Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth shared images from a recent visit to the company's research labs.
In one of the six images that were shared to Instagram and Threads, Bosworth is seen holding a tethered headset that appears to have canted lenses and a wide curved body extending beyond the strap arms horizontally, suggesting a wide field of view.
The other five images show a Ray-Ban Meta glasses prototype, Project Aria research glasses attached to a Quest 3, a silhouette appearing to be him wearing a headset, and two shots of him sitting with Meta's Chief Scientist Michael Abrash, who leads Reality Labs Research.
"Visiting our research labs is always a highlight. They’re making incredible progress on hard technological problems and I can’t wait to share more", Bosworth wrote on Threads.
Meta has been far more open about showing off its long-term hardware research than other big tech companies, a tradition carried over from Oculus, the startup it acquired and turned into its Reality Labs division.
In recent years Meta has presented, and even demoed to us, prototype headsets that introduce a new feature or push a specification to the extreme, such as retinal resolution, varifocal, ultra bright high dynamic range, and reprojection-free depth correct passthrough.
Meta says it uses these prototype headsets to test how impactful these features and specifications are, using the results to inform how it prioritizes which features to push in future products.
David Heaney
Ian Hamilton
David Heaney
One specification we haven't seen a Meta prototype significantly push forward for six years now though is field of view, arguably the most important specification for immersion. Back in 2018 the company showed off the original Half-Dome headset which, as well as having varifocal optics, it said had a field of view of 140 degrees.
For reference, most of the company's shipped headsets have had a field of view of just under 100 degrees horizontal, while Quest 3 achieves around 110 degrees and Quest Pro achieved just under that.
Subsequent versions of Half-Dome had a smaller field of view than the original, with Half-Dome 2 focusing on compactness and Half-Dome 3 moving to an electronic varifocal approach with no moving parts. Until now, we hadn't seen any Meta prototype appearing to have a wide field of view again.
In 2022, when Quest 2 was the company's only headset on the market, Bosworth was asked how important he thought advancing field of view was. He replied that it "hasn’t felt like the right tradeoff" so far, because of the added rendering power needed for the extra pixels and geometry, and also said that he found (presumably referring to internal prototypes) that a taller vertical field of view was more impactful for him than a wider horizontal field of view. Valve also said this while working with HTC to develop the original Vive, explaining that being able to see the floor in VR strongly contributed to the feeling of presence.
Interestingly, one year later Meta released Quest 3, which has a wider horizontal field of view than Quest 2 but the same vertical.
More recently, when asked to describe the Quest headset of the early 2030s in an interview in July, Bosworth reaffirmed his view that a taller field of view was more important than a wider one, suggesting this will be Meta's focus in the future.
David Heaney
