Emerging Technologies

This novel design for an optical see-through augmented-reality display offers a wide field of view and supports a compact form factor approaching ordinary eyeglasses. Instead of conventional optics, the design uses only two simple hardware components: an LCD panel and an array of point-light sources (implemented as an edge-lit, etched acrylic sheet) placed directly in front of the eye, out of focus. The point-light sources are coded through the LCD to form miniature see-through projectors. A virtual aperture encoded on the LCD allows the projectors to be tiled, creating an arbitrarily wide field of view. Software rearranges the target augmented image into tiled sub-images and sends them to the display, where they appear as the correct image when observed out of the viewer's accommodation range. Evaluation of the design space of tiled point-light emphasized on increasing spatial resolution through the use of eye tracking and demonstrated a preliminary human-viewable display.

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