Abstract

SA Photonics and SL Process have developed a new type of electronic see-through augmented reality head mounted display. Our display utilizes a very compact freeform prism eyepiece that has almost no peripheral obscuration. This provides the wearer with the advantages of an electronic see-through system (occlusion, operation in high ambient environments, high contrast imagery, image enhancement, image export) but in a system that also allows natural vision of the real world outside the field of view of the eyepiece. As such, the user sees a seamless view of the entire real world, with augmentation in the central 62-degree diagonal field of view. The cameras for the see-through imagery are “hidden” behind the eyepieces, so they do not block the view of the real world, providing less than a 10% obscuration of the total visual field, much less than any other electronic see-through system and even less than many optical see-through systems. In addition to providing the see-through imagery, these cameras and SL Process’ innovative video processing architecture provide six degrees of freedom head tracking as well as hand tracking.