Large field-of-view and high resolution free-form head-mounted display

It is challenging to design a large field of view (FOV) and low F-number optical system, especially an eyepiece for head-mounted displays (HMD), which also demands compactness in size, lightness in weight and a large exit pupil distance. In this paper, we describe a novel design of a wide FOV free-form eyepiece by tiling multiple wedge-shaped free-form prisms. We compared our tiling method using the novel free-form prism eyepieces with a traditional tiling approach and the drawbacks of the traditional tiling method are analyzed. We further present a successive approximation method for designing a freeform surface and compare the accuracy of several surface conversion methods. An example design was also demonstrated.