Big Blue Ceiling

HoloFlect

Optics and Displays

How HoloFlect puts an image in front of the eye, from a reflective visor and its calibration to the display panels and driver boards behind it, plus our experiments printing and finishing lenses in clear resin.

A double-lobed mirrored visor lying next to a white printed display frame, both reflecting the room's lights, on a cutting mat.

Every HoloFlect build uses the same basic optical layout. The display sits above the eyes, facing down, and a curved, partly reflective visor in front of the face bounces its image back toward the wearer while letting the room show through. The Molecules design calls the whole assembly the Optical Bracket. It's a common mount and cabling path, so the display, the visor and the field of view can all change without redesigning the rest of the headset.

A hand holding the Pro v1 headset in a living room, with two small images of a globe glowing on the inside of the visor.

The visor

The visor is one curved shell with a lobe for each eye. Its shape came from hand-drawn profiles and was refined in CAD. A curved reflector bends the image, so we made calibration images, with a panel and a grid for each eye, to see how the curve distorted them, and a resolution chart to check what detail survived.

We tried a range of visor treatments. A mostly clear visor keeps eye contact, which matters when the wearer is working with other people. A heavily tinted visor makes the display much more vivid, at the cost of seeing the wearer's eyes. Mirrored coatings sit between the two. The visor attaches to its bracket magnetically, so one treatment can be swapped for another, and in the finished parts the magnets are sealed inside the visor components.

A dark tinted double-lobed visor with a white bracket fastened along its top edge.

Panels and resolution

The first builds used a 5.5-inch full HD (1080p) panel. Once the modular build was proven, we moved to a 5.5-inch 2560×1440 panel. Split between two eyes, that gives 1280×1440 per eye, about twice the per-eye resolution of the first-generation HoloLens and Magic Leap headsets. The cheapest configuration kept the 1080p panel.

Both panels are driven over HDMI through a small HDMI-to-MIPI driver board. Fitting the panel, the board and the ribbon cable between them into a small space took its own design pass. We measured each board, worked out where the cable had to fold, and printed a cradle and baseplate that hold the panel and board together as one module. That module is what the Optical Bracket carries, and swapping it is how a HoloFlect gets a new display.

A display driver board and ribbon cable on a white printed carrier plate.

Printed lenses

Alongside the visor, we ran a series of experiments printing small lenses in clear resin. Straight off the printer, the lenses are optically clear. They're rinsed in isopropyl alcohol to remove uncured resin, then post-cured under UV light. Curing leaves them slightly cloudy, but they can be polished back to clarity, and we also tried restoring the surface with thin clear coats. We printed lenses with flat mounting tabs and in ring-shaped mounts, and the finished lenses magnified printed text the way a ground lens would.

The same resin printer also produced clear visor shells, so a new curve could go from CAD to a part we could look through without leaving the shop.

  • A gloved hand holding a curved visor with a white printed edge, its surface tinted blue-green and reflecting the bench lights.
    A visor with a reflective coating.
  • A gloved hand holding a mirrored visor shell, which reflects the workbench and tools below it.
    A heavily mirrored visor treatment.
  • A double-lobed mirrored visor next to a white printed display frame, on a cutting mat beside a box of small parts.
    A mirrored visor and the display frame it pairs with.
  • A dark tinted double-lobed visor with a white bracket along its top edge, on a cutting mat.
    A heavily tinted visor, for vivid images.
  • View through a HoloFlect visor: a glowing purple grid and a speckled globe float in front of a living room.
    Through the visor: rendered content over the real room.
  • A hand-drawn sketch on a dark grid of a curved lens profile, labeled interior, front and cross-section.
    Sketching the visor's curve.
  • A calibration image of two side-by-side panels, each with grey triangles inside a circle, overlaid with a red grid.
    A dual-lens calibration image, with a grid for measuring distortion.
  • A grey resolution test chart with a central circle, fine line patterns and crosshair targets in the corners.
    A resolution test chart for checking the displays.
  • Display panels and driver boards laid out on a white background: two bare boards, a blue board, a blue panel back and small adapter boards.
    Display panels and the interface boards that drive them.
  • A bare display panel with a ribbon connector, lying on a white desk beside an Intel RealSense tracking camera.
    A higher-resolution panel next to the tracking camera it was paired with.
  • A display driver board and ribbon cable laid on a white printed carrier plate on a workbench.
    The display cradle with its driver board.
  • A display driver board on a whiteboard with hand-written dimensions, beside digital calipers reading its width.
    Measuring a driver board for the cradle.
  • A photo of a driver board on a green carrier, with a blue shape drawn over it and notes about reserving space underneath for the cable.
    Planning the cradle around the board and its cable.
  • A driver board and ribbon cable on a cutting mat, with hand-drawn dimensions and a note about two-millimeter mounting holes.
    Mounting-hole notes for the driver boards.
  • A clear resin visor printing upside down on the build plate of a resin printer, lit in purple and green.
    Printing a visor in clear resin.
  • Post-processing printed lenses: rinse, cure, and why they cloud.
  • A resin printer's build plate with a row of small clear lens prints hanging from it.
    Lens prints on the build plate.
  • A small clear printed lens with a flat tab, held in black tweezers.
    One printed lens, with its mounting tab.
  • Three small clear lenses with flat mounting tabs, printed in resin, sitting on a blue paper towel.
    Lenses printed in clear resin.
  • A syringe applying a drop to a small clear printed lens on a blue paper towel, with other lenses beside it.
    Applying a thin finishing coat to a lens.
  • Finishing the lens surfaces by hand.
  • Fingers holding a printed lens with a ring-shaped mount, with two more small lenses on the towel below.
    A ring-mounted lens design.
  • Close-up of a clear ring-shaped printed lens mount held by a gloved hand while a probe touches the lens.
    Checking a lens in its ring mount.
  • Inspecting a ring-mounted lens after cleaning.
  • A row of small clear lenses on black tape, arranged in an arc on a sheet of cardboard.
    Lenses set out for coating.
  • A small clear printed lens resting on a printed instruction sheet, magnifying the letters beneath it.
    A finished lens magnifying the text under it.

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