Meta shared details about the BoBa 3’s ultra-width FOV VR & MR prototype, as well as the “hyper-realistic VR” prototype called Tiramisu.
Meta shows off a practical visual field headset prototype
Meta builds two prototype headsets with a 180° x 120° field of view in a form factor comparable to today’s quest and demos them in Siggraph 2025.
If you missed it, last month, Meta researchers revealed three prototype headsets across two paper summaries.
One paper comes from the Display Systems Research (DSR) team. It is called “Wide View Mixed Reality” and presents VR and mixed reality variants of headset designs with an ultra-wide field of vision, in a form factor comparable to today’s quests.
Another paper comes from Meta’s Optical, Photonics and Optical Systems (OPALS) team, called “Hyperrealic VR: 90-PPD, 1400-NIT, High Contrast Headset.” Opal says it combines high brightness and high contrast for the first time. The combination they argue is achieving “a new milestone about how realistic a realistic VR experience is.”
The full paper is scheduled to be released just before Siggraph 2025 next week. This is a meeting where Meta demonstrates all three headsets to participants.
uploadVr will be held at Siggraph in 2025. I plan to put all three headsets into practice and make an impression.
Currently, Meta reveals the names and important details of these three prototype headsets in a blog post that includes quotes from key members of the DSR and Opals teams.
Boba 3: Vr & Mr
The practical, ultra-width view headset visually shown in the abstract is called the Boba 2, and we found that Meta actually presents a smooth, high resolution called the Boba 3 in Siggraph.
Boba 3 achieves 180° Horizontal 120° Vertical field of view.
“It feels like Boba 3 is plunging into the next level of immersion, opening up the perimeter and showing off things you didn’t even know.”
For comparison, Quest 3 has a field of vision of less than 110° x 96°, while Quest 3 is less than 96° x 96°, and human vision is very about 200° x 135° depending on the shape of a person’s face.
Simply put, Meta argues that Boba 3 covers about 90% of the human field of vision compared to 46% in Quest 3.
Meta’s Boba 3 practical ultra-width view headset prototype.
Progress in achieving practical, ultra-wide vision comes after a decade of stagnation in this respect.
Back in 2018, DSR showed off their original half-dome headset.°. However, although subsequent versions of the Half Dome have a smaller field of view, the Half Dome 2 focuses on compactness, and the Half Dome 3 moved to an electronically fluctuating approach without moving parts.
Until recently, we had no broad-view metaprototypes at all. Then in October 2024, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth shared a photo of himself holding the headset in a very wide curved body, suggesting an ultra-wide vision. He later said it had about 210 horizontal visions.°however, he reiterated his long-standing view that the ultra-wide vision does not deserve a trade-off on “weight, form factor, computing, thermal.”
Meta says that the prototype is now called the Boba 1 and had a stack of displays and optics from “about nine years ago.”
According to the company, the Boba 1 had a resolution of 2k x 1k per eye, but until last year when the Boba 2 arrived at 3k x 3k, the ultra-wide vision appears to have been in the rear seat.
The Boba 3, the headset demoed at Siggraph this year, has a resolution of 4k x 4k per eye, and says that Meta can ultimately provide ample central angular resolution.
Specifically, the central resolution of BOBA 3 is 30 pixels per degree (PPD) (PPD) compared to the 25 PPD in Quest 3. For reference, human retinal resolution is generally considered to be 60 PPD.
A walkthrough of Meta’s Boba 3.
But as I mentioned when covering abstractions, what really makes the Boba 3 attractive is achieving an ultra-wide field of view without the form factor trade-off seen in all previous attempts, including the Boba 1 and the original Pimax headset.
According to Meta, the mixed reality Boba 3 variant weighs 840 grams, while the Boba 3 VR without passthrough weighs 660 grams.
Given that these figures include rigid plastic straps, it is necessary to compare with Quest 3 at Elite Straps: 698g.
“It’s something we wanted to send out into the world as quickly as possible, but it’s not for everyone,” says Jan Zhao, DSR optical scientist.
“It’s not easy to hit the mass market price range, and you also need state-of-the-art GPU and PC systems.”
Meta says that it is possible to achieve ultra-width fields of view without significantly increasing weight and bulk thanks to “custom optical designs that utilize high-yield reflective polarizers.” The design is based on a decade-long investment in pancake lenses, and utilizes displays that are already mass-produced.
So it sounds like meta would theoretically ship Boba3 as a product. However, it is not cheap and requires high-end gaming PCs to promote viable angular resolution due to their larger field of view. Therefore, Meta will not ship Boba 3 immediately. Not because I couldn’t do it, but because I’m not interested in creating a PC-only VR headset.
Tiramisu: “Surreal VR”
The headset, which combines high brightness and high contrast on the retina, is called tiramisu and comes from Meta’s optical systems, photonics, and Light Systems (Opals) team and DSR’s “sister team.”
Meta has previously demonstrated retinal resolution in one headset, while another has very high brightness and contrast, demonstrating the perceptual benefits of each. uploadVr caught my eye on both headsets too. But what makes Tiramisu special is that one headset has all three qualities.
Starburst: Eyes using Meta’s 20k NIT HDR display technology
Is High Dynamic Range (HDR) the key to next-generation VR displays? A practice time with Meta’s latest demo and an interview with the head of Display Systems Research suggests that it will be quite important. Please read the details. David Heaney and I went at a recent Siggraph conference in Vancouver.
Hands-on: Meta’s retinal resolution change prototype
We tried out Meta’s butterscotch variation prototype with dynamic focus, retinal resolution and dynamic distortion correction. Read our impressions here:
According to Meta, Tiramisu is 3.6 times the central angular resolution of Quest 3, with 14 times the brightness and 3 times the contrast.
Specifically, the central angle resolution of tiramisu is 90 ppd and the brightness is 1400 nits. This is comparable to just 100 knits for 25 PPD and Quest 3. Also, for reference, the resolution of the human retina is generally considered to be 60 PPD.
In the demo, Meta uses “the best real-time graphics that Unreal Engine 5 can generate”, including Nvidia’s DLSS 3 Neural Upscaling, so the software side also offers “surreal” visuals.
However, Tiramisu is making many sacrifices to achieve what Meta describes as “a new milestone in VR realism.”
The headset has a field of view of just 33° x 33°, a comically large form factor, and uses heavy glass lenses.
But like the prototype of Orion AR Glasses, Meta describes tiramisu as a “time machine.” Its purpose is to study the surreal VR sense, which informs the company’s priorities for future headset products.
A walkthrough of Tiramisu meta.
This is an important step towards the purpose mentioned by Meta to pass the “visual Turing Test” and it is not possible to know if you are wearing safety goggles or an XR headset.
“Tiramisu is not something you can really understand just by reading the summary,” says DSR Director Douglas Lanman.
“It’s like the first time you’ve seen a 4K TV or HDR TV or you’ve been riding a really immersive theme park where you blow water on your face. That’s something newand it’s hard to understand that I feel this number combination on the page is really different. Honestly, it’s the first headset that really gives me a strange feeling. This is the most realistic VR image I’ve still seen, and it has a very impressive spec to match what appears to be more realistic than what I’ve seen before in VR. ”
