounted display (OST-HMD) that can provide a highly immersive augmented reality (AR) environment. Because visibility of objects is degraded by external light and because projection optics cannot represent black color, the reality of AR content is reduced. To solve this problem, we adopted an additional transparent display to adjust the transmittance of exterior light. This adjustment is achieved using a guest–host liquid crystal (GHLC) to provide transparency in the initial state and opacity when voltage is applied. To verify the display’s usefulness, we measured ambient contrast ratio (ACR) and color gamut under various ambient light conditions after attaching the GHLC panel to the existing OST-HMD (Microsoft HoloLens). Under typical office illumination, use of the GHLC panel increased the ACR by 4.67 times, and the color gamut by 2.87 times compared to the OST-HMD without it. Under high illumination the panel increased the ACR by 1.54 times and the color gamut by 16.16 times. The proposed method significantly improved the ambient contrast ratio and color expression, and yielded a flexible way to customize existing OST-HMDs by adding a detachable display.