Full-Color Waveguide-Type Near-Eye Displays with Huygens’ Metasurfaces

Miniaturized and lightweight see-through near-eye displays are desirable for wearable computing applications. With the recent rapid advances in ultra-thin metasurface optics, the compactness and weight of near-eye displays can be improved without compromising the performance of the real-virtual scene. In this paper, a proof-of-concept solution, using transparent Huygens' metasurface hologram as the display device, is developed to provide full-color images. A virtual image is created by illuminating three 500 µm metasurface holograms, spaced 500 µm apart, with red, green, and blue light sources, and combining the resulting holographic images in a diffractive waveguide to produce a full-color image in front of the viewer's eyes. Using this method, a compact and wearable near-eye display with a thin (1.2 mm) waveguide in front of the viewer's eyes is experimentally demonstrated, creating a virtual image with a large field of view (≥40°) that can be viewed along with the real world within a large eye box (15mm × 10 mm). To achieve this, a new design method exploring the potential of metasurface holograms as an image source for mobile computing in daily life is introduced.