Metatiramisu’s hyper-realistic vr’s practice: a stunning window into another world

At Siggraph 2025, we practiced tiramisu, a meta research prototype that combines cross-retinal resolution, high brightness and contrast despite our narrow field of vision.

Since Oculus widely demoed the DK1 over a decade ago, it has been found that the angular resolution of affordable headsets has been moving forward from 6 PPD (pixels per pixel).

But how high does the headset’s angular resolution need to be to feel authentic? Are returns decreasing? And are the other specifications of the display system just as important or even more?

Tiramisu can help you answer some of these questions.

This is an important step towards the stated purpose of the meta to pass the “visual Turing Test” and you won’t be able to know if what you’re looking at is real or virtual. Put another way, a visual Turing test pass means you don’t know if you’re wearing safety goggles or an XR headset.

What is the “retina” resolution?

In the XR industry, 60 PPD is often “generally accepted” as the limit of what the human eye can identify. Meta’s own blog posts about Tiramisu and Boba 3 also repeat this so-called “common knowledge.”

However, within Meta’s research team, some of the biggest hearts of VR have been skeptical of this since the early days of Oculus.

In 2022, Meta announced a prototype called Butterscotch, with an angle resolution of 55 pixels. The trade-off is that, although the butterscotch has only 50 degrees of vision, the point of the headset was to study how “retina” resolution felt and to figure out where the reduced returns would start by adjusting the resolution in real time during testing.

In Siggraph 2023, we made the evolution of butterscotch called Butterscotch Varifocal practical. As the name suggests, it combines “retinal” resolution with varifocal, and the results of this combination of angular resolution near the retina and dynamic focus adjustment gave us a view of the view into a world without visible envelope.

In theory, 60 pixels per degree will provide a 20/20 vision. But reality is much more complicated.

For starters, the way pixels are sampled and delivered to your eyes on a VR headset is very different from flat monitors.

Because VR systems render virtual worlds and sample them from an accurate perspective, text cannot use flat screen technologies such as aligning edges of text to minimize split pixels. Furthermore, in VR, the image is intentionally barrel-set and there is no true mapping of pixels from render to vision, as it matches the distortion of the pincushion of the lens used to provide a wide field of view.

Plus, about 30% of people are better than 20/20. Therefore, even if this sampling problem was not present, 60 PPD is not their limitation.

Therefore, to prove that the question across the reality lab studies around 60 PPD as a limit, we incorporate knowledge from Starburst and the knowledge that brightness and contrast are equally important.

Opals is a sister team of Display Systems Research (DSR) and although you may have heard of it already, they often work together.

Tiramisu: Coming closer to a visual turing test

The tiramisu has an angular resolution of 90 ppd, brightness of 1400 nits, and three times the contrast of Quest 3.

It uses a micro-all display similar to headsets such as the Bigscreen over 2. To achieve 90PPD, zoom in on these displays with a small field of view of just 33° x 33°. However, unlike all the micro-all headsets we’ve seen so far, Tiramisu doesn’t use pancake lenses.

In recent years, pancake lenses have been supplying thin, sharp headsets. But they also have important trade-offs. They are very low optical efficiency. This means that most of the light passing through them is lost, resulting in a significant reduction in brightness that reaches your eyes. Bright displays of the future can reduce this slightly with brute force, but it’s not easy.

For example, Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro offer only about 100 nits of eyes despite using a very bright display. For comparison, a typical laptop reaches around 200 nits, while a high-end HDR TV or iPhone Pro exceeds 1000 nits. And the brightness of the sun wars these numbers – on a sunny day, tens of thousands of nits.

For Tiramisu, Opal built a custom refractive lens. It consists of three elements made from high refractive index flint glass, and Meta claims to correct almost all geometric and pigment anomalies. Each element is custom made with an anti-reflective coating that enhances contrast and maximizes brightness across the entire field of view.

The result was a thick, heavy headset, which caused me to hold it in my face – no straps. However, it has the solution power to provide 90 PPD and can pass through much more light than known pancake optics.

To showcase this, Meta ran a powerful desktop PC and unveiled a series of unrealistic engine five scenes using NVIDIA’s DLSS.

So, what did this actually look like?

Tiramisu’s little vision meant that I wasn’t surrounded by the virtual world it presented. However, the visual quality of these worlds was not nearly identical. Amazing. A rich, vibrant, highly detailed image, at least in my eyes, without any kind of distortion.

In the park scene, there were no signs of pixelation or aliasing, and even the most subtle contoured lines and markings looked smooth. In the aircraft cockpit on the runway at night, we were able to spot small switch ridges and grooves, and we could see the smallest runway edge markers in the distance.

I couldn’t try them in a row – it’s now two years – Meta researchers say they can definitely see the difference between the 55 PPD for butterscotch and the 90 PPD for tiramisu.

However, what impressed me the most was not the tiramisu angular resolution. It was brightness and contrast.

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.

I have long been the underrated specs of the VR display, and it was proof when Ian and I tried the Starburst prototype of Meta on Siggraph 2022 with that huge 20,000 knit.

In Tiramisu, virtual LEDs on the control of the aircraft’s cockpit, and on the far runways, it really looked like a radioactive light source. In Quest 3, which was running the same scene, these lights looked like colored stickers in comparison. This feeling of virtual light was really bright, and contrasting with the darker parts of the cockpit gave us a sense of realism that far surpassed even butterscotch.

Furthermore, although tiramisu was not abnormal, increased brightness and contrast appeared to enhance the sense of depth. This is a strange and poorly understood phenomenon, but it has even been reported on 2D HDR televisions with extremely high brightness.

And beyond that sense of realism, the bright and vibrant image of Tiramisu was totally comfortable to see. As head of the DSR, Douglas Lanman said, it reminded me of watching 4K HDR OLED TV first – even more impressive.

Tiramisu 2: The Road to Practicality

Unlike Boba 3, Meta wanted tiramisu, but was unable to send tiramisu viable. The field of vision is too narrow, thick and heavy, making it almost impossible to make it comfortable.

However, Meta said nothing about future plans in last week’s blog post, but the Siggraph showed the lens stack of a headset under development called the Tiramisu 2.

The Tiramisu 2 appears to balance angle resolution, brightness, contrast and field of view and compactness.

Tiramisu 1 has a refractive lens stack of 63mm, while Tiramisu 2 combines refractive index and diffractive elements, resulting in a thickness of 26mm thick, which is the hair above Quest 3’s. And it should have a horizontal field of view of about 90 degrees, and it’s something you’ve got with the original Oculus Rift.

This sacrifices angle resolution and brightness. Tiramisu 2 targets 60ppd and 700 nits. However, it is still more than twice the angle resolution of Quest 3 and seven times the brightness. These seem like wise trade-offs.

Can I watch Tiramisu 2 in Siggraph 2026? Tiramisu lead Ying Geng refused to say. I think she probably doesn’t know yet. But when I see a realistic image of even half of the tiramisu, beyond a 90-degree field of view, I hope I do that.

Boba 3: Ultra-width vision

At Siggraph 2025, I practiced another metaprototype headset called the Boba 3 from the DSR team.

The Boba 3 has the same angular resolution and the same low brightness and contrast as a headset like the Quest 3, but it engulfs you in a massive 180° horizontal with a 120° vertical field of view.

Metaboba 3 Prototype Hands-On: An Uncompromising Extra-Long View

We practiced the Boba 3, Meta’s practical, ultra-width field of view prototype headset. This is more optimistic than ever about the future of VR.

You can read my impressions of Boba 3 here.

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