Waveguide combiners for mixed reality headsets: a nanophotonics design perspective

This paper is a review and analysis of the various implementation architectures of diffractive waveguide combiners for augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) headsets, and smart glasses. Extended reality (XR) is another acronym frequently used to refer to all variants across the MR spectrum. Such devices have the potential to revolutionize how we work, communicate, travel, learn, teach, shop, and are entertained. Already, market analysts show very optimistic expectations on return on investment in MR, for both enterprise and consumer applications. Hardware architectures and technologies for AR and MR have made tremendous progress over the past five years, fueled by recent investment hype in start-ups and accelerated mergers and acquisitions by larger corporations. In order to meet such high market expectations, several challenges must be addressed: first, cementing primary use cases for each specific market segment and, second, achieving greater MR performance out of increasingly size-, weight-, cost- and power-constrained hardware. One such crucial component is the optical combiner. Combiners are often considered as critical optical elements in MR headsets, as they are the direct window to both the digital content and the real world for the user’s eyes.