Innovative Systematic Design Approach for Lightguide Devices for XR-Applications

For applications in the field of XR, devices based on light guiding are one beneficial approach to combine the virtual image with the light impinging from the real-world environment. Usually, lightguide devices like AR glasses are quite complex, due to the required management of a large field of view and light of different wavelengths. Due to this complexity, numerous parameters must be considered in order to design a functional device which provides a sufficient image quality and optical performance.

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Physical-Optics Analysis of Lightguides for Augmented and Mixed Reality Glasses

Lightguides in combination with gratings seem to be a promising candidate for the development of AR/MR glasses. The research and development of this technique is done in numerous companies and institutes and there is still a lot of room for new ideas and innovations. The design and the modeling of such lightguides is very different to lens design and requires new techniques in modeling. Though ray tracing gives insight also in the case of lightguides, an analysis which includes all relevant effects must be based on a physicaloptics approach which is fast and user-friendly. With the Fast Physical Optics technique in our software VirtualLab Fusion we provide such a modeling approach.

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Physical-Optical Analysis of Lightguide Coupling Setup and Systematic Design Strategy

Lightguide structures are widely applied in different applications, and, nowadays, the are drawing special interest in the field of near-to-eye display systems. Such systems are typically realized with either planar or curved lightguides together with gratings for coupling light out of or into the lightguides. For the application in display, the field of view (FOV) supported by the lightguide parts becomes an important issue for the system design. In this work, we analyze the behavior of typical gratings for lightguide coupling, especially with the angular dependency taken into consideration

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Fast-physical optics modeling of two-photon microscopy with 3D-structured illumination

We perform a fast-physical optics modeling of two-photon microscopy with 3D-structured illumination. We analyze the contrast, inhomogeneity and the temporal focusing of the 3D-structured illumination pattern, which should be accounted for in image processing.

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Physical-Optics Modeling of Interferometer-Based Metrology Systems

Interferometer-based optical setups play an important role in modern optical metrology for different applications. Such setups often consist of multi-disciplinary components. This reveals new ways of improving the performance or enriching the functionality of the system, while at the same time leading to complexities and difficulties in system modeling and analysis. To overcome this, we present a physical-optics-based simulation approach. It is founded on a fully electromagnetic representation of light, and therefore includes the coherence and polarization effects which are of growing interest for modern interferometers.

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Modeling and Design of Gratings, Diffusers, DOEs, Diffractive and Metalenses
Fast physical optics with VirtualLab Fusion optics software

The inclusion of micro- and nanostructured flat optical components in combination with classical components like lenses and mirrors is gaining momentum in many technical applications of optics and photonics. This ultimately exceeds the limits of ray optics and demands a physical-optics simulation approach. VirtualLab Fusion software combines physical-optics modeling techniques for lenses, mirrors and microstructures to enable a fast and practical modeling experience. After a brief introduction of the fast physical optics technology we demonstrate various examples from different fields of application.

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Physical-Optics Investigation of Light Coupling into Fiber and Micro-Optical Sensors

In modern optical metrology systems, fibers and other micro-optical devices are widely used for collecting and monitoring light signals. Such devices are of great help to reduce the size of the detecting units; but on the other side, the design and analysis of systems containing fiber and micro-sensors often requires far beyond the ray-optics based modeling techniques. Because the interaction between light and micro-structures with comparable feature size to the wavelength often requires electromagnetic field solvers.

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