An Optical See-through MR Display with Digital Micro-mirror Device

Abstract

Several methodologies on Mixed Reality displays focus how to represent the occlusion phenomenon among real objects and CG objects. Generally, optical seethrough ways can not represent the correct occlusion phenomenon: a CG object overlaps on the real one translucently. This paper proposes an optical system with Digital Micro Mirror Device (DMD), a new type of optical see-through display which can represent the correct occlusion among the real and virtual images. A DMD consists of some hundred thousands of micro-mirror, that one micro-mirror corresponds to one pixel of the input image, and each mirror can switch its reflective direction. A reflective optical system with DMD, object and eye lenses is able to mix the transparent view of the real scene and another image according to arbitrary pixels with arbitrary mixture rate. Unlike other optical see-through displays with a LCD shutter and a half-mirror, there is an advantage in optical efficiency due to reflective and switching optics.