Luminance-enhanced pinhole-based lightfield near eye display using polarization-multiplexed retinal imaging

Mixed reality (MR) devices using a near eye display (NED) are gathering attentions with plenty of expectation. Since the MR NED is a head-mounted type device, the form factor of it is one of the crucial specifications affecting the usability of the device significantly. Among various approaches to realize a compact MR device, a pinhole-based lightfield (PBLF) NED without any use of bulky and heavy refractive optics is regarded as one of practical candidates. However, despite that significant advantage, it is necessary for the PBLF scheme to improve optical efficiency to enhance the luminance. Although it is a fundamental way to increase the density of the arrays of elemental images and pinholes, there is a side effect that the PBLFNED becomes more vulnerable to crosstalk, which is caused by pseudo retinal imaging that an elemental image is projected by incorrect neighboring pinholes. In this paper, we propose a novel method to enhance luminance of the PBLFNED by adopting a polarization-multiplexed retinal imaging to prevent crosstalk.