Óptica
Pancake lens
También conocido como pancake optics, folded optics
A pancake lens is a folded optical design that bounces light back and forth between layers, letting headsets sit closer to the face with a sharper image across more of the view.
A pancake lens is a compact lens stack that uses polarizers and partly reflective layers to fold the light path. Light passes through the stack, reflects back, and passes through again before reaching your eye. Because the path is folded, the display can sit much closer to the lens than with older single-element designs, which makes the front of the headset thinner and moves weight closer to your face.
Benefits
- A slimmer, better-balanced headset.
- A larger "sweet spot," meaning the image stays sharp even when you look toward the edges.
- Far fewer of the glare streaks known as god rays that are common with Fresnel lenses.
Drawbacks
Folding the light path wastes a lot of it, so pancake optics need brighter displays or backlights to deliver the same perceived brightness. They are also more complex and more expensive to make.
Examples
Pancake lenses are used in the Meta Quest 3, the Meta Quest Pro, the PICO 4 Ultra and the Apple Vision Pro, among others.
Términos relacionados
- Fresnel lens
- A Fresnel lens is a thin, light lens made of concentric ridges; it is cheap and bright but can show glare streaks called god rays…
- Field of view (FOV)
- Field of view (FOV) is how much of the virtual world you can see at once through a headset, usually given in degrees horizontally…
- Micro-OLED
- Micro-OLED is a display built directly on a silicon chip, packing very small self-lit pixels into a tiny panel…