Towards Eyeglass-style Holographic Near-eye Displays with Statically Expanded Eyebox

Holography is perhaps the only method demonstrated so far that can achieve a wide field of view (FOV) and a compact eyeglass-style form factor for augmented reality (AR) near-eye displays (NEDs). Unfortunately, the eyebox of such NEDs is impractically small (similar to< 1mm). In this paper, we introduce and demonstrate a design for holographic NEDs with a practical, wide eyebox of similar to 10mm and without any moving parts, based on holographic lenslets. In our design, a holographic optical element (HOE) based on a lenslet array was fabricated as the image combiner with expanded eyebox. A phase spatial light modulator (SLM) alters the phase of the incident laser light projected onto the HOE combiner such that the virtual image can be perceived at different focus distances, which can reduce the vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC). We have successfully implemented a bench-top prototype following the proposed design. The experimental results show effective eyebox expansion to a size of similar to 10mm. With further work, we hope that these design concepts can be incorporated into eyeglass-size NEDs.