Design of an off-axis near-eye AR display system based on a full-color freeform holographic optical element

In this Letter, we propose a design and fabrication method for a full-color augmented reality (AR) optical system based on a freeform holographic optical element (HOE). A point-by-point design method is proposed to generate the starting point of the system. Based on the preliminarily optimized system, the recording systems of the full-color HOE are designed. A joint optimization is conducted for all the systems, simultaneously considering the overall imaging performance, the diffraction efficiency, the constraints, and fabrication. A prototype is designed and fabricated to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.