Novel optical see-through head-mounted display with occlusion and intensity matching support

In an augmented reality system, mutual occlusion and intensity matching of real and virtual environment enhance the user's feeling that virtual objects truly exist in the real world. Conventional optical see-through head-mounted display (HMD) cannot present mutual occlusion and intensity matching correctly. Aiming at the attribute of conventional optical see-through HMD, we propose a novel display design with mutual occlusion and intensity matching capability. In our design an 8-bit gray level XGA LCD is used as the addressable filter, by which mutual occlusion and intensity matching could be accomplished. Furthermore, with our optical system, a viewer can simultaneously observe both outside scenery and a pattern on the LCD panel in focus. Experimental results show that our novel design can integrate virtual object with real scene more seamlessly.