Wins the runner-up prize with ‘15 Focal Planes Head-Mounted Display’
“Relieves eye strain and improves immersion”


Winners of the Optical Design Challenge for AR/VR/MR. Third from the left, Researcher Dong-Heon Yoo (Photo credits: SNU)

Dong-Heon Yoo and Seungjae Lee, who are PhD students under Professor Byoungho Lee of department of electrical and computer engineering, College of Engineering (Dean Kukheon Char), SNU (President Se-Jung Oh), won the runner-up prize at the Optical Design Challenge for AR/VR/MR, which was held from February 2nd until the 7th at the Moscone Center of San Francisco, United States.

This challenge was hosted by the world’s biggest optics and photonics society, Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers(SPIE), as part of the Photonics West conference. Every year, 20,000 optics technology researchers and developers and around 1,300 companies from around the world participate in this conference. Research staffs from major companies, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Huawei, and many start-up companies that are developing headsets for AR/VR/MR attended and judged research papers of the participants.

Dong-Heon Yoo and Seungjae Lee received a high score by submitting a paper with a title, ’15 Focal Planes Head-Mounted Display Using LED Array Backlight.’ They introduced through the paper how to implement a VR headset based on a glasses-free 3-dimensional display concept using LED arrays with a small volume. This headset can represent the three-dimensional space from 20cm to tens of meters ahead onto fifteen of two-dimensional focal planes in real time, thus smoothly expressing the three-dimensional information with afterimages.

15 focal planes head mounted display. (a) Experiment equipment (b) three-dimensional images taken from different distances (photo credits: SNU)

Professor Byoungho Lee explained, “Currently commercialized headsets for virtual reality have a disadvantage of causing visual inconvenience to the users leading to dizziness and sickness. Through this research, it will be possible to relieve eye strain, which was a huge barrier for current AR headsets, and to further improve the level of immersion.”

This research was conducted with financial resources of Ministry of Science and ICT and support from Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation(IITP). Under the supervision of professor Byoungho Lee, who is pioneering technology related to AR/VR optics system in both Korea and overseas, researchers Dong-Heon Yoo and Seungjae Lee dominantly led the research, and researchers Young Jin Kim, Jaebum Cho and Sooyeon Choi, student of SNU department of electrical and computer engineering, also contributed.

Source: http://ee.snu.ac.kr/community/news?bm=v&bbsidx=48500
Translated by Kyungjin Lee, English Editor of Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, jin11542@snu.ac.kr