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Meta Reveals VR Headset Prototypes Designed to Make VR ‘Indistinguishable From Reality’

June 20, 2022 From roadtovr

Meta says its ultimate goal with its VR hardware is to make a comfortable, compact headset with visual finality that’s ‘indistinguishable from reality’. Today the company revealed its latest VR headset prototypes which it says represent steps toward that goal.

Meta has made it no secret that it’s dumping tens of billions of dollars in its XR efforts, much of which is going to long-term R&D through its Reality Labs Research division. Apparently in an effort to shine a bit of light onto what that money is actually accomplishing, the company invited a group of press to sit down for a look at its latest accomplishments in VR hardware R&D.

Reaching the Bar

To start, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke alongside Reality Labs Chief Scientist Michael Abrash to explain that the company’s ultimate goal is to build VR hardware that meets all the visual requirements to be accepted as “real” by your visual system.

VR headsets today are impressively immersive, but there’s still no question that what you’re looking at is, well… virtual.

Inside of Meta’s Reality Labs Research division, the company uses the term ‘visual Turing Test’ to represent the bar that needs to be met to convince your visual system that what’s inside the headset is actually real. The concept is borrowed from a similar concept which denotes the point at which a human can tell the difference between another human and an artificial intelligence.

For a headset to completely convince your visual system that what’s inside the headset is actually real, Meta says you need a headset that can pass that “visual Turing Test.”

Four Challenges

Zuckerberg and Abrash outlined what they see as four key visual challenges that VR headsets need to solve before the visual Turing Test can be passed: varifocal, distortion, retina resolution, and HDR.

Briefly, here’s what those mean:

  • Varifocal: the ability to focus on arbitrary depths of the virtual scene, with both essential focus functions of the eyes (vergence and accommodation)
  • Distortion: lenses inherently distort the light that passes through them, often creating artifacts like color separation and pupil swim that make the existence of the lens obvious.
  • Retina resolution: having enough resolution in the display to meet or exceed the resolving power of the human eye, such that there’s no evidence of underlying pixels
  • HDR: also known as high dynamic range, which describes the range of darkness and brightness that we experience in the real world (which almost no display today can properly emulate).

The Display Systems Research team at Reality Labs has built prototypes that function as proof-of-concepts for potential solutions to these challenges.

Varifocal

Image courtesy Meta

To address varifocal, the team developed a series of prototypes which it called ‘Half Dome’. In that series the company first explored a varifocal design which used a mechanically moving display to change the distance between the display and the lens, thus changing the focal depth of the image. Later the team moved to a solid-state electronic system which resulted in varifocal optics that were significantly more compact, reliable, and silent. We’ve covered the Half Dome prototypes in greater detail here if you want to know more.

Virtual Reality… For Lenses

As for distortion, Abrash explained that experimenting with lens designs and distortion-correction algorithms that are specific to those lens designs is a cumbersome process. Novel lenses can’t be made quickly, he said, and once they are made they still need to be carefully integrated into a headset.

To allow the Display Systems Research team to work more quickly on the issue, the team built a ‘distortion simulator’, which actually emulates a VR headset using a 3DTV, and simulates lenses (and their corresponding distortion-correction algorithms) in-software.

Image courtesy Meta

Doing so has allowed the team to iterate on the problem more quickly, wherein the key challenge is to dynamically correct lens distortions as the eye moves, rather than merely correcting for what is seen when the eye is looking in the immediate center of the lens.

Retina Resolution

Image courtesy Meta

On the retina resolution front, Meta revealed a previously unseen headset prototype called Butterscotch, which the company says achieves a retina resolution of 60 pixels per degree, allowing for 20/20 vision. To do so, they used extremely pixel-dense displays and reduced the field-of-view—in order to concentrate the pixels over a smaller area—to about half the size of Quest 2. The company says it also developed a “hybrid lens” that would “fully resolve” the increased resolution, and it shared through-the-lens comparisons between the original Rift, Quest 2, and the Butterscotch prototype.

Image courtesy Meta

While there are already headsets out there today that offer retina resolution—like Varjo’s VR-3 headset—only a small area in the middle of the view (27° × 27°) hits the 60 PPD mark… anything outside of that area drops to 30 PPD or lower. Ostensibly Meta’s Butterscotch prototype has 60 PPD across its entirely of the field-of-view, though the company didn’t explain to what extent resolution is reduced toward the edges of the lens.

