Unique Shared-Aperture Display with Head or Target Tracking

The extreme environment of a military cockpit requires a novel display technology, introduced as the Virtual Retinal Display (VRD). A head-worn VRD generates an image by optical scanning light directly to the viewer’s eye. This novel display allows the direct coupling of the display to an infrared optical head tracking system, resulting in an interactive VRD. With only minor adjustments, the interactive VRD can be used in many non-military AR and VR line-of-sight target tracking applications, such as image plane manipulations. Since the unique tracking technology shares the same aperture or scanned optical beam with the visual display, the tracking produces high accuracy and computational efficiency without the motion artifacts from video frame rate tracking. The apparatus and performance of static and dynamic 3D target tracking in 2D projection overlay are demonstrated.