Abstract
Many small scale image display systems, such as head mounted displays (HMDs), beam light from an optical fiber onto deflectable mirrors or rotating polygonal mirrors to produce an image on an image plane. This approach has many size limitations. For instance, light beams of less than 3 millimeters are impractical for displays using mirrors, because mirror scanners and grating deflectors must be significantly larger than the light beam diameter to avoid beam clipping or adding diffraction. Reducing the diameter of a conventional display device reduces the possible number of pixels, and thus reduces the resolution and/or field of view (FOV) of the device. Our proposed HMD system focus on reducing the hardware while maintaining a high resolution by utilizing a microfabricated 2D optical scanner combined with a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) controller for display.