We’ve got a pretty good idea of what a higher-end Quest Pro 2 could look like. Apple’s Bar
With the Vision Pro headset, Apple clearly did not aim to create an affordable headset. They wanted to set a minimum quality bar to describe how they wanted mixed reality to feel and look. Vision Pro, after packing all the features and tech they felt was necessary, came in at $3,500.
That means it is only an indirect competitor to something like Quest 3 which costs $500. Meta’s Quest Pro will be evolving to compete with the high-end prices. What would a Quest Pro 2 be like if Meta was going to compete with Apple?
It turns out that we have a pretty good guess. Douglas Lanman is Senior Director of Display Systems for Reality Labs Research. Late last year
, a school from which Reality Labs regularly recruits researchers.
Lanman spent most of the one-and-a-half hour session overviewing the research his team has worked on in recent years. The team built several prototypes to explore holographic lenses, high dynamic range, retina resolution and reverse-passthrough. Video via Mixed Reality News
While he stressed that this concept was not a roadmap, but a design he and his team had created, he stated it was “practical” to build today with readily available parts. Lanman explained that Mirror Lake will include compact holographic opticals, multiview eye-tracking and reverse-passthrough. It also includes a varifocal screen, reverse-passthrough and built-in prescription correction. That’s quite a mouthful… so let’s break each one of these down.
Holographic Optics
A huge challenge in making XR headsets compact is the need for optics to be placed between the viewer and the display. Meta’s Quest Pro and Quest 3 have a compact ‘pancake optic’, but researchers at Meta think they can make it even thinner. Their solution is a ‘holographic lens’, which is exactly what it sounds like: a lens baked into a hologram that can be practically as thin as a sheet of paper.he gave a guest lecture at the University of ArizonaMulti-view Eye-tracking
Eye-tracking works best when you have multiple views of each eye. This allows for better data to determine the exact direction of each eye. More cameras mean more processing overhead, heat, electricity, and costs. Meta researchers came up with an innovative way to get multiple views of the eye using just one camera. The camera can see multiple reflections in the lens by using a holographic component. That could provide more views for better eye-tracking without adding more cameras.
Varifocal Display
Every XR headset on the market today uses stereoscopy–the overlapping of two similar images–to display 3D imagery. While this is very similar to the way we see the world in real life, it does not include an important visual cue. The distance at which the light comes from changes the way our eyes focus. Because XR headsets use a fixed display the light always comes from the same direction. This means that you can only select one focal distance. It would be the same as your eyes being limited to focusing at a specific distance. This is known as the vergence-accommodation conflict (or VAC).
A varifocal display is any display which allows variable focus, thus solving for VAC. Meta has studied several solutions, but Lanman believes that Mirror Lake could use a stack electronically controlled polarizers for dynamic lens focus. Combined with eye-tracking, this would allow the system to focus the light for the specific part of the scene that you’re looking at.
Reverse-passthrough
‘Passthrough’ is what we call it when you put cameras on the outside of a headset and use them to show the wearer a view of the outside world. This is similar to your vision ‘passing’ through the headset. Reverse-passthrough is what we call it when you put cameras
inside
the headset to show the outside world a view of your face. This is the same thing you may have seen on Vision Pro (Apple calls it ‘EyeSight’).
But it isn’t as easy as just sticking a display to the outside of the headset. Because the front of your headset sits quite far from your actual eyes, showing an image of your eyes that far out would look very unrealistic–like your eyes were somehow glued to the front of the headset.
Instead, you need a way to make the eye appear sunken back into the headset. To do that you need some kind of light-field display, which is a display that shows different views depending upon the angle that you’re looking at.
Lanman said that in the Mirror Lake render they actually did a ray-tracing simulation to show an approximation of what the reverse-passthrough on the headset would look like, given the components the headset would theoretically be made from.
Prescription Baked-in
For those who need glasses, having a headset that can support your prescription is important. Lanman said that the compactness of Mirror Lake means there’s not much space for glasses. He suggests that a headset like this would be tailored to each individual’s eyesight requirements. This could be done on Mirror Lake by customizing the holographic lens to each user’s vision correction. It’s clever, because it allows the headset to be adjusted for each individual user without adding bulk or additional components. Quest Pro, Meta’s first ‘Pro” headset, had a rocky launch. It was hampered by its lack of mixed reality and face-tracking capabilities. Meta seemed to agree, as it dropped the headset’s price to $1,000 not long after its release. Meta seemed to agree, because it dropped the headset to $1,000 not long after release.
Quest Pro | Image courtesy MetaMaking Quest Pro’s launch even more rocky, Quest 3 was announced not long after and brought many of Quest Pro’s improvements down to a much more attractive $500 price point.If Meta is going to have a ‘Pro’ headset line, the headset needs to do substantially more than its consumer-focused headsets. Vision Pro, a $3,500 headset packed with technology, has opened up the possibility of Meta releasing a more high-end headset in future Quest Pro models.