Meta’s Flamera Has a New Vision for Augmented Reality
This cyberpunk headset keeps you in touch with actual reality
Meta’s latest prototype headset, Flamera, looks ripped straight from a sci-fi action flick—and it quickly turned heads at SIGGRAPH 2023, where Flamera won the coveted Best in Show award.
The Flamera headset, bug-eyed and glowing ominous red, is an intimidating piece of kit that looks radically different from its peers. And the look is not just for show. The headset debuts a new lens design that could solve augmented reality’s most pressing problem: “passthrough,” or the use of external cameras to provide a headset user with a view of the world around them. ...
Meta’s bug-eyed Flamera presents a novel solution