Resonant screens focus on the optics of AR (Conference Presentation)

The recent new development of Meta Resonant Waveguide-Gratings (RWG) allows adapting the unique optical properties of Resonant Waveguide-Grating away from the specular reflection and direct transmission, in which they were confined in the last 35 years. Exploiting Wood's second type of anomalies, the so-called resonance anomalies in meta-devices based-on horizontal guided-mode resonances (GMR) create excellent transparency out of the resonance condition. Meta RWG can be engineered to exhibit highly selective and tunable optical properties to realize as examples monochromatic diffraction gratings, monochromatic metalenses and meta-couplers, while their nanostructures are made very compact and with flat aspect-ratio. Examples of new optical combiners implementation for augmented and mixed reality will be presented. A roadmap for future developments will be sketched as well as their advantages and limitations, for which they will be compared to surface relief grating, volume holograms and visible-light metasurfaces. The author will focus on the implementation of Meta-RWG in augmented and mixed reality systems addressing the many challenges of such see-through near-eye display system, such as large field of view, large eye-box with a sufficient eye-relief distance, high transparency, high compactness and low-weight, high pixel angular resolution as well as a mitigated vergence accommodation conflict or a non single/fix focal plane architecture.