LAUSR

Abstract A lightweight, compact and wide field of view (FOV) reflective type head-mounted display (HMD) system with off-axis three-mirror (OTM) imaging technology is proposed. The surfaces of all the mirrors in this system are freeform type, which possess excellent aberration correction properties even with fewer optical elements for a compact design. The design and optimization process of the proposed wide FOV OTM-HMD system are described in detail. Our HMD system has a diagonal FOV of 40 degrees and the maximum distortion of the system is less than 5%. The modulation transfer function (MTF) value was found to be larger than 0.1 at the spatial frequency of 60 cycles/mm. A binocular prototype (total size: 160 mm × 56 mm × 36 mm) meeting the human ergonomic requirements was built using the proposed design and the optical performance of the prototype was tested. While being compact, lightweight and cost-efficient, the optical performance of our OTM-HMD system is comparable to that of other previously reported HMD systems.