Hybrid light field head-mounted display using time-multiplexed liquid crystal lens array for resolution enhancement

In recent years, head-mounted display technologies have greatly advanced. In order to overcome the accommodation-convergence conflict, light field displays reconstruct three-dimensional (3D) images with a focusing cue but sacrifice resolution. In this paper, a hybrid head-mounted display system that is based on a liquid crystal microlens array is proposed. By using a time-multiplexed method, the display signals can be divided into light field and two-dimensional (2D) modes to show comfortable 3D images with high resolution compensated by the 2D image. According to the experimental results, the prototype supports a 12.28 ppd resolution in the diagonal direction, which reaches 82% of the traditional virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD).