4 MASSIVE Features Coming To Meta Quest Headsets

I came back from a three-week vacation to Meta showing off what its tens of billions of dollars in VR have been spent on, and it got me pumped. Meta wants VR so real you can’t tell it apart from real life, and it showed how far it has come with working Meta VR headset prototypes. Today’s headsets already make us feel like we’re somewhere else, but resolution, field of view and the headset’s weight still pull you out of it. Here are the four features from those prototypes that I think will change everything, counting down to my favourite.

4. Butterscotch: retina resolution

Butterscotch has a near-retinal resolution of 60 pixels per degree, which is about 20/20 vision. You can read text clearly even about 20 feet away in VR. It roughly matches the human eye, thanks to an extremely pixel-dense display panel and a new custom lens.

The compromise is field of view: it’s about half the size of the Quest 2’s, because no display on the market can yet handle that many pixels across a wide view. Meta didn’t say so outright, but it seems to reach that resolution across the whole field of view. Some very expensive enterprise headsets already offer retina resolution, but only in a small area in the middle, so this shows how far Meta’s research has come.

Butterscotch isn’t ready for production. It’s there to research what retina resolution feels like.

3. Half Dome: varifocal focus

Varifocal means focusing with your eyes the way you do in real life. Look at something close and it’s sharp while the background blurs. Look into the distance and the near things blur instead.

Consumer headsets can’t do that, because the display sits at a fixed distance. Try to focus on something close and it can look blurry and strain your eyes.

Meta’s answer is the Half Dome series of prototypes:

• Half Dome 1 had a display that moved mechanically to adjust focus.
• Half Dome 3 dropped all the mechanics for an electronic system: a stack of lens layers that can each be switched on with a voltage. Combining layers gives a wide range of focus distances. Six layers give 64 possibilities.

Mark Zuckerberg said varifocal could come in the next five to six years, though he added not to hold him to that exactly.

2. Starburst: HDR at 20,000 nits

Starburst is a fitting name, because its display is super bright: 20,000 nits. For comparison:

• A standard monitor is commonly around 200 nits.
• TVs don’t usually go much past 1,500 nits.
• VR displays don’t even reach 1,000 nits.

The real world is brighter still. Sunlight reflecting off a window, the lamp on your desk, a candle flame: all of those are very high in nits. Brightness is what makes life look alive, unless you’re a vampire, and Starburst’s HDR tries to recreate that real luminance. The team at Tested tried it with a static photo and found the extra brightness alone created depth.

Zuckerberg called this arguably the most important feature for making VR indistinguishable from reality, and said few people expect brightness to be more convincing than, say, higher resolution. I hadn’t given brightness much thought either.

A 20,000 nit display, or even 10,000, is still far off and realistically won’t ship in the next few Quest headsets. Sony’s PSVR 2 is expected to be the first consumer headset with HDR, though Sony hasn’t said how bright it gets. Probably nowhere near 10,000, but HDR has me more excited now.

1. Holocake 2: VR that fits like ski goggles

For VR to feel like real life, the headset also has to be light on your face. So Meta is shrinking size and weight, and Holocake 2 looks like comfortable ski goggles.

It combines holographic lenses with pancake optics. A holographic lens is a very thin lens made of holographic film that holds a hologram of a regular lens, so it works like a normal lens while being much lighter and allowing better form factors.

Holocake 2 is a prototype, but a working one: you connect it to a PC and play VR games. That’s also the trade-off, since it isn’t standalone. Meta says it needs a laser light source, and lasers aren’t yet available at the performance, size and price consumer products need, so it won’t ship in the next couple of generations. Meta calls it its first attempt at a fully working headset with holographic optics, believes headsets can shrink further, and thinks this type could come later in the decade.

Meta VR headset prototypes and the visual Turing test

All four features were tested separately. The end goal is one headset with all of them. Meta’s Reality Labs Research uses the term visual Turing test for whether what’s in a headset can be told apart from the real world. No VR technology passes it today, but Meta thinks these features combined might, and it sounds like it’s aiming for less than ten years.

What I’m most excited about

These prototypes give a good sense of where VR is going, and I don’t think it’s that far away. Less than ten years is a pretty good deal: I’ll still be around for it.

Will any of this be in the next Quest? Clearly not yet, and we don’t know which feature Meta will prioritise. For me, number one is comfort, so Holocake 2. But after researching HDR, that sounds like it will make a huge difference too. If you want to go deeper, Tested visited the research lab for a long hands-on video that I enjoyed a lot, and thanks to Tested for letting me use the footage.