Tech giant 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, reports The Verge.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Reality Labs chief scientist Michael Abrash, along with other Reality Labs members, presented their work at a virtual roundtable last week. The event focused on designs that Meta refers to as "time machines": bulky proofs of concept meant for testing one specific feature, like a super-bright backlight or super-high-resolution screen.
"I think we're in the middle right now of a big step forward towards realism," Zuckerberg was quoted as saying.
"I don`t think it's going to be that long until we can create scenes with basically perfect fidelity," he added.
Zuckerberg reiterated plans to ship a high-end headset codenamed Project Cambria in 2022, following its initial announcement last year. Cambria supports full VR as well as mixed reality, thanks to high-resolution cameras that can pass a video feed to an internal screen. It will also ship with eye-tracking, a key feature for future Meta headsets.
