Large-Scale Huygens' Metasurfaces for Holographic 3D Near-Eye Displays

Novel display technologies aim at providing users with increasingly immersive experiences. It is a long-sought dream to generate three-dimensional (3D) scenes with high resolution and continuous depth, which can be overlaid with the real world. Current attempts, however, fail in providing either truly 3D information, or large viewing area and angle, strongly limiting the user immersion. Here, a proof-of-concept solution for this problem is developed. A compact holographic 3D near-eye display with a large exit pupil of 10 mm x 8.66 mm is realized. The 3D image is generated from a highly transparent Huygens' metasurface hologram with large (>10(8)) pixel count and subwavelength pixels, fabricated via deep-ultraviolet immersion photolithography on 300 mm glass wafers. High-quality virtual 3D scenes with similar to 50k active data points and continuous depth ranging from 0.5 to 2 m, overlaid with the real world and easily viewed by naked eye are experimentally demonstrated. A new design method for holographic near-eye displays is introduced that is able to provide both parallax and accommodation cues, solving the vergence-accommodation conflict existing in current 3D displays. Additionally, the complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) compatible, industry-grade fabrication technology employed opens new avenues for the large-scale, mass manufacturing of metasurfaces.