Meta's latest prototype VR headset is eerily close to real life — but its design is something to behold

While Mark Zuckerberg may be adamant that AI smart glasses are the future, Meta isn't giving up on virtual reality just yet. The company has just revealed its latest VR headset prototype, codenamed "Tiramisu." And it is, to put it nicely, absurdly large.

As you can see in the image above, this headset is pretty gargantuan, and it reminds me of scenes in Futurama where Bender extends his eyes out of his head. Needless to say, this thing looks very front-heavy and rather uncomfortable to wear.

That said, Meta claims that this is the closest any of its headsets have come to "passing the visual Turing test." In other words, Meta is inching closer to being able to trick your eyes into thinking they're looking at the real world — not some metaverse landscape that's blander than my grandmother's grilled chicken.

Whether those claims hold any water is not clear, because we haven't tested the headset for ourselves. And the fact it's a prototype, with its absurd design, means we're not likely to be doing so anytime soon.

What does "Tiramisu" actually have to offer?

Apparently this headset offers 90 pixels per degree (PPD), which is considerably higher than what we can buy right now. Apple Vision Pro is 34 PPD, while Meta Quest 3 offers 26 PPD. Apparently, such high pixel density means that even the smallest on-screen lettering is legible to the wearer.

The brightness is also claimed to be 14 times higher than the Quest 3 (1,400 nits), with ultra-high contrast. Meta claims there's something called "angular resolution" thrown in, which helps with those finer details, and promises to be 3.6 times better than the Quest 3's capabilities. That all sounds pretty darn impressive, at least on paper.

The downside is the design of the headset itself. The bulk is a big issue, but it's also claimed that the Trismus headset has a narrow field of view. Just 33 x 33 degrees, in fact, which is pretty poor.

Needless to say, it's going to be hard to convince your brain you're not looking at a virtual landscape without matching (or ideally slightly exceeding) the same field of view as our eyes. Those black areas inside the headset would be a dead giveaway that it's all fake. That's before you consider the actual weight and feel of the headset itself.

Don't expect these specs anytime soon

Still, progress is progress no matter how limited it might be in certain areas. The only way is forward from here.

You're not likely to see such high-end specs in a consumer VR headset anytime soon. Not only does Meta need to figure out the field of view and bulk problems, the cost factor will also come into play.

This stuff is going to be horrendously expensive, and as we've seen with the Apple Vision Pro, no amount of high-tech wizardry can make people buy something that's astronomically priced.

For now, the closest you'll be getting to this is eating an actual tiramisu while wearing a Quest 3.

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