Meta shows off its $10 billion VR investment

In the six years since the very first genuine consumer headsets were released, virtual reality has gone a long way, but it have always had a long road ahead to reach its potential.

During the hour-long discussion, Zuckerberg as well as a panel of Meta researchers discussed what it will take for the finest VR headsets to clear the “visual Turing Test.”

Turing Test Image Source: Meta

Even before the group purchased Oculus in 2014, Meta’s Reality Labs has also been working on it. Though some of these experiments have went on to be the headsets we know today (such as the Oculus Quest 2), the majority of them have a particular purpose and are intended to solve a particular problem in virtual reality.

Each prototype (Butterscotch, HoloCake 2, Starburst and Mirror Lake) is a part of the puzzle that will lead to better goods in the long run, whether it’s raising the display’s resolution, broadening the field of vision, bringing levels of light, or just wanting to make Headsets smaller and lighter. But running a corporation like this requires a huge amount of money— $10 billion, to be exact — and it’s for this specific purpose that Zuckerberg and his team made the effort to describe in detail what Meta had spent its money on.

Image Source : Meta

Try and hold a butterscotch sweet to your eye and seeing through that small circle. It demonstrates how difficult optics engineers have it to make a solution to this problem. The perceived resolution of a VR headset’s display diminishes as the field of vision (FoV) of the lens grows, giving you a larger picture of the virtual environment to better simulate the human eyeball.

To combat this, Meta engineers had to create a new sort of lens with a broad enough field of view to be comfortable while still delivering this ultra-high-resolution virtual world vision. However, that lens is only one of many being tested.

These prototypes aren’t seeing the light of day anytime soon (or at all), but they all offer VR enthusiasts faith that the next era of virtual reality will provide even more ground-breaking technology than we’ve seen so far.