Description of "Personal Viewer Eyewear Display":

The Personal Viewer is an eyewear display (i.e. worn on the face like sunglasses) that presents its user with an ultra-wide field of view and has a low profile on the user's face and has very low weight. Additionally, the display does not block the users' view of their surroundings in any way.

Applications

There are many eyewear display applications that will benefit greatly from provision of a full breadth of human visual field, which is approximately 180 degrees horizontally and 100 degrees vertically (see Figure xx1). These include gaming, telepresence, training, augmented reality and cinema. Gamers are generally displeased that they cannot see to the sides of their current position without rotating their heads and generally enjoy the full field of natural human vision.

Method

The human eye has a very broad field of view, to present an image of this breadth a spherically formatted digital image must be presented that enters the users eye as a colimated (focused for infintiy, the relaxed human eye) broadly distributed over a roughly pi steradian space around the eye (again, see Figure xx1). Conventional ocular designs are not well suited to this task, the Erfle, Konig and the more recent Nagler designs are generally limited to well under 100 degrees of image field and they become both heavy and expensive as their limits are approached.

Status

The current status of the personal viewer prototype (see Figure 3 for the
complete prototype assembly) is that the ellipsoids have been fabricated and
appear to have satisfactory form, a more precise method for evaluating their
geometry is in development. The original tricolor beam generation design has
proven to be too weak, a conversion to a monochromatic design has been made as a
stop-gap measure and a raster is now visible, scan sync issues remain.