Meta's Quest Head-mounted Display with Varifocal Lens Technology Hints for Upcoming Products

TapTechNews June 27th news, Meta's Quest head-mounted display firmware information hints that the company's varifocal lens technology (varifocallense) is expected to be applied to the upcoming products.

The firmware information has accurately predicted the upcoming Quest features many times in the past. For example, about a year before the release of the first-generation QuestPro, users found codes related to eye tracking and facial tracking in the firmware.

At the end of 2022, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, demonstrated its MirrorLake concept head-mounted display. He said that the technology of this proof-of-concept (including adjustable focal length) may be applied in the products of the second half of this decade.

In March 2023, an internal Meta hardware roadmap leaked to TheVerge showed that the QuestPro2 originally planned to be released in 2024 was canceled and replaced by a more ambitious but far away product. According to the roadmap, this head-mounted display will have the CodecAvatars function, higher resolution, and retain the rear battery design of QuestPro. Earlier this month, TheInformation reported that the research and development work of this head-mounted display started in November last year. So, does the latest firmware information imply that it may also be equipped with varifocal lenses?

All VR head-mounted displays on the market currently use fixed focal length lenses. Although both eyes can obtain independent perspectives, the focal length of the image is fixed, usually several meters away. When users gaze at a virtual object, the eyes cannot actually focus on the virtual object truly. This leads to a less realistic feeling of the virtual world, and close-range virtual objects look blurry, and it can even cause eye fatigue.

At the F8 Developer Conference in 2018, Facebook demonstrated a prototype head-mounted display named HalfDome, which combined eye tracking technology and adjusted the focal length by mechanically moving the display forward and backward. HalfDome solved the vergence-accommodation conflict problem, but the mechanical structure has serious reliability problems in the real world and is not suitable for commercial products.

In the OculusConnect6 conference in 2019, Facebook demonstrated HalfDome2 and HalfDome3. HalfDome2 adopted a more reliable actuator and a more compact design but sacrificed some field of vision.

And HalfDome3 adopted a completely different new method without movable parts. Instead of moving the display, it uses stacked liquid crystal lens layers. By changing the voltage applied to each lens layer to change its focal length, different focal distances can be achieved. Through 6 layers of lenses, 64 different focal length adjustments can be achieved.

In a speech at the beginning of 2020, Douglas Lanman, director of Facebook's display system research and development, said that the technology of Half-Dome3 is almost ready for commercial use. After more than four years, is the varifocal technology finally going to leave the laboratory and be about to enter mass production? TapTechNews will keep following up.