Mark Zuckerberg reveals some weird and intriguing VR glasses

by time news

The holy grail of the VR world is to pass the Turing visual test, but on the way there you have to pass some tough stops. Get some very weird prototypes of Meta’s reality division trying to crack the way there

Mark Zuckerberg and the HoloCake. Image: Meta

If you have not yet been able to use Meta’s VR glasses (well, Facebook), Meta Quest 2, then we first of all highly recommend you to try them on. Unlike quite a few of its other products, Meta has managed to create a pretty complete and successful product here that combines impressive capabilities with good pricing – but nonetheless, these glasses are light years away from making you think you were launched into another universe, or the same weird vision of Mark Zuckerberg’s MetaVerse.

At a special press conference hosted by Meta, Zuckerberg unveiled the significant challenges that will allow the company to pass the “Turing Screen Test” that will make you differentiate between reality and virtual reality, and along the way also showcased the very interesting advances its research division has made behind the scenes. One thing you need to consider before you start reading – none of these prototypes are even close to launch or transition to mass production. Shall we start?

How do you get the perfect VR display?

Zuckerberg claims that there are at least 4 major challenges in the display segment of VR glasses: resolution, focus, distortion and HDR. The first is perhaps the one that every user thinks of. Today, Meta’s popular VR glasses reach a total pixel density of 773PPI and a brightness of 100 nits. It’s much, but much less than what you have even on a bad screen of a smartphone, cheap TV or a bad laptop.

This is Butterscotch. Image: Meta

The company’s biggest achievement to date in the resolution segment came with a quirky prototype called Butterscotch. According to Zuckerberg, the glasses manage to achieve 6/6 vision for the user also in VR, so that in the imaging of an impressive view, each leaf can be seen separately on the trees. But, and this is a very big but in the full sense of the word: the crew had to reduce the field of vision by about 50% compared to Quest 2 to display this resolution, and the helmet itself is so heavy that the display actually sits detached from the screen.

But resolution is an almost obvious challenge for any VR user. The second challenge is the focus challenge. When we watch TV we are used to not controlling the focus of the camera, but when we talk about VR glasses that are supposed to give you the feeling that you are in a completely different place, we are currently stuck with a fixed focus that does not behave like your eye does in reality. . So Zuckerberg and his team introduced the Half Dome series, which is a bit more like the Rift than the Quest, and uses Varifocal lenses that are able to move dynamically according to your eye, similar to how smartphone camera lenses move to produce autofocus. The company has been working on the development of glasses and refocals since 2017, but recently managed with the Half Dome 3 to replace all the mechanical components with liquid crystal lenses, which allows for a reduction in its size and weight.

The Half Dome series. Image: Meta

Aside from the focus, there is also the challenge of distortion or distortion. If you used VR glasses, you must have noticed that no matter what the jitter rate of your glasses is, every time your eye moves from place to place, you get weird distortions that make objects in space feel really static and sometimes you can even notice all sorts of very strange colored distortions. So the meta are not yet ready to announce significant innovations in the field, but do announce that they have created a distortion simulator that sits outside of Butterscotch and allows researchers to understand why and how these distortions occur, and produce new tools and algorithms to try to deal with them. In other words – there is a reasonable chance that this will be the most difficult challenge to solve by the company.

The fourth challenge, and according to Zuckerberg also the most significant, is HDR, or High Dynamic Range. We are familiar with this concept from TV and smartphone screens, where it usually says that a particular screen is capable of displaying a wider range of contrast and brightness, so that dark spots and light spots get a sub-validity and an impressive and deeper image. Today, as mentioned, the Quest 2 is capable of reaching 100 nits, and it is likely that your smartphone is capable of reaching 1,000 nits and beyond, so its display is much more impressive than that of VR glasses.

And this is Starburst

For this case of HDR in VR, Zuckerberg unveiled Starburst, which with the help of a very powerful lamp sitting behind the screen is capable of reaching tremendous brightness levels of over 10,000 and 20,000 nits (at very specific points, of course). But you know that there is another but – the Starburst has to be physically held all the time as a kind of binoculars because it is large and heavy.

And now for something completely different

On the way to these developments there are quite a few failed experiments

Each of the prototypes that Zuckerberg and the team introduced is a kind of landmark in the study of VR and VR displays, but the unusual prototype that Zuckerberg introduced is the Holocake 2, the lightest VR helmet the company has produced to date. According to Zuckerberg, the helmet works fully and is capable of displaying any application or game that currently exists (connected to a computer only). To achieve this, they use a pancake and hologram lens (if you did not understand it by name) thus reducing the gap between the display and the lens, and also reducing the lens thickness by using a much thinner and flatter holographic lens. It is also the company’s first experience with laser diodes instead of LED diodes. However, Zuckerberg himself noted that there are quite a few drawbacks to this approach, arguing that it promotes them in one aspect, and takes them back in other aspects.

For dessert, Zuckerberg introduced the least “true” prototype of all he had presented so far, called Mirror Lake. This is a concept that is similar to ski goggles, and according to the researchers, thanks to the use of holography, all the components become flatter and thus it is easier to cram more technologies into it in the same place. A kind of compression of all the previous prototypes into one prototype that will allow the meta to present for the first time also a Mixed Reality helmet. However, the team qualifies itself and claims that this is only a preliminary concept, and there is no helmet at this stage that proves it works. In case the team does manage to produce Mirror Lake, it claims to be a Game Changer for the VR world.

Excites the technologists, reassures the shareholders

Look, Meta’s event was pretty weird, in that there were no concrete announcements, dates or prices, but it’s quite in line with the “spirit of the commander” when it comes to announcements related to the Mabras, the same vague and unclear vision for the “next generation of the Internet” Everything in virtual worlds. Only unlike the very theoretical and very imaginative Tavers announcements, the company seems to be really scientifically focused on VR helmet displays and although it will be many more years before it presents a real breakthrough, the stations it presents along the way are the closest thing to innovation in the field. One may not like even these slightly bizarre announcements. Even if their goal is to reassure the company’s shareholders along the way.


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A good old age

Born with a joystick in hand. He has far too many gadgets and far too little free time to play with them all. An unexplained hammer holder for calibrating device batteries. When he’s not busy writing about technology, he likes to talk about it, and a lot

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