Existing near-eye display designs struggle to balance between multiple trade-offs such as form factor, weight, computational requirements, and battery life. These design trade-offs are major obstacles on the path towards an all-day usable near-eye display. In this work, we address these trade-offs by, paradoxically, removing the display from near-eye displays. We present the beaming displays, a new type of near-eye display system that uses a projector and an all passive wearable headset. We modify an off-the-shelf projector with additional lenses. We install such a projector to the environment to beam images from a distance to a passive wearable headset. The beaming projection system tracks the current position of a wearable headset to project distortion-free images with correct perspectives. In our system, a wearable headset guides the beamed images to a user's retina, which are then perceived as an augmented scene within a user's field of view. In addition to providing the system design of the beaming display, we provide a physical prototype and show that the beaming display can provide resolutions as high as consumer-level near-eye displays. We also discuss the different aspects of the design space for our proposal.

We present StainedView, an optical see-through display that spatially filters the spectral distribution of light to form an image with improved color fidelity. Existing light-attenuation displays have limited color fidelity and contrast, resulting in a degraded appearance of virtual images. To use these displays to present virtual images that are more consistent with the real world, we require three things: intensity modulation of incoming light, spatial color filtering with narrower bandwidth, and appropriate light modulation for incoming light with an arbitrary spectral distribution. In StainedView, we address the three requirements by cascading two phase-only spatial light modulators (PSLMs), a digital micromirror device, and polarization optics to control both light intensity and spectrum distribution. We show that our design has a 1.8 times wider color gamut fidelity (75.8% fulfillment of sRGB color space) compared to the existing single-PSLM approach (41.4%) under a reference white light. We demonstrated the design with a proof-of-concept display system. We further introduce our optics design and pixel-selection algorithm for the given light input, evaluate the spatial color filter, and discuss the limitation of the current prototype.

We propose a novel spatial augmented reality (SAR) framework to edit the appearance of physical glossy surfaces. The key idea is utilizing the specular reflection, which was a major distractor in conventional SAR systems. Namely, we spatially manipulate the appearance of an environmental surface, which is observed through the specular reflection. We use a stereoscopic display to present two appearances with disparity on the environmental surface, by which the depth of the specularly reflected visual information corresponds to the glossy surface. We refer to this method as augmented environment mapping (AEM). The paper describes its principle, followed by three different implementation approaches inspired by typical virtual and augmented reality approaches. We confirmed the feasibility of AEM through both quantitative and qualitative experiments using prototype systems.