Freeform micro-optical arrays (FMOAs) can overcome some limitations of rotationally symmetric optical components. The manufacturability assessment for FMOA designs containing many freeform elements is demanding. We present computer-aided design (CAD) tools that analyze FMOA designs for manufacturing constraints. They 1) extract the height (Sag) and 2) local slope while highlighting areas beyond manufacturing limits, 3) extract the minimum tool radius and 4) convert CADs into ray traceable solids using NURBS for performance comparison of the actual micro-structure to the design. Critical parameters can be identified early, reducing time-consuming and costly adjustments later.
Most virtual reality (VR) headsets nowadays use conventional, rotationally symmetric optics to create a wide field of view
(FOV > 90°) virtual scene enabling the required “immersion” or “presence” feeling. These optics require a long total track
length (TTL, distance between the actual panel displaying the contents and user’s pupil) to work well, and headsets become
very bulky. The so-called CLOVER is an optic, compatible with VR and video-see-through mixed reality (MR) able to
work around the TTL problem by using a freeform multi-channel, light folding approach. In its simplest version, it can
reduce the TTL down to a half, compared to conventional solutions, for the same FOV and angular resolution. Along with
a review of the original 4-channel CLOVER, this work shows recent results of upscale versions of the optic that utilize
myopia and color correction, pupil tracking and staggered surfaces to, respectively, avoid the need of prescription lenses,
improve the image quality for all colors, rise the resolution (by a 20%) and reduce the size (20% TTL reduction) of the
precursor.
Free-form micro-optical arrays (FMOAs) gain increasing interest because they can overcome some limitations of rotationally symmetric optical components and because of the benefits of their microscopic dimensions. They enable better performance and compactness of optical devices. However, the complex and segmented surface shapes bring many challenges, from design to fabrication to quality control. In particular, for FMOA designs that contain many individual free-form elements, their manufacturability assessment is far from trivial. Here, we present computer-aided design (CAD)-based tools that analyze FMOA designs for manufacturing constraints so that critical parts can be identified at an early stage, reducing time-consuming and costly adjustments at a later stage. The CAD tools are of great support to quickly and reliably analyze FMOA designs containing several hundred individual elements in an automated manner. They have been developed as user-oriented tools that require little software knowledge and display the results with great visual clarity
Reducing the size of Virtual Reality head-mounted displays is of main interest to improve the comfort of users, which is a particularly complex design problem due to the very large field of view needed to feel the immersion. High compactness with high transmission efficiency and high contrast can be achieved by multichannel optics, whose design for high performance is carried out at LIMBAK introducing intensively freeform optical surfaces, increased resolution via variable magnification, dynamic mapping control and super-sampling via pixel interlacing. This presentation will cover the growing variety of geometries, how to address their challenges and envision their future.
Reducing the size of Virtual Reality head-mounted displays is of main interest to improve the comfort of users, which is a particularly complex design problem due to the very large field of view needed to feel the immersion. Such reduction can be achieve via folded polarization “pancake” optics, but at the expense of a very low transmission efficiency and poor contrast. High compactness without those drawbacks can be achieved by multichannel optics, whose design for high performance is carried out at LIMBAK intensively introducing freeform optical surfaces, adding variable magnification to maximize the VR display resolution where it is to be normally gazed, and applying two-dimensional distortion software corrections to each channel. This presentation will cover the recent advances in these systems, the growing variety of geometries, the benefits obtained when including gaze-tracking and the resolution boosts obtained by the application of pixel interlacing strategies.
Freeform microlens arrays, FMLAs, have gathered considerable scientific and industrial interest in recent years due to their advantages compared to the more standard MLAs, based on rotationally symmetric optical units. However, they pose are challenging to design and manufacture. More specifically, the complex surface shapes involved, typically described by a large set of parameters and the large number of individual microstructures in each FMLA makes their quality control cumbersome. Surface profile measurements involve many data points, difficult to handle and optical functionality tests provide little insight into potential manufacturing deviations. Here we present and demonstrate CAD-based characterization and design for manufacturing methods that at- tempt to overcome these limitations. We also present two additional CAD-based tools that analyze FMLA designs from a manufacturing perspective that we have developed to support optical designers and manufacturers alike to identify critical parts in an early stage. Our algorithms can process several hundreds of individualized microstructures in a couple minutes.
Compared to conventional, rotationally-symmetric optics, free-form optics provide additional degrees of freedom that enable special geometrical and performance features. For instance, in AR and VR, some approaches based on free-forms have shown their ability to reduce the display to pupil distance (total track length, or TTL), to increase the Field of view (FOV) or to improve the apparent resolution of the VR scene. This work will discuss different forms to treat design problems with free-forms, ranging from the direct calculation of point-clouds using the so-called SMS method (followed by a NURBS representation of results) to the combination of direct calculation + optimization. In the latter approach, different types of polynomial descriptions of the free-form surfaces will be considered, with special emphasis on the importance of using a basis that is orthogonal, either with a sag metric or a gradient one.
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