Optical waveguide devices, methods and systems incorporating same

An optical system comprising:

• an augmented reality display optical combiner, said optical combing comprising an optical waveguide substrate and a plurality of reflectors spatially distributed in a reflector sequence along a propagation axis of said optical waveguide substrate;
• wherein said plurality of reflectors comprises a plurality of angular selective notch filter optical reflectors;
• wherein each angular selective notch filter optical reflector is configured both to partially reflect and partially transmit light rays having angles of incidence with respect to the reflector which are in a specific transflectance band of angles selected for each particular reflector and to pass or transmit light rays that have angles of incidence above and below the selected specific transflectance band without reflection, or with reduced reflection compared to light rays having angles of incidence within the selected specific transflectance band;
• and
• wherein the specific transflectance band of each angular selective notch filter optical reflector is selected according to the order of the reflector within the sequence of said reflectors in said optical waveguide substrate.

A computer-implemented method of determining optical profiles of reflectors for an optical device, the method comprising in a computer simulation:

• designating optical properties of an optical waveguide substrate defining a plurality of reflectors spatially distributed in a sequence along the optical waveguide substrate;
• for each reflector, designating surface properties and associating the surface properties with the reflector within the waveguide substrate;
• simulating a light ray source at the eye-box plane;
• reverse tracing light rays from the light ray source into said optical waveguide,
• based on the defined reflector surface properties and the waveguide geometry, determining the angles of incidence of the light rays from the eye-box light source that are directly and indirectly incident on the reflectors;
• and
• determining the optimized or required selective notch filter angular response of each reflector according to the determined angles of incidence of the rays directly and indirectly incident on the reflectors.