Planar cameras with high performance and wide field of view (FOV) are critical in various fields, requiring highly compact and integrated technology. Existing wide FOV metalenses show great potential for ultrathin optical components, but there is a set of tricky challenges, such as chromatic aberrations correction, central bright speckle removal, and image quality improvement of wide FOV. We design a neural meta-camera by introducing a knowledge-fused data-driven paradigm equipped with transformer-based network. Such a paradigm enables the network to sequentially assimilate the physical prior and experimental data of the metalens, and thus can effectively mitigate the aforementioned challenges. An ultra-wide FOV meta-camera, integrating an off-axis monochromatic aberration-corrected metalens with a neural CMOS image sensor without any relay lenses, is employed to demonstrate the availability. High-quality reconstructed results of color images and real scene images at different distances validate that the proposed meta-camera can achieve an ultra-wide FOV (>100 deg) and full-color images with the correction of chromatic aberration, distortion, and central bright speckle, and the contrast increase up to 13.5 times. Notably, coupled with its compact size (< 0.13 cm3), portability, and full-color imaging capacity, the neural meta-camera emerges as a compelling alternative for applications, such as micro-navigation, micro-endoscopes, and various on-chip devices.
In virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) display, the vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC) is a significant issue. Thus, true-3D display technologies has been proposed to solve the VAC problem. Integral imaging (II) display, one of the most critical true-3D display technologies, has received increasing research recently. Significantly, anachromatic metalens array has realized a broadband metalens-array-based II (meta-II). However, the past micro-scale metalens arrays were incompatible with commercial micro-displays. Additionally, the elemental image array(EIA)rendering is slow. These device and algorithm problems prevent meta-II from being used for practical video-rate near-eye displays (NEDs). This research demonstrates a II-based NED combining a commercial micro-display and a metalens array. We make efforts in the hardware and software to solve the bottlenecks of video-rate metalens array II-based NED. The large-area nanoimprint technology fabricates the metalens array, and a novel real-time rendering algorithm is proposed to generate the EIA. We also build a see-through prototype based on our meta-II NED, demonstrating the effect of depth of field in AR, and the 3D parallax effect on the real mode. This work verifies the feasibility of nanoimprint technology for mass preparation of metalens samples, explores the potential of video-rate meta-II displays, which we can be applied in the fields of VR/AR and 3D display.
In this presentation, we briefly review the development of optical metalenses from the single metalens to the metalens array and to the metalens systems, especially focusing on the progress of silicon nitride metalenses. We then show the optical properties of silicon nitride films with different refractive index in our lab. With such silicon nitride films, we introduce our researches on the broadband achromatic metalens array, and the microscope meta-objectives with cascade metalenses, showing the visible imaging applications on noncoherent 3D integral imaging and high-resolution biological imaging.
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