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Mark Zuckerberg shows early metaverse headsets Mirror Lake, Holocake


The company formerly known as Facebook will spend 10 billion dollars this year on research and development in augmented and virtual reality technology, including computer glasses or headsets.

In Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed how the social media company has made progress toward that goal by revealing the many unfinished headphone prototypes the company has built in the lab. mine.

Zuckerberg has bet the future of the social networking company he founded is based on virtual reality, which transports users into computer-generated and augmented reality worlds that superimpose computer-generated objects. compared to the real world. Last year, the company changed its name to Meta to emphasize the company’s new emphasis on the metaverse, a virtual world in which Zuckerberg imagines people will spend more time — ideally through advanced computer glasses.

If Zuckerberg succeeds in making wearables mainstream, then Meta will have a new revenue stream from hardware sales and it will control its own hardware platform, which will make it less affected by background changes from other companies. For example, during its last earnings call, Meta said that recent privacy changes Apple made to the iPhone could spent 10 billion dollars in missed revenue this yearbecause it interferes with the company’s ability to target ads to precise audiences.

The current VR market is very small and there are many questions about how big it can be. Meta currently dominates headphone sales, with its current $299 Quest 2 accounting for 78% of all headset sales in 2021, according to estimates from IDC. But there was only 11.2 million VR headsets sold total for the year – a much smaller number than a smartphone or PC.

Meanwhile, investors are skeptical about Meta’s shift away from its main business of advertising and apps. Shares are down more than 53% so far in 2022 due to concerns about costs are increasingslight growth forecast, increased competition from TikTok and magnetic effects Apple’s iPhone privacy change has stymied mobile advertising.

Monday’s rally did not assuage those fears – shares of Meta closed down more than 4% on Tuesday, despite a broader rally in tech shares. (US markets were closed on Monday for the June 13 holiday watch.)

What Zuckerberg showed

Meta is developing next-generation virtual reality displays designed to provide a realistic enough experience for users to feel like they’re in the same room as other virtual people, Zuckerberg said during his demonstration. me. The current screen has a low resolution, the screen is distorted and cannot be worn for a long time.

“It won’t be long before we can create footage with perfect fidelity,” Zuckerberg said on a media call about the company’s virtual reality efforts. “Only instead of seeing them on the screen, you feel like you’re there.”

“The problem today is that the vividness of the screens we have compared to what your eyes see in the physical world is different by an order of magnitude or more,” Zuckerberg said.

Over the past few years, Meta has regularly demonstrated its progress in the development of virtual reality headsets and augmented reality headsets to partners and the press, to encourage investors to consider the project worthwhile. pricing, while helping to recruit well-paid developers and executives with experience in VR. and AR.

During these roundtable presentations, Meta regularly displays unfinished prototypes for research use, which is unusual in the consumer electronics sector. Utility companies love to perfect products and find out how they will be manufactured before talking about them in the press. For example, Apple, which is developing its own headphones, never introduces prototypes.

“These prototypes, they’re custom and custom models that we’ve built in our labs, so they’re not ship-ready products,” Zuckerberg said.

These are the prototypes he showed:

Butterscotch. Butterscotch is designed to test higher resolution screens that have pixels small enough that the human eye cannot distinguish them. Butterscotch has a new lens that Meta developed to limit the field of view of the headset, making it possible to present beautiful text and display more realism.

However, Meta says the prototype is “not transportable” because of how heavy and cumbersome it is – adding, the prototype still has an open circuit board.

Half Dome 3. Meta has been working on Half Dome headsets since at least 2017 to test how far a screen can shift the focus point of the headset’s optics. Meta says that with Half Dome’s technology, the resolution and image quality can improve enough for users to create giant computer screens inside the headset to work. The latest version, 3, replaces the mechanical parts with a liquid crystal lens.

Holocakes 2. Meta says it’s the thinnest and lightest VR headset it’s made, and it’s fully capable of running any VR software if it’s connected to a PC. However, it requires specialized lasers that are too expensive for consumer use and require additional safety precautions.

“In most VR headsets, the lenses are quite thick, and they have to be placed a few inches away from the screen so they can focus accurately and direct the light directly into your eyes,” Zuckerberg said. In Holocake 2, Meta uses a flat, three-dimensional lens for mass reduction (apart from the laser.)

Starburst. Starburst is a research prototype focused on brighter high dynamic range displays and wider color gamut. Meta says that HDR is the single technology that has the most to do with added realism and depth.

“The goal of all this work is to identify technical avenues that will allow us to meaningfully improve in the ways that begin to approach the visual realism we need,” Zuckerberg said.

HoGuom lake. Meta has also introduced a concept design called Mirror Lake for a ski-style headset. Mirror Lake is designed to combine all the different Meta headset technologies it is developing into a single next-generation display.

Meta Reality Labs Scientist Michael Abrash said: “The Mirror Lake concept is promising, but right now it’s just a concept with no fully functional headset built to definitively demonstrate what it can do. architecture”. “But if it succeeds, it will be a game changer for the VR visual experience.”



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