Introducing the Meta XR Prototype: Butterscotch Varifocal
Are you ready to experience the future of virtual reality? With the Meta XR prototype, you can now immerse yourself in a virtual world with clarity and comfort like never before. Optical Scientist Yang Zhao is leading the research team that has developed the Butterscotch Varifocal, a revolutionary headset that provides visual acuity and comfort that rivals what you can see with the naked eye.
What is the Butterscotch Varifocal?
Today’s virtual reality headsets do a great job of immersing us in virtual worlds, but they’re limited by a fixed focal distance. Anything that’s about 1 meter or so away from your eyes appears clear, but if you try to hold something up close to your face, most people are unable to focus on it with full clarity. That’s where varifocal comes in. By leveraging eye tracking technology and moving the display closer to or farther away from your eyes depending on where you’re looking, the system allows you to focus at various depths for a more natural, realistic, and comfortable experience.
Combine that with a retinal-resolution display and you get crisp, clear visuals that rival what you can see with the naked eye. This research aims to demonstrate a VR display system which provides visual clarity that can closely match the capabilities of the human eye. Retinal resolution means that the headset can provide sharp details that are close to the limit of what human eyes can perceive. On top of that, a varifocal display supports the range of accommodation that human eyes have so that the high resolution can be perceived at different focal depths.
What Makes the Butterscotch Varifocal Unique?
The Butterscotch Varifocal is the culmination of eight years of research motivated by a desire to improve resolution while enhancing visual comfort. It is, to our knowledge, the first prototype headset to achieve varifocal with a retinal resolution display of roughly 60 pixels per degree (PPD), which is sufficient for 20/20 visual acuity.
In order to achieve retinal resolution with LCD panels readily available on the market, Butterscotch Varifocal has a reduced field of view (50 degrees compared to greater than 90 degrees with Meta Quest 2). And the form factor is somewhat larger than consumer headsets like Quest 2.
The software has also improved and matured in tandem with the hardware. To create a great varifocal experience, the hardware and software need to work together seamlessly. Our understanding of distortion correction, eye tracking, rendering, and latency have all been refined to create a high-quality experience that can use our best varifocal hardware to its maximum capabilities.
Experience the Future of Virtual Reality with the Butterscotch Varifocal
The end result is nothing short of extraordinary. As you look around a scene, the things that draw your attention snap magically into focus and tiny details that may have previously gone unnoticed shine. Take Lone Echo II from Ready At Dawn as an example. From the textures of your android chassis to the highlights of Liv’s hair, all of the intricacies pop. And the demo experience brings to life the developers’ years of passionate efforts and meticulous attention to detail like never before.
With the Butterscotch Varifocal, we can now see things in VR in a similar resolution and quality compared to what we see in the physical world, which opens up doors to many new possibilities of building amazing experiences in VR. Don’t miss out on this revolutionary piece of technology – experience the future of virtual reality with the Meta XR prototype, the Butterscotch Varifocal.
Introducing Flamera: A Revolutionary Meta XR Prototype
Are you looking for the most immersive experience possible? Look no further than the Flamera research prototype, a radical new take on passthrough research. Research Scientist Grace Kuo is leading the charge with this revolutionary meta XR prototype. With Flamera, you can explore new worlds, live out interactive narratives, and watch captivating films on the biggest possible screen. But that’s not all – Flamera also lets you stay connected to the outside world.
What is Flamera?
Flamera is a light field camera that strategically places an aperture behind each lens in the array. This helps block out unwanted rays of light, so only the desired rays reach the eyes. This architecture also concentrates the finite sensor pixels on the relevant parts of the light field, resulting in much higher resolution images. The raw sensor data ends up looking like small circles of light that each contain just a part of the desired view of the physical world outside the headset. Flamera rearranges the pixels, estimating a coarse depth map to enable a depth-dependent reconstruction. All of this results in a view of the physical world seen through the lens of the headset that more closely approximates what the eye would see naturally and with fewer artifacts compared to commercial headsets on the market today.
The goal of Flamera isn’t to show something that’s viable for a consumer product – yet. Research Scientist Nathan Matsuda is spearheading this recent wave of experientially focused research, kicking off and managing the perspective-correct passthrough program, as well as programs on reverse passthrough and high dynamic range (HDR) VR. This hardware hints at what the future might hold if researchers and product engineers buy into the underlying vision and continue to push the envelope.
The Flamera optical design works best when the headset is thin, which lets us put the passthrough cameras as close to the user’s eyes as possible. However, the camera sensor we were using had a lot of electronics that made the headset substantially thicker, so we had to design custom flexes to move those electronics out of the way.
Flamera gives us a preview of what MR passthrough might one day become. It points a path forward for perspective-correct passthrough that may seem ‘wacky’ today but could very well prove practical to meet the user experience and form factor challenges of tomorrow’s MR headsets. We envision a passthrough experience that lets you seamlessly interact with your surroundings while wearing a headset. High-quality passthrough lets us convincingly overlay digital content on our view of the physical world while leveraging the high-contrast, wide-field-of-view displays of VR headsets.
So, if you’re looking for the most immersive experience possible, look no further than the Flamera research prototype. With Flamera, you can explore new worlds, live out interactive narratives, and watch captivating films on the biggest possible screen. Plus, you can stay connected to the outside world. This revolutionary meta XR prototype is paving the way for a future of perspective-correct passthrough that could prove practical for tomorrow’s MR headsets.