Display Engines for Mixed Reality: Optical Design & Technology

Level: Intermediate Length: 4 hours Format: In-Person Lecture Intended Audience: This course will benefit students, researchers and team leaders working with Displays or Mixed Reality hardware. Undergraduate engineering or science training and basic optics and ray tracing knowledge are assumed. Description: Mixed Reality hardware encompasses a wide range of devices to fit specific applications. Characteristics like the optical see-through, field of view, eye box size, and resolution determine each headset's optical design and technology. The display engine is the heart of the optical system as it forms the image and creates an exit pupil for the eye box or the waveguide. This course looks at the two fundamental aspects of display engines: (a) the optical design and (b) the modulator technology forming the image pixels. The first part of the course concentrates on occlusive architectures (VR) with optical designs based on hybrid Fresnel lenses, Catadioptric optics (a.k.a. pancakes) and segmented optics. It continues to describe the basic operation of LCDs and OLED display panels. The second part of the course describes the display engines for optical-see-through architectures (AR), with or without an exit pupil expansion waveguide. The operating principles of Laser Beam Scanners (LBS), Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS), and Digital Micromirrors (DMD) are described, and how they are integrated into the optical system is presented. Learning Outcomes: This course will enable you to: - distinguish the key differences between occlusive and optical-see-through display engines - list and compare display engine architectures for occlusive and optical-see-through headset displays - compare the key technologies of optical modulators for both occlusive and see-through devices - describe the fundamental operation of display engines used in Mixed Reality - construct a ray-raced diagram of a VR or AR display engine Instructor(s): Andreas Georgiou is an Independent Consultant with Reality Optics Ltd, with a particular interest in computational problems in optics. He worked in diffractive optics for over two decades and over a decade in Mixed Reality optics. Andreas enjoys making new ideas into operating prototypes by combining physics, mathematics, engineering, and software. He particularly enjoys working with head-mounted displays, three-dimensional displays, sensors, and everything odd with lenses and gratings inside. Before his current position, he worked with many product groups at Microsoft (Surface, HoloLens, Azure and Kinect), developed micro-confocal endoscopes for surgery, designed space instruments for Mars, and created the first genuinely holographic display. He obtained his PhD in Optics from the University of Cambridge and is also an Engineering Research Fellow at Robinson College, Cambridge. He has over 30 patents and over 20 peer-reviewed publications on head-mounted displays, data storage, holographic displays, and data transmission. Event: SPIE Photonics West 2025 Course Held: 27 January 2025