Design and fabrication of a dual-element off-axis near-eye optical magnifier

The key contribution is the design, analysis, and fabrication of a dual-element off-axis magnifier to improve the state of the art in catadioptric magnifiers. The catadioptric magnifier is composed of a free-form mirror and a lens with a diffractive optical element. A monocular magnifier was prototyped, to our knowledge for the first time, with the specifications of an 8 mm exit pupil, 20 degrees diagonal full field of view, 15 mm eye clearance, 1.5 arcmin resolution, and operating in the photopic visual regime.