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If you are into your virtual reality you will likely know Meta’s Chief Technology Officer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth from his many posts conferences and videos. Now Boz’s latest podcast – Boz to the Future (spoiler, he likes being called Boz), sees the Quest head honcho go into great detail while looking into the future, at what kind of standard VR we will be getting by the year (randomly) 2031 and to be fair he is extremely pragmatic about it.
If you are expecting him to say it will all be implemented in your retina by Elon and his merry gang, or you will be living most of your day in Ready Player One’s Oasis, then you are going to be sorely disappointed as Bosworth firmly puts the boot in on that idea and the scale of ambition in the next seven years won’t take us dramatically beyond where we currently sit today.
In terms of what Meta will be focusing on, Boz doesn’t believe headsets will need to go beyond the 120Hz refresh rate we already have today. That might sound ridiculous when we have monitors that already do twice that. While it might be functionally possible Bosworth says, “I’m not saying 240 isn’t better than 120, just like I think 60 PPD is better than 40 PPD, but within these limited compute budgets you’re not seeing generational huge improvements on that.”
He also believes that the weight of a headset will come fairly dramatically and is one of the things Meta will be pushing for as a lighter headset is obviously much more comfortable to wear for longer periods of time.
“I do think comfort is a tremendously important part of it. You’d like to see the weight pushed down. In particular, it’s not just the raw number of grams. It’s not the most important thing. How you balance it on the head, how close can the optical stack be to the eyes, that lever that is on the edge of your nose out to the edge of the device that controls the comfort on your nose, on your cheeks, the amount of pressure on your forehead, depending on what kind of strap you’re using, that’s determined there. So you can move that stack in a little bit, which is one of the big shifts from Quest 2 to Quest 3, that distance is quite a bit in so it feels more comfortable. So I’d like to see the weight reduced by, you know, 100-200 grams by that point.”
In terms of Field of View Bosworth predicts we will get a taller field of view rather than huge gains in the width of it that we might expect, “I actually think taller field of view matters more than wider field of view, for immersion. Certainly wider field of view is more important for us as a species in terms of information density, because our eyes do see more horizontal, but vertical is a good way of convincing you that you’re immersed in a space, in a way that’s kind of deceptive.”
UploadVR goes into a lot of depth reviewing the episode or If you want to listen to Boz from the Future in full, seek it out where you usually get your podcasts such as Spotify
Featured image courtesy of Meta
