'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean?
ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing.
When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. Indeed, we follow strict guidelines that ensure our editorial content is never influenced by advertisers.
ZDNET's editorial team writes on behalf of you, our reader. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards. If we have made an error or published misleading information, we will correct or clarify the article. If you see inaccuracies in our content, please report the mistake via this form.
Meta has a secret VR headset that may have a key advantage over Apple's Vision Pro
There's one thing that all mixed reality (and some virtual reality) headsets have in common but not one has truly perfected yet, and that's passthrough. Through the meticulous arrangement of cameras and lenses, headsets like the Meta Quest Pro, Apple Vision Pro, and even the $299 Quest 2 can simulate your physical surroundings -- to varying degrees -- as they cover your actual view.
Also: Apple's Vision Pro labs are drawing audible gasps from developers, says company
Passthrough empowers augmented reality applications like home design, fashion, and interactive learning, use cases that involve some degree of real-world spatial awareness, and a whole lot of computational processing for image simulation.
Naturally, achieving a visual experience similar to how you see things in real life is not an easy feat, especially when you take into account the distance between where the headsets' cameras are set and where your own "cameras" (or eyes) are positioned. But Meta has a secret weapon stashed within its Reality Labs' Display Systems Research (DSR) team that it believes has cracked the passthrough code.
Meet Flamera, a pre-production mixed-reality headset that uses "Light Field Passthrough" as a means to accurately replicate your surroundings. By assembling a grid of apertures between the cameras' lens arrays and sensors, the most optimal light capture is achieved no matter how you move your eyes, and there's a natural recording of both the distance and motion of the things around you.
A pre-production unit of Flamera.
This aperture module results in what can only be described as a bug-eye appearance, with holes pointing at all directions and angles. The headset takes the raw sensor data captured by all of those holes and pieces it together through depth-dependent reconstruction, according to Meta. You can see a comparison between passthrough mode and reality below.
"The Flamera optical design works best when the headset is thin, which lets us put the passthrough cameras as close to the user's eyes as possible," says Grace Kuo, a Research Scientist in Meta's DSR team. "With our work on light field passthrough, we're focused on previewing the experience of perspective-correct MR passthrough," adds Douglas Lanman, Director of DSR.
Just last month, the Flamera was demoed at Siggraph 2023, an annual convention that showcases innovators in the computer graphics and interactive techniques space. "It was definitely among the best quality [augmented reality] passthrough I've ever seen," remarked Anshel Sag, an attendee and Principal Analyst at Moors Insights & Strategy told IEEE Spectrum.
Also: Meta Quest 3 unveiled: Price, features, and when you can buy
Sag also called out the smaller field of view of the beta headset, which can pose a problem for VR/AR applications that require you to look from side to side.
Still, Flamera may be the start of something big. And the slate of new mixed reality headset releases in the coming months, culminating in Apple's Vision Pro launch early next year, makes technology developed by Meta's DSR team something to keep an eye on.