The Flamera headset offers a direct, in-front-of-our-eyes solution to the mixed reality industry’s largest challenge.
Passthrough is a feature that all mixed reality (and some virtual reality) headsets share but that no one has quite mastered. Headsets like the Meta Quest Pro, Apple Vision Pro, and even the $299 Quest 2 can imitate your physical surroundings to varied degrees as they obscure your actual view thanks to the painstaking placement of cameras and lenses.
Passthrough enables use cases that require some real-world spatial awareness and a significant amount of computer processing for image simulation in augmented reality applications like fashion, home design, and interactive learning.
Naturally, achieving a visual experience that closely resembles what you see in reality is not a simple task, especially when you consider the distance between the headsets’ cameras and your own “cameras” (or eyes). But Meta believes it has a secret weapon in the Display Systems Research (DSR) team of Reality Labs that has cracked the passthrough code.
According to Meta, the headgear uses depth-dependent reconstruction to piece together the raw sensor data obtained by all of those holes.
According to Grace Kuo, a Research Scientist on Meta’s DSR team, “The Flamera optical design works best when the headset is thin, allowing us to put the passthrough cameras as close to the user’s eyes as possible.”
Attendee and Principal Analyst at Moors Insights & Strategy Anshel Sag told IEEE Spectrum that it was “definitely among the best quality [augmented reality] passthrough I’ve ever seen.”
Sag also brought out the beta headset’s constrained field of view, which might be problematic for VR/AR applications that demand you to glance side to side.
But Flamera might be the beginning of something significant. Additionally, the slew of upcoming mixed reality headset launches, which will culminate in the debut of Apple’s Vision Pro early next year, makes the DSR technology created by Meta’s team something to keep an eye on.