What They Say
Kopin reported that it has developed an all-plastic ‘pancake’ optical lens system for VR, AR and MR applications. The lens system provides an image equivalent to a 250″ (635cm) diagonal display viewed at 10′ (3m) distance when used with a Kopin 2.6K x 2.6K OLED microdisplay, but the lens is just 16mm thick and weighs 15gms. Field of view is 95°. The system uses aspherical lenses and special plastic materials that have almost no birefringence in a folded optics configuration (3M & Pegatron Working on VR Headset with Folded Optics).
In his send out of the release, Chris Chinnock said that Kopin has filed for three patents for the optical system and he believes that the firm has ‘locked up’ the supply chain.
What We Think
Clearly pancake optics are an interesting area of development. According to B Kress’s excellent book on Optics for XR , pancake optics has been under development since 1969.
Although Kopin claims that the optics would be good for AR, like Chris, I’m not clear on this. Still, Kopin has been around a long time and has to be taken seriously. (BR)
Assembly schematic and pictures of the working all-plastic Pancake optical lenses.
