The team’s research was presented at the IEEE VR conference in Saint-Malo, France, in March 2025, in a paper entitled Slim Diffractive Waveguide Glasses for Beaming Displays with Enhanced Head Orientation Tolerance.
AR glasses have the potential to transform a user’s physical environment by integrating virtual elements. Despite many advances in hardware technology over the years, AR glasses remain heavy and awkward and still lack adequate computational power, battery life and brightness for optimal user experience.
In order to overcome these limitations, a team of researchers from the University of Tokyo and their collaborators designed AR glasses that receive images from beaming projectors instead of generating them.
“This research aims to develop a thin and lightweight optical system for AR glasses using the ‘beaming display’ approach,” said Yuta Itoh, project associate professor at the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at the University of Tokyo and first author of the research paper. “This method enables AR glasses to receive projected images from the environment, eliminating the need for onboard power sources and reducing weight while maintaining high-quality visuals.”
The researchers created a prototype to test their technology, projecting a 7-millimeter image onto the receiving glasses from 1.5 meters away using a laser-scanning projector angled between zero and 40 degrees away from the projector. Importantly, the incorporation of gratings, which direct light inside and outside the system, as waveguides increased the angle at which the team’s AR glasses can receive projected light with acceptable image quality from around five degrees to around 20-30 degrees.
The team acknowledges there is more testing to be done and enhancements to be made. “Future research will focus on improving the wearability and integrating head-tracking functionalities to further enhance the practicality of next-generation beaming displays,” Itoh said.
Ideally, future testing setups will monitor the position of the light-receiving glasses and steerable projectors will move and beam images to light-receiving AR glasses accordingly, further enhancing their utility in a three-dimensional environment. Different light sources with improved resolution can also be used to improve image quality. The team also hopes to address some limitations of their current design, including ghost images, a limited field of view, monochromatic images, flat waveguides that cannot accommodate prescription lenses, and two-dimensional images.
Research paper
Yuta Itoh, Tomoya Nakamura, Yuichi Hiroi, and Kaan Akşit, “Slim Diffractive Waveguide Glasses for Beaming Displays with Enhanced Head Orientation Tolerance,” IEEE VR 2025 conference paper: March 8–12, 2025.