Apple Inc.

Wei-Liang Hsu

John N Border

Serhan O Isikman

Brent J Bollman

Di Liu

Francois R Jacob

Zuoqian Wang

Ran He

Guanjun Tan

Cheng Kai Chen

Chaohao Wang

Rui Liu

Naoto Matsuyuki

Sheng Zhang

Yury Anatolievich Petrov

Mark F Flynn

Nan Zhu

Aleksandr N Polyakov

Yoshihiko Yokoyama

Brandon E Clarke

Aditi G Kanhere

A head-mounted display may include a display system and an optical system that are supported by a housing. The optical system may be a catadioptric optical system having one or more lens elements. In one example, the optical system includes a single lens element and a retarder that is coated on a curved surface of the lens element. The retarder may be coated on an aspheric concave surface of the lens element. In another example the retarder may be coated on an aspheric convex surface of the lens element. One or more components of the optical system may be formed using a direct printing technique. This may allow for one or more adhesive layers and one or more hard coatings to be omitted from the optical system. A lens element may be directly printed on the display system to improve alignment between the optical system and the display system.

Optical system for head-mounted display

An electronic device may include a display system with a pixel array and a catadioptric lens. The display system may include a linear polarizer through which image light from the pixel array passes and a first quarter wave plate through which the light passes after passing through the polarizer. The lens may include a partial mirror, a second quarter wave plate, and a reflective polarizer. A third quarter wave plate may be formed between the linear polarizer and the pixel array to mitigate ghost images. Control circuitry may predict potential ghost images based on the geometry of the lens and data from an image frame. Tone mapping circuitry may adjust contrast of the image frame within a region overlapping the predicted ghost image. The control circuitry may adjust luminance of the image frame outside of the region overlapping the predicted ghost image.

Optical system with ghost image mitigation

A head-mounted device may have catadioptric lenses that each include a partial mirror, a quarter wave plate, and a polarizer. An optical system in the head-mounted device may have an infrared light-emitting device and an infrared light-sensing device. The optical system may illuminate a user's eyes in eye boxes and may gather measurements from the illuminated eye boxes for eye tracking and other functions. The optical system may operate through the catadioptric lenses. To enhance optical system performance, the polarizers may be wire grid polarizers that are formed from conductive lines that exhibit enhanced infrared transmission and/or the quarter wave plates may be formed from cholesteric liquid crystal layers that serve as quarter wave plates at visible wavelengths and that do not serve as quarter wave plates at infrared wavelengths.

Display systems with optical sensing

An electronic device may have a support structure that supports a display and lenses. Each lens may be a reflective lens such as a catadioptric lens that receives polarized image light from the display and provides a corresponding image to an eye box. The display may be an emissive display with pixels that include light-emitting diodes. The light-emitting diodes may be overlapped by a light recycling layer such as a reflective polarizer or cholesteric liquid crystal layer. The light recycling layer recycles emitted light to enhance display efficiency.

Electronic device having emissive display with light recycling

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Wei-Liang Hsu