Holography for Automotive Applications: from HUD to LIDAR

Holography can offer unique solutions to the specific problems faced by automotive optical systems. Frequently, when possibilities have been exhausted using refractive and reflective designs, diffraction can come to the rescue by opening a new dimension to explore. Holographic optical elements (HOEs), for example, are thin film optics that can advantageously replace lenses, prisms, or mirrors. Head up display (HUD) and LIDAR for autonomous vehicles are two of the systems where our group have used HOEs to provide original answers to the limitations of classical optic. With HUD, HOEs address the problems of the limited field of view, and small eye box usually found in projection systems. Our approach is to recycle the light multiple times inside a waveguide so the combiner can be as large as the entire windshield. In this system, a hologram is used to inject a small image at one end of a waveguide, and another hologram is used to extract the image several times, providing an expanded eye box. In the case of LIDAR systems, non-mechanical beam scanning based on diffractive spatial light modulator (SLM), are only able to achieve an angular range of few degrees. We used multiplexed volume holograms (VH) to amplify the initial diffraction angle from the SLM to achieve up to 4 pi steradian coverage in a compact form factor.