Design of a head-mounted display with freeform mirrors

Abstract

A head-mounted display (HMD) requires a large field of view (FOV) and a large exit pupil diameter while maintaining a compact structure. In this paper, we show a head-mounted display design comprising two freeform mirrors covering a 28° full field-of-view with an eye relief of 15mm. The simplified partial differential equation (PDE) method is applied in the design of a two-mirror HMD system. Then the data points on the unknown freeform mirrors are calculated using the rays from multiple fields and are used to construct the freeform mirrors in the HMD system, which is taken as a starting point. This simplified partial differential equation method makes calculations easier. The anamorphic surface and the XY polynomial freeform surface are used in the two freeform mirrors for improving the image quality, respectively. The optimization strategy is also described in detail. The final HMD system operates at F/3.75 with 8mm exit pupil diameter achieving good imaging performance.