This week, Meta presented several of its latest virtual reality prototypes, whose concepts are impressive in terms of their technical characteristics and long design. Literally. The company shared some details about its Tiramisu project, calling it “hyper-realistic VR.” This set promises three times greater contrast, 14 times greater maximum brightness, and 3.6 times greater angular resolution than Meta Quest 3. In real statistics, this amounts to up to 1400 nits of brightness and an angular resolution of 90 pixels per degree.
One of the goals of the Reality Labs Research team on optics, photonics, and light systems (OPALS) is to create virtual reality that is indistinguishable from the real world, or the so-called visual Turing test. “Our mission in this project was to provide the best possible image quality,” said Xuan Wang, a research scientist at OPALS who works on optical research. But the team achieved this quality with some compromises: Tiramisu has a limited field of view of only 33 degrees by 33 degrees, compared to 110 degrees horizontally and 96 degrees vertically in Meta Quest 3. And the form factor is currently quite bulky, as you can see above.
Other prototypes described in the company’s blog are the Boba 3 headsets. These mixed and virtual reality headsets offer an ultra-wide field of view. All three projects will be presented at the SIGGRAPH 2025 conference in Vancouver next week.
