Design and Development of Holographic Sighting System used for small arm weapons in Close Quarter Battle situations

Holographic Sight is an electro-optic system, which uses holographic technology. It is a plane plate sight with no lenses and uses a laser light from laser diode to illuminate a holographic reticle image that is embedded in the display window. The sight seen with both eyes open, projects a virtual image in the target plane, which is not seen by anyone other than the firer. The illuminating laser beam is completely blocked by the housing. The main component of this sight is a hologram that generates the reticle image. A laser diode and a pair of holographic elements are incorporated in the design to make the sight more achromatic and avoid the sighting errors due to wavelength drift. In addition to the reticle hologram, holographic lens is also designed in such a way that the collimated reference wave front is shaped and illuminated for displaying and projecting the reticle as virtual image in the target plane. With the advent of low cost laser diodes, prototype units have been fabricated. The opto-mechanical design is included for moving the laser diode either horizontally or vertically for very finer angular adjustments of elevation and wind age to zero the weapon. No parallax error of the reticle image is observed in the target plane. Range, Field of view, Elevation, Wind age adjustments of the image of the reticle for zeroing on the target and electronic circuitry for controlled laser beam output and weight are important parameters in the system design of Holographic Gun sight. In this work for a given requirement of range and weight, holographic sight is designed and developed to get optimum performance of the above parameters.