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

San Francisco, 2 February 2020, SPIE Photonics West

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 physical-optics approach which is fast and user-friendly. With the Fast Physical Optics technique in our software VirtualLab Fusion we provide such a modeling approach. We include the polarization of the in-coupled light, fully vectorial grating analysis, coherence, interference and diffraction effects in the analysis carried out in one software platform, with a fully non-sequential consideration of the lightpaths through the lightguide.