Continue on Page 2: High Dynamic Range, Downsizing »

Filed Under: butterscotch, Feature, half dome, holocake 2, mark zuckerberg, Meta, meta reality labs, meta reality labs research, michael abrash, News, Reality Labs, reality labs display systems research, starburst, vr hdr, VR Headset, vr headset prototypes, VR Research

Zuckerberg Warns Shareholders: Metaverse Investments May Not Flourish Until 2030s

April 28, 2022 From roadtovr

Today during Meta’s Q1 2022 earnings call CEO Mark Zuckerberg told shareholders that they should buckle up for the long haul because the company’s steep investments in XR and metaverse technologies aren’t expected to flourish until the next decade.

Today Meta gave its shareholders a quarterly update, in which the company overviewed its latest earnings and expenses.

For Reality Labs, the company’s XR and metaverse division, revenue was up 30% year-over-year, from $534 million in Q1 2021 to $695 million in Q1 2022.

However, costs associated with running the Reality Labs division rose even more, up by 62% year-over-year, from $1.83 billion in Q1 2021 to $2.96 billion in Q2 2022.

This growth in costs wasn’t unexpected. Meta told investors last year they should expect the company’s XR investments in 2021 to total $10 billion… and to grow even more from there.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been asking for investor patience in his vision for XR and metaverse technologies for years. Back in 2017 he was already prepping investors for a long haul, saying that in order to reach mainstream tracition, XR would need a 10 year trajectory from the year the company acquired Oculus—a timeline that pushed out to 2024.

But in Zuckerberg’s eyes that timeline may have slipped considerably.

Today during Meta’s Q1 2022 earnings call, during a lengthy, unscripted response to a shareholder question, Zuckerberg said that he didn’t expect the company’s metaverse and XR investments to really flourish until the 2030s.

So we have multiple teams in parallel that we’ve sort of now spun up [to build XR and metaverse tech]. This goes for VR as well as augmented reality and the other work that we’re doing and is sort of driven by the success that we feel like we’re seeing in the markets and the technology is starting to be ready to really ramp up.

So those [operating losses for Reality Labs], we’re experiencing today. I mean, having those teams operating is something that you see weigh on the results and is one of the reasons why I think the growth rates and expenses have been so high, and I think we’ll continue investing more over some period. But at some point, we will have all those product teams fully staffed for a few versions into the future and then the growth rates there will come down.

But it’s not going to be until those products really hit the market and scale in a meaningful way and this market ends up being big that this will be a big revenue or profit contributor to the business. So that’s why I’ve given the color on past calls that I expect [substantial revenue from Reality Labs] to be later this decade, right?

Maybe primarily, this is laying the groundwork for what I expect to be a very exciting 2030s when this is like—when this is sort of more established as the primary computing platform at that point. I think that there will be results along the way for that, too. But I do think that this is going to be a longer cycle.

To be fair, the company’s initial ’10 year trajectory’ included only a vague idea of the metaverse—something that, despite still being somewhat nebulous—has come into clearer focus in the eight years since Meta acquired Oculus and set out to build ‘the next computing platform’.

Meta arguably didn’t take its first stab at trying to figure out what the metaverse might look like until 2016 when it began seriously experimenting with social VR in what would ultimately become Facebook Spaces, the company’s first social VR app which launched in 2017.

Even so, progress has been slow. Facebook Spaces was shut down in 2019, to be superseded by Horizon. But Horizon—which was first announced in 2019—didn’t launch until the far end 2021… and it’s still only available to a limited audience.

For shareholders seeing Meta spend $2–$3 billion on Reality Labs per quarter… it makes sense why the company is being regularly questioned about its steep spending. Zuckerberg’s suggestion that the investments won’t really flourish until the 2030s surely isn’t going to help matters.

To that end, Zuckerberg said during the earnings call that the company’s plan is to use revenue from its non-XR businesses (Facebook, Instagram, and the like) to fund its aggressive and forward-looking spending. For investors to stick around for the long haul, Zuckerberg is going to need to continue to emphatically sell his belief that XR is the next computing platform and explain why shareholders should stick around for the ride.

Filed Under: mark zuckerberg, Meta, meta earnings call, meta q1 2022 earnings, News, vr industry

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