Meta CTO Holds Wide Field Of View Prototype Headset In Photo

Meta has been far more open about showing off its long-term hardware research than other big tech companies, a tradition carried over from Oculus, the startup it acquired and turned into its Reality Labs division.

In recent years Meta has presented, and even demoed to us, prototype headsets that introduce a new feature or push a specification to the extreme, such as retinal resolution, varifocal, ultra bright high dynamic range, and reprojection-free depth correct passthrough.

Meta says it uses these prototype headsets to test how impactful these features and specifications are, using the results to inform how it prioritizes which features to push in future products.

Hands-On: Meta’s Retinal Resolution Varifocal Prototype

We tried Meta’s Butterscotch Varifocal prototype which has dynamic focus, retinal resolution, and dynamic distortion correction. Read our impressions here:

Starburst: Eyes-In With Meta’s 20K Nit HDR Display Tech

Is high-dynamic range (HDR) the key to next generation VR displays? Hands-on time with Meta’s latest demo and an interview with the head of display systems research suggests it’ll be pretty key. Read on for details. At the recent SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver David Heaney and I went

Hands-On: Meta’s Reprojection-Free Passthrough Prototype

At SIGGRAPH 2023 we tried Flamera, Meta’s research prototype of reprojection-free passthrough AR. Read our impressions & thoughts here:

One specification we haven’t seen a Meta prototype significantly push forward for six years now though is field of view, arguably the most important specification for immersion. Back in 2018 the company showed off the original Half-Dome headset which, as well as having varifocal optics, it said had a field of view of 140 degrees.

For reference, most of the company’s shipped headsets have had a field of view of just under 100 degrees horizontal, while Quest 3 achieves around 110 degrees and Quest Pro achieved just under that.

Subsequent versions of Half-Dome had a smaller field of view than the original, with Half-Dome 2 focusing on compactness and Half-Dome 3 moving to an electronic varifocal approach with no moving parts. Until now, we hadn’t seen any Meta prototype appearing to have a wide field of view again.

In 2022, when Quest 2 was the company’s only headset on the market, Bosworth was asked how important he thought advancing field of view was. He replied that it “hasn’t felt like the right tradeoff” so far, because of the added rendering power needed for the extra pixels and geometry, and also said that he found (presumably referring to internal prototypes) that a taller vertical field of view was more impactful for him than a wider horizontal field of view. Valve also said this while working with HTC to develop the original Vive, explaining at the time that being able to see the floor in room-scale VR strongly contributed to the feeling of presence.

Interestingly, one year later Meta released Quest 3, which has a wider horizontal field of view than Quest 2 but the same vertical.

More recently, when asked to describe the Quest headset of the early 2030s in an interview in July, Bosworth reaffirmed his view that a taller field of view was more important than a wider one, suggesting this will be Meta’s focus in the future.

Meta’s CTO Predicts The Specs Of A 2031 Quest Headset

Andrew Bosworth described the resolution, field of view, refresh rate, weight, and audio solution he expects a Quest headset to have in 2031.