This is an abbreviated version of Andrew Bosworth blog post.
We believe that 2022 will be remembered as a year when fundamental technological elements enabling our vision of the future made their way into the hands of developers and users for the first time. This octoberMeta shipped several in Meta Quest Pro: Mixed reality is a key part of the journey to full augmented reality devices, and eye and face tracking are essential parts of the technology stack needed for AR and VR devices to reach their full potential. Quest Pro also brought significant advancements in display and optics that will advance VR hardware for the long haul.
The long-term value of these technologies will come from how they are adopted by the ecosystem of developers, creators and builders that has formed around these devices. That’s why I’m especially proud that we delivered Quest Pro when we did, because the sooner people can start working with new technology like this, the sooner its full value and potential can be unlocked. . We will live with the benefits of this work for decades to come.
Introducing Meta Reality: Mixed Reality is More Than Just a Video Stream
Mixed reality goes far beyond displaying a live video feed of your surroundings inside the headset. For it to work properly, the headset needs to understand your room as a 3D space, recognize the surfaces and objects around you, and how they might interact with digital objects. This requires technologies such as Spatial Anchors, which allow virtual objects to occupy fixed spaces in the physical world, as well as Scene Understanding to virtually reconstruct physical spaces, as well as Stereoscopic Color Passthrough, to capture the world physics and accurately represent it in the headset. with a feeling of depth for more comfort. Meta Reality, our mixed reality system, combines all of these technologies and more into a single system that developers can build with.
Unlock advanced experiences with eye and face tracking
Eye and face tracking offer a multitude of possibilities, both today and in the future. Currently, eye and face tracking provide more expressive avatars on Meta Quest Pro, allowing people’s digital selves to better match their real-life facial expressions. It’s one of many steps we’re taking to create an avatar system that can improve the quality of communication, expression and connection in virtual spaces – and we’ll have a lot more to share about that. subject in 2023.
But the longer-term possibilities offered by eye and face tracking technology go far beyond avatars. Our vision of true AR glasses will take years of progress to make our devices thinner, lighter, faster, and more powerful, while consuming far less battery and generating far less heat. A major efficiency gain will come when devices are smart enough to display only the highest resolution graphics in the small area where the user is actually looking. In October, we demonstrated this capability for the first time with Quest Pro’s eye-tracking technology, and it’s going to advance VR and AR for many years to come.
Introducing Infinite Display: Measuring Visual Quality in Virtual Reality
The visual quality of a VR device depends on a range of technologies that go beyond the typical metrics we’ve used to describe displays on a computer, TV, or phone. Along with display resolution, factors such as system resolution, sharpness, contrast, and color gamut each play an important role. The same goes for the optical stack itself, where lenses, coatings and films each make a huge difference. We recently shared more details on how each of these elements combine in Meta’s Infinite Display system for VR optics, the product of years of investment in the research and development of VR and AR technologies. This R&D will continue to pay off for a long time to come, and earlier this year we showcased some of the research prototypes we built to demonstrate these next-generation display technologies.
Support the virtual world building community
We also saw the beginnings of a new community of creators on our platforms: virtual world builders. It’s not often you see a whole new way of self-expression and community building emerge on a platform, and the way the creators have worked their magic. Horizon Worlds this year was a thing to see. We’re going to spend 2023 focusing on building this community.
Meta is far from the only company working to push the boundaries here, and we expect to see new competitors join us in the build for AR and VR next year. As new devices hit the market, we believe our industry will enter a new era of growth and competition that will bring enormous benefits to users and the developer community. And Meta will have new devices to share, including the successor to Meta Quest 2, our best-selling VR device of all time. You will love. And you’ll definitely love the Meta Quest Gaming Showcase in the spring, where we’ll once again be showcasing some of the awesome new games coming next year.
