Harvard: Meta-optics Achieves RGB-achromatic Focusing for Virtual Reality

Virtual and augmented reality are rapidly developing technologies, but their large-scale penetration will require breakthroughs in the optical architecture. Unlike electronics that has rapidly evolved and shrunk in size following Moore’s law, the appearance and the underlying physics of lenses have not changed much. In this talk, we would like to show a path to a future VR/AR platform based on the meta-optics. We show millimeter-scale-diameter, high-NA, sub-micron thin, metasurface-based lenses that achieve diffraction-limited achromatic focusing of the primary colors by exploiting constructive interference of light from multiple zones and dispersion engineering meta-atoms. We further demonstrate a VR system based on a home-built fiber scanning near-eye display..