Meta previewed some of its latest virtual reality prototypes this week and plans to demo them at next week’s SIGGRAPH conference. The aim, according to Meta’s blog post, is to offer VR experiences “indistinguishable from the physical world” — something it says no present-day VR system has yet done. It wants to surpass what it terms the visual Turing test.
“Our mission for this project was to provide the best image quality possible,” said Xuan Wang, an optical research scientist with Reality Labs Research’s Optics, Photonics and Light Systems (OPALS) team.
And Meta’s Tiramisu project seemingly has the numbers to back up those ambitions. It promises three times the contrast, 14 times the maximum brightness and 3.6 times the angular resolution of the Meta Quest 3. The headset offers 1,400 nits of brightness and an angular resolution of 90 pixels per degree.
It’s a work in progress, however. Tiramisu has a field of view of just 33 degrees by 33 degrees compared to the 110 degrees horizontal and 96 degrees vertical FOV in the Meta Quest 3. It also looks like Google’s Daydream, from back in the day.
Conversely, another pair of prototypes, codenamed Boba 3, leans into an ultrawide field of view. It has a 180-degree FOV, when human vision extends to around 200 degrees. Also, they’re roughly the same size as current VR headsets.
— Mat Smith
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