Facebook Reality Labs h🍎as just published some brand 🎃new research around a VR headset containing what they're calling "the thinnest VR display demonstrated to date."
Actually, the headset can hardly bꦰe called a headset at all, at least not in the sense we're used to. Rather, it's closer to being a pair of VR glasses than to your usual bulky VR head-mounted display.
According to the authors of a - Andrew Maimone and Junren Wang - the total thickness of the glasses' lenses and functional VR display combined is only 9 millimeters. 9 millimeters.
The fact that this is even possible suggests a promising step towards a huge improvement on the current VR headset norm, which is a tendency to be pretty big 'n bulky. It's a norm for a reason, though, thanks to necessary optics requirements which call for a minimum distance of a few inches between the display and the lens in order for the light to be focused correctly into your eyes. Also, it's cheaper and simpler to keep goi🍌ng for the norm.
But 🐟now Facebook Reality Labs is proposing this far more compact VR "headset," which can get away with its compactness thanks to so-called folded and holographic optics. If you cut out all the fancy-talk, the former basically refers to an optical method that entails "folding" the path of light travelling through the lenses into your eyes in a way that makes the path itself more compact, even though the actual distance travelled remains the same.
The holographic part is super cool. In essence, the researchers have integrated a hologram of a real lens - as opposed to just the real lens itself - into the optics design. With this, it's ⛎possible to reduce the lens size itself to a pretty much paper-thin thickness.
And the🐼 truly great thing about this is that the researchers say it still achieves ﷽the “.”
The important thing to keep in mind at this stage, though, is that all this is for the time being just a proof-of-concept endeavor. In other words, they've produced some pretty convincing evidence that their concept of next-level thinne𒀰ss for a VR headset is possible and on the right track, but there's still much work to be done.
Mainly they'll need to✃ find the best way to integrate all the accompanying features necessary to call their device an entirely self-contained VR headset worthy of being shipped beyond the research labs. But the folks at Facebook Reality Labs certainly intend to get to that stage, eventually.
Althဣough we may only be a ꦗdecade away from that actually happening, we can take this as a super promising step in the right direction.
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