UCF Trustee Chair Professor, Optics & Photonics
Emerging light engines for AR/VR displays
Shin-Tson Wu is a Trustee Chair professor at College of Optics and Photonics, University of Central Florida. He is an Academician of Academia Sinica, a Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and a Fellow of the IEEE, OSA, SID, and SPIE. He is a recipient of Optica Edwin H. Land Medal (2022), SPIE Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award (2022), Optica Esther Hoffman Beller Medal (2014), SID Slottow-Owaki Prize (2011), Optica Joseph Fraunhofer Award (2010), SPIE G. G. Stokes Award (2008), and SID Jan Rajchman Prize (2008). In 2014, he was inducted to the inaugural Florida Inventors Hall of Fame. Dr. Wu has published 7 books, 660 journal papers, and 310 conference papers, and obtained 95 U.S. patents. His publications have accumulated about 45,000 citations with an h-index of 102. In the past, he served as founding Editor-In-Chief of the IEEE/Optica Journal of Display Technology, Optica Publications Council Chair and Board of Directors, and SID honors and awards committee chair.
Presently, LCD and OLED are the two dominating light engines for VR headsets. How to achieve low power consumption and ultracompact formfactor are major challenges. For lightweight eyeglasses-like AR displays, micro-LED, OLED-on-Silicon, MEMS, laser beam scan, and front-lit LCoS are strong contenders. To reduce the required display brightness for low power consumption, and to enable occlusion effect, a segmented smart dimmer is a viable approach. The pros and cons of each approach will be analyzed.