Air Mounted Eyepiece: Optical See-Through HMD Design with Aerial Optical Functions

We propose a novel method of implementing an optical see-through (OST) head-mounted display (HMD) with a wide viewing angle and high resolution for augmented reality, called an Air Mounted Eyepiece (AME). In past years, many optical elements, such as transmissive liquid-crystal display (LCD), half-mirror, and waveguide have been adopted for OST-HMD. To achieve the AME design, we employ an off-the-shelf HMD and Transmissive Mirror Device (TMD), which is used in aerial real-imaging systems, instead of conventional optical elements. In the proposed method, we present 'Virtual lens," which has the same function as the HMD lens in front of the eyes. By using TMD, it is possible to shorten the optical length between the virtual lens and the eye. Therefore, the aerial lens provides an immersive image with see-through capability. In this paper, we describe a detailed design method of TMD-based HMD, and compare it to previous half mirror-based HMD and convex mirror-based HMD. Then, we construct a fabricated prototype of the OST-HMD using TMD. We aim to contribute to the field of human-computer interaction and the research on eyepiece interfaces by discussing the advantages and the limitations through simulations and experiments.

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