Traditional optical manufacturing poses a great challenge to near-eye display designers due to large lead times in the order of multiple weeks, limiting the abilities of optical designers to iterate fast and explore beyond conventional designs. We present a complete near-eye display manufacturing pipeline with a day lead time using commodity hardware. Our novel manufacturing pipeline consists of several innovations including a rapid production technique to improve surface of a 3D printed component to optical quality suitable for near-eye display application, a computational design methodology using machine learning and ray tracing to create freeform static projection screen surfaces for near-eye displays that can represent arbitrary focal surfaces, and a custom projection lens design that distributes pixels non-uniformly for a foveated near-eye display hardware design candidate. We have demonstrated untethered augmented reality near-eye display prototypes to assess success of our technique, and show that a ski-goggles form factor, a large monocular field of view$(30^{o}\times 55^{o})$, and a resolution of 12 cycles per degree can be achieved.

Optical see-through augmented reality (AR) systems are a next-generation computing platform that offer unprecedented user experiences by seamlessly combining physical and digital content. Many of the traditional challenges of these displays have been significantly improved over the last few years, but AR experiences offered by today's systems are far from seamless and perceptually realistic. Mutually consistent occlusions between physical and digital objects are typically not supported. When mutual occlusion is supported, it is only supported for a fixed depth. We propose a new optical see-through AR display system that renders mutual occlusion in a depth-dependent, perceptually realistic manner. To this end, we introduce varifocal occlusion displays based on focus-tunable optics, which comprise a varifocal lens system and spatial light modulators that enable depth-corrected hard-edge occlusions for AR experiences. We derive formal optimization methods and closed-form solutions for driving this tunable lens system and demonstrate a monocular varifocal occlusion-capable optical see-through AR display capable of perceptually realistic occlusion across a large depth range.

In this paper, we present our novel design for switchable AR/VR near-eye displays which can help solve the vergence-accommodation-conflict issue. The principal idea is to time-multiplex virtual imagery and real-world imagery and use a tunable lens to adjust focus for the virtual display and the see-through scene separately. With this novel design, prescription eyeglasses for near- and far-sighted users become unnecessary. This is achieved by integrating the wearer's corrective optical prescription into the tunable lens for both virtual display and see-through environment. We built a prototype based on the design, comprised of micro-display, optical systems, a tunable lens, and active shutters. The experimental results confirm that the proposed near-eye display design can switch between AR and VR and can provide correct accommodation for both.

We introduce an optical design and a rendering pipeline for a full-color volumetric near-eye display which simultaneously presents imagery with near-accurate per-pixel focus across an extended volume ranging from 15cm (6.7 diopters) to 4M (0.25 diopters), allowing the viewer to accommodate freely across this entire depth range. This is achieved using a focus-tunable lens that continuously sweeps a sequence of 280 synchronized binary images from a high-speed, Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) projector and a high-speed, high dynamic range (HDR) light source that illuminates the DMD images with a distinct color and brightness at each binary frame. Our rendering pipeline converts 3-D scene information into a 2-D surface of color voxels, which are decomposed into 280 binary images in a voxel-oriented manner, such that 280 distinct depth positions for full-color voxels can be displayed.

We present a novel design for an optical see-through augmented reality display that offers a wide field of view and supports a compact form factor approaching ordinary eyeglasses. Instead of conventional optics, our design uses only two simple hardware components: an LCD panel and an array of point light sources (implemented as an edge-lit, etched acrylic sheet) placed directly in front of the eye, out of focus. We code the point light sources through the LCD to form miniature see-through projectors. A virtual aperture encoded on the LCD allows the projectors to be tiled, creating an arbitrarily wide field of view. Software rearranges the target augmented image into tiled sub-images sent to the display, which appear as the correct image when observed out of the viewer's accommodation range. We evaluate the design space of tiled point light projectors with an emphasis on increasing spatial resolution through the use of eye tracking. We demonstrate feasibility through software simulations and a real-time prototype display that offers a 110° diagonal field of view in the form factor of large glasses and discuss remaining challenges to constructing a practical display.

Granular computing represents an object as an information granule. Traditionally the information is derived from the primary source of data by recording events such as transactions, phone calls, user sessions, security breaches, and car trips. Much of the early data mining techniques used information granules generated from primary data sources. Recent data mining techniques such as ensemble classifiers and stacked regression use secondary sources of data obtained from initial data mining activities. Typically, these techniques use preliminary applications of data mining techniques for initial knowledge discovery. The knowledge acquired from the preliminary data mining is then used for more refined analysis. Granular computing can enable us to develop a formal framework for incorporating information from both primary and secondary sources of data. This enhanced granular representation can help us develop integrated data mining techniques. This paper proposes a novel recursive meta-clustering algorithm to demonstrate the versatility of granular computing for developing integrated data mining techniques to exploit primary and secondary knowledge sources.