Improved Head-Mounted Displays for Immersive Virtual Reality

To fight and win, the soldier needs to see - clearly and to his sides. Virtual close quarters battle (CQB) simulation systems need to mirror this simple reality, yet the magnification required to create such wide imagery from micro-displays traditionallyrequires large and heavy lenses. This results in head mounted displays that are too heavy and cumbersome for the rapid motions typical of CQB. Phase I prototyped and proved the feasibility of a novel optical design that weighs a mere ounce, is based onnewly available components, and produces a visual field of over 110 degrees per eye. This is roughly twice the visual field of current approaches and is less than half the size and weight. Phase II will integrate this innovation with availablemicro-displays, drive electronics and other optical components into a complete head mounted display prototype that has a very wide visual field, high quality images, good ergonomics and is comfortable to use - even with rapid head and body motions. Thedesign will be reliable and economical to commercialize. Such a device remains one of the few missing components required to create a personal CQB training system. The immersive display system developed during this program will fill a need for a rugged,economical, compact, and lightweight wide field-of-view head mounted display. A broad range of government applications requiring - and currently trying to acquire - such a device include: ground and ship-based forces training; firefighting, law enforcementand other first-responder training; simulation-based design and piloting of remote vehicles. Commercial and government sector applications which have already developed the software and markets for such a display, but currently resort to large andexpensive projection-based designs include: computer aided design and review; large scientific data-set visualization and information mining, extraction and exploitation. Due to the inherent low cost of the proposed optical approach, larger consumermarket applications will be considered, including video game console displays and augmented reality displays for mobile telephones.