Design and Evaluation of Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Display With Wide FOV Based on Dihedral Corner Reflector Array

Existing optical see-through (OST) head-mounted displays (HMDs) generally utilize plane mirrors with partial transmission to merge the virtual and real-world scenes, which inducing the vignetting effect to result in small field of view (FOV). Accordingly, this paper proposes an OST-HMD system in which a rotationally-symmetric eyepiece with a wide FOV of ±30 degrees is coupled with a dihedral corner reflector array (DCRA) to achieve a sufficient relief distance to project all of the exit rays of the eyepiece into the pupil. The feasibility of the proposed system is evaluated by means of numerical simulations based on optical models of the HMD lens, DCRA and human eye. The simulation results show that the eye can receive the display information in the wide FOV with a sufficient relief distance through this kind of the OST-HMD development.