Facebook Unveils Future ‘Near Retina-Quality’ VR Headsets

Meta’s Reality Labs division has revealed new prototypes in its roadmap toward lightweight, hyper-realistic virtual reality graphics. The breakthroughs remain far from consumer-ready, but the designs — codenamed Butterscotch, Starburst, Holocake 2, and Mirror Lake — could add up to a slender, brightly lit headset that supports finer detail than its current Quest 2 display.

Yet to be released headsets have features which have been sorely missing previously: near-retina-quality image offering about 2.5 times the resolution of the Quest 2’s (sort of) 1832 x 1920 pixels per eye, letting users read the 20/20 vision line on an eye chart, high dynamic range (HDR) lighting with 20,000 nits of brightness and eye tracking. “The goal of all this work is to help us identify which technical paths are going to allow us to make meaningful enough improvements that we can start approaching visual realism.” says the Meta CEO.