Fenglin Peng: The 2023 SPIE Early Career Achievement Award — Government/Industry Focus
Fenglin Peng is a research scientist at Reality Labs, Meta, where she works on novel optics and display systems to enable future AR/VR. Her accomplishments in AR/VR include introducing an alternative for the commonly known linear reflective polarizers in the pancake system. In a pancake VR system, a reflective polarizer is required to fold the optical path and reduce the display-to-eye track length. The linear reflective polarizer with well-established production lines was naturally used for this application. Peng introduced the use of cholesteric liquid crystal film as circular reflective polarizers. The circular reflection removes the clocking sensitivity, leading to simpler manufacturing. The compact and large field-of-view pancake VR systems are associated with optical design challenges. One of them is the brightness roll-off introduced by the mismatch between display emission angle and pancake chief ray angle. Peng proposed and led the development of a novel diffractive liquid crystal film based on Pancharatnam-Berry phase to direct the emission angle. Her innovation addressed the brightness roll-off, improved the eye-box uniformity, contrast, and increased the system efficiency by as much as 50%.
Peng has authored several SPIE proceedings papers and is a member of the Advances in Display Technology Committee for SPIE Photonics West. In 2016, Peng received an SPIE Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship.
“As an early researcher in optics, Dr. Peng has consistently demonstrated her knowledge, creativity and leadership,” says Meta’s Senior Director of Optics and Display Research Barry Silverstein. “Dr. Peng joined Meta’s Optics and Display Research team as a research scientist in 2017, right after receiving her PhD in Optics. She has put her innovative thinking into the frontier of AR/VR development as demonstrated by filing over 30 patents with 17 granted to date. Dr. Peng led a diverse slate of projects including the development of the first electrically switchable half-wave retarder, providing broad-bandwidth and fast switching to the Half-dome 3 project. This enables the first demonstration of a fully functional electrical varifocal VR system. The conflict between 3D content (vergence) and eye focus (accommodation) in VR is one of the most important reasons for VR sickness. Previously proposed Half-dome varifocal systems were based on mechanically moving the display panel, leading to more power consumption and larger size. Her work and contribution toward Half-dome 3 mark an important milestone in moving VR headsets to the next level.”
Meet the other 2023 SPIE Society Award recipients.
Read more about Fenglin Peng and the SPIE Early Career Achievement Award — Government/Industry Focus.
