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

Abstract 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.