Patent ID: 11914767
Assignee: MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING, LLC
Field: Optics (Instruments)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 6:
7. A head-mounted display (HMD) device wearable by a user and supporting a mixed-reality experience including viewing virtual images from a virtual world that are combined with real-world images of objects in a physical world, comprising:
a waveguide-based display system through which the user can view the physical world and on which the virtual images are rendered within a field of view (FOV) of the display system;
an infrared (IR) illumination source generating one or more beams of IR light:
a waveguide-based illumination system including an illumination system waveguide, at least one input coupler disposed on the illumination system waveguide, and at least one output coupler disposed on the illumination system waveguide, the input coupler configured for in-coupling the beams of IR light from the IR illumination source into the illumination system waveguide, and the output coupler configured for out-coupling the beams of IR light from the illumination system waveguide, wherein the output coupler is at least partially aligned with the FOV of the display system;
at least one optical component disposed on the illumination system waveguide opposite to the at least one output coupler, the optical component being a discrete component that is separate from the at least one output coupler and configured to exclude out-coupling functionality and further configured to spread the out-coupled beams of IR light into divergent beams of IR light within a predefined range of spreading angles to generate one or more IR point sources that are located within the FOV of the display system;
one or more sensors configured to capture glints from the IR point sources that are reflected from features of an eye of the user; and
an eye tracker operatively coupled to the IR illumination source and the one or more sensors, the eye tracker configured to control the IR illumination source and the one or more sensors to respectively generate glints and capture images of the glints for eye tracking.