The new VR glasses from Meta

The glasses are far from developed and ready for sale, but the designs - codenamed Butterscotch, Starburst, Holocake 2, and Mirror Lake - are set to result in a sleek headset with more realistic colors that supports finer details than the current Quest 2 screens.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Reality Labs chief scientist Michael Abrash, along with other Reality Labs members, presented their work last week during a virtual roundtable discussion. The event focused on designs that Meta calls "time machines": bulky proofs of concept intended for testing one specific feature, such as a super bright backlight or a screen with super high resolution. "I think we're in the middle of a big step forward towards realism," Zuckerberg told reporters. "I don't think it'll be long before we can create scenes with essentially perfect fidelity." Display technology isn't the only piece of the puzzle to achieve that, but it's an area where Meta's intensive VR hardware research gives a considerable lead.

Zuckerberg reiterated his plans to launch a high-end headset codenamed Project Cambria in 2022, following the initial announcement last year. Cambria supports both full VR and mixed reality, thanks to high-resolution cameras that can transmit a video feed to the screen. It will also come with eye tracking, a crucial feature for future Meta headsets. Zuckerberg indicated that Meta has two lines of VR headsets planned: one that will remain affordable and consumer-oriented, like today's Quest 2, and one that will incorporate the company's latest technology, targeting a "prosumer and professional market." This seems to align with reports that the company already plans updates for Cambria and the Quest 2, though these prototypes were not discussed during the conversation.

Meta's VR headsets are alongside another line of extended reality glasses, namely the augmented reality glasses, which are intended to project images onto the real world rather than exclude it through a screen with only virtual reality content. Meta recently postponed the launch of its first-generation AR glasses. In general, VR screens have reached consumers much faster than AR glasses. But Meta's AR prototypes show how far the company thinks it can still go.

The Starburst is even further away from a public release than the Butterscotch, but contains a similarly impressive upgrade. The somewhat bulky design uses a powerful lamp - which requires handles to support the weight - it produces HDR (high dynamic range) lighting with 20,000 nits of brightness. "This headset is of course hugely impractical, but we use it as a test platform for further research and studies," says Zuckerberg. "The goal of all this work is to help us identify which technical directions will enable us to make meaningful improvements so we can start approaching visual realism."

Holocake 2 goes in another direction and explores Meta's capabilities to make VR headsets thinner and lighter. It is the successor to a design dating back to 2020 and is based on holographic optics, a light-bending technique where a nearly flat panel replaces the current thick lens. The result could be as thin as sunglasses, but Meta is still working on a suitable light source that could power the sunglasses - almost certainly this will be a laser and not the OLEDs commonly used today. "We will need to do a lot of research to come up with a consumer-viable laser that meets our specifications: safe, inexpensive, efficient, and can fit into a thin VR headset," says Zuckerberg.

The presentation also discussed Half Dome, a series of prototypes that allow focal planes to shift depending on where users are looking. This varifocal optical technology was introduced in 2017 as a clunky mechanical system and later switched to a system of liquid crystal lenses. According to internal Meta research, they can thereby create a convincing (and physically comfortable) illusion of depth in VR.

Meta described the technology of Half Dome in 2020 as "almost ready for public release," but today Zuckerberg was much less optimistic. "This stuff, this technology is still far away," he said in response to a question about his earlier comment in 2020, that "this technology was almost ready for the market." "We're working on it, we really want to get it into one of the upcoming headsets, I'm confident we'll do that at some point, but I'm not going to make any more announcements about timelines today."

Reality Labs will reveal more details of the research at the SIGGRAPH fair in August this year, including how they will capture real-world recordings more accurately for mixed reality. The designs above are actual hardware prototypes that Zuckerberg briefly showed during the event. But Meta also unveiled a prototype, called Mirror Lake, that is still just an idea and has not been built yet. The design looks more like ski goggles than Meta's current Quest hardware. It would include the thin optics of Holocake 2, the HDR capabilities of Starburst, and the resolution of Butterscotch. "It shows what a complete next-gen display system could look like," said Abrash.

On top of these features, Mirror Lake would include an outward-facing screen that projects an image of the user's eyes on the outside of the headset, reducing the sense of enclosure for people outside the headset. Meta showed this somewhat creepy feature last year in a prototype, and it may not be the only company interested in the concept: Apple has considered a similar feature for its headset. The idea is intriguing for the mixed reality world where Meta wants to invest heavily - but today the company is focusing on the small steps towards it.

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