Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg Monday (June 20) offered a high-level overview of four virtual reality prototypes of headsets he said the company is developing with the goal of producing “displays that are as visual and realistic as the physical world and much more advanced than traditional computer screens we use today.”
One prototype shown in a video Zuckerberg posted on Facebook is of Butterscotch, which approaches a resolution of 60 pixels per degree. The headset “let’s you comfortably read the smallest letters on an eye chart,” Zuckerberg said.
Another prototype shows off the company’s work addressing what Zuckerberg called “focal depth.”
“Normal monitors are a set distance away, so you only focus on one place,” he said. “But in VR and AR, you need to be able to focus on things that are very close and very far from you.”
One way of addressing this is through “eye-tracking” technology, he said.
“We also need to fix optical distortion in software so quickly that it’s imperceptible to the human eye,” he added.
The third prototype, Zuckerberg said, is called “Starburst” and exhibits “high dynamic range.”
“Nature is often 10 or 100 times brighter than modern HDTVs and the highest-end monitors,” he said. “But we need colors to be just as vivid to feel realistic. So we built Starburst — the first HRD VR system that we know of.”
The fourth technology is “a device that is light and thinner than anything that exists,” he said. It’s called Holo Cake II and uses holographic technologies.
An explanation of why Meta would spend what must be huge sums of money to develop technologies might be found in recent remarks by Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs.
Clegg wrote in a May 18 blog post that the rise of the metaverse is much like the migration of browsing activity to mobile devices.
Read more: Meta Says Metaverse Will Be Worth $3T
In his blog post Wednesday (May 18), Clegg compared the transition to the metaverse—numerous online worlds connected by apps and virtual reality devices — to the way our browsing preferences have gone from using desktop computers to smartphones.
“Skepticism is a natural reaction to something that sounds like it’s straight out of a science fiction novel — in a way, it is — especially when there are wider societal concerns about how tech operates in the two-dimensional world, he wrote.
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