Hands-On: Meta’s Reprojection-Free Passthrough Prototype

What I seen was a real-world passthrough view with no distortion or offset of any type, the place the geometry of objects I seen by the present was an similar to what I seen when lifting it up. Flamera does ship on its promise.

Nonetheless, the horrible present system was a persistent distraction from appreciating the true deserves of what Flamera presents. The refresh worth as an example meant the latency was inherently extreme, and the choice and color duplicate led to a blurry washed out image.

In future years, I hope to see Meta pair Flamera’s seize system with the also-thin “Holocake” lenses it teased last year to see what this seize methodology can really look like paired with the right present system.

Nevertheless Is It Wise?

Meta’s Present Applications Evaluation (DSR) group appears to be focused on two completely completely different duties: researching the feeling of specific long-term XR present choices, and often figuring out specific utilized sciences to appreciate these choices.

The other headset I tried at SIGGRAPH this year, Butterscotch Varifocal, was undoubtedly the earlier type. It’s not launched as an exact wise method to acquire each varifocal or retinal resolution in merchandise.

Nevertheless Flamera seems to be every an investigation of the feeling of reprojection-free passthrough and a proposal for a specific methodology. So that raises the question: will we see this in merchandise?

I requested the Flamera enterprise lead (who moreover had the distinctive thought) Grace Kuo. I spotted that the one primarily expensive part of Flamera’s methodology is the terribly large image sensor wished to grab all the views, which moreover generates a variety of heat – you might even see the heatsinks on all sides of the headset.

Nevertheless there are potential choices to this, akin to using separate loads smaller image sensors for each lens, or a minimum of groups of lenses.

One different potential future methodology might be a midpoint of reprojection and Flamera, using fewer lenses to chop again the complexity and ingredient worth and making use of additional gentle reprojection than what’s used, resulting in some seen artefacts – though loads a lot much less excessive than the current standard digicam methodology. This fusion of {{hardware}} and software program program is one factor Mea is desirous about investigating.

Meta admits that the utilized sciences in Flamera “may in no way make their methodology proper right into a consumer-facing product”. Nevertheless even when that’s the case, it nonetheless displays the spirit of novel innovation is alive & properly inside the agency’s evaluation phrases, and suggests there is also many non-obvious choices  to the problems of VR headsets within the current day invented in coming a very long time.