Scanning Polymeric Waveguide Design of a 2-D Display System

Many small-scale display systems used in head-mounted displays (HMDs) create planar images by beaming light from an optical fiber onto deflectable or rotating mirrors. This mirror-based approach has a critical limitation: the hardware of mirror scanners and grating deflectors must be significantly larger than the light beam diameter to avoid undesirable clipping or diffraction effects. Typically, attempting to reduce the size of a conventional display device reduces pixel count by loss of resolution or field-of-view (FOV) of the device. In this paper, we propose a HMD system utilizing a microfabricated 2D optical scanner controlled by a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) that overcomes the size limitations of other systems while maintaining high resolution.