Meta’s prototype headsets show off the future of mixed reality

Meta’s consumer VR headsets are already among the best you can get for their price points, but at a conference next week, the company is showing off some impressive-sounding research prototypes that could be a peek at what its headsets might be capable of in the future.

One headset, called “Tiramisu,” brings a “new milestone for realism in VR,” Meta says in a blog post. Tiramisu has “high contrast — roughly 3x that of Meta Quest 3 — combined with an angular resolution of 90 pixels per degree (PPD) — 3.6x that of Quest 3 — and brightness up to 1,400 nits — 14x that of Quest 3.” There are apparently some trade-offs, including that it’s “bulkier and heavier” than consumer headsets available today and has a limited field of view (FOV), but it’s “the closest we’ve come to a visual experience that passes the visual Turing test yet.”

Two other headsets, the “Boba 3” and the “Boba 3 VR,” instead have a very wide FOV. While the Quest 3 has a horizontal FOV of 110 degrees and a vertical FOV of 96 degrees, the Boba 3 headsets have a horizontal FOV of 180 degrees and vertical FOV of 120 degrees. That horizontal FOV brings the headsets much closer to the FOV of the human visual system, which Meta says is “roughly” 200 degrees.

The Boba 3 headsets, which leverage “displays in mass production and similar lens technologies to those found in Quest 3,” have a display resolution per eye of 4K by 4K. That’s higher than the 3K by 3K display resolution per eye of last year’s Boba 2 prototype and the 2K by 1K display resolution per eye of the previous Boba 1 prototype.

The prototype headsets will be shown at next week’s SIGGRAPH 2025 conference, and I recommend checking out Meta’s blog post to see videos of them in action. While Meta says they are “purely research prototypes, with novel technologies that may never make their way into a consumer product,” you can see how they might eventually lead to headsets that can offer much more immersive VR experiences.