Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, August 3, Meta will unveil two new prototypes at SIGGRAPH 2023 next week. SIGGRAPH is an annual conference where researchers present breakthroughs in computer graphics hardware and software.

CTOnews.com noted that last year Meta showed Starburst, a research prototype of a high dynamic range (HDR) display with a brightness of 20000 nits, the highest of any known head display. This year, Meta will showcase two prototype head displays: Butterscotch Varifocal will showcase near-retinal resolution and zoom optics, while Flamera validates a novel real-world perspective without reprojection. Attendees will then be able to try out the two prototypes, but it should be clear that Butterscotch Varifocal and Flamera are research prototypes designed to explore head-display technologies in the distant future, and Meta specifically warned that these technologies "may never enter consumer-oriented products".

Butterscotch Varifocal: zoom retinal resolution angular resolution is the true measure of head-mounted display resolution because it takes into account the difference in field of view between different head displays and describes how many pixels you see in each degree of view, that is, pixels per degree (PPD). For example, if two head displays use the same display, but one of them has twice the field of view of the other, they have the same resolution, but the former has only half the PPD of the latter. "Retinal resolution" is a term used to describe that the angular resolution exceeds the threshold recognized by the human eye, which is 60 PPD in the head display field. At present, there is no consumer VR head on the market that is close to this level. The Quest Pro is about 22 PPD, while the Bigscreen Beyond $32 PPD,2000 Varjo Aero has reached 35 PPD. Varjo's $5500 commercial head does achieve retinal resolution, but only in a small rectangular area in the middle of the angle of view.

Last year, Meta showed a 55-PDD prototype head display, called Butterscotch, designed to demonstrate and study the sense of retinal resolution, but with a field-of-view angle of about half that of Quest 2. Butterscotch Varifocal is the next generation evolution of Butterscotch, combining its retinal angular resolution with the variable focus optics of the Half-Dome prototype.

Butterscotch Varifocal's motor-adjustable display focal length Half-Dome, which was first exhibited in 2018, combines eye-tracking technology to move the display back and forth quickly and mechanically to dynamically adjust the focus. At present, all head displays on the market use fixed focus lenses, and each eye has a separate angle of view, but the image is focused at a fixed focal length, usually a few meters away. Your eyes will point to (converge or diverge) the virtual object you are looking at, but cannot really focus (adjust) the virtual distance to the object. This is called parallax-adjusting conflicts, which can cause eye fatigue and make close virtual objects look blurred. Solving this problem is important to make VR feel more realistic and more suitable for long-term use. Butterscotch Varifocal can support adjustments from 25 centimeters to infinity, Meta said, so you can focus on objects at close or long distances. Meta claims that the combination of retinal resolution and zoom optics means that the head display provides a "clear, bright visual effect comparable to that seen with the naked eye".

Flamera: light field perspective without reprojection Flamera is a head display prototype without reprojection perspective, which Meta describes as a "computational camera using light field technology". Headdisplays like Quest Pro, Apple Vision Pro and the upcoming Quest 3 use front cameras to show the real world, but because these cameras are different from the user's real eye position, they must use image processing algorithms to re-project the camera view to show what your eyes will see. This process increases the delay and leads to image processing artifacts. Flamera aims to bypass the reprojection method completely through a completely new hardware design, which is built with perspective as the goal.

Here is how the header works as described by Meta:

Unlike traditional light-field cameras (with lens arrays), Flamera (imagined as a "flat camera") intentionally places an aperture behind each lens in the array. These apertures physically block unwanted light so that only the desired light reaches the eye (traditional light-field cameras capture more than that, resulting in an unacceptably low image resolution). The architecture used also concentrates a limited number of sensor pixels on the relevant part of the light field, resulting in a higher resolution image. The original sensor data eventually looks like small dots, each of which contains only a portion of the view needed to show the outside physical world. Flamera rearranged the pixels and estimated a rough depth map to achieve depth-related reconstruction.

Meta claims that this will lead to perspective with lower latency and fewer artifacts.

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