Digital Optical Elements and Technologies (EDO19): Applications to AR/VR/MR

This paper serves as an introduction to the EDO19 conference "Digital Optical Technologies" dedicated specifically to digital optics for AR/VR and MR Head Mounted Display (HMD) systems, in all their incarnations: Display, Imaging and Sensors. We will introduce the field of AR/VR/MR optics historically, and review the most important criteria for AR/VR/MR optical design: matching the performances of the optics to the ones of the human visual system. This can be done for all Digital Optical Elements reviewed throughout this conference: free space optics, waveguide optics (waveguide combiners), diffractive, holographic and metasurface optical elements, tunable, switchable and reconfigurable optics, and novel computational techniques for display and imaging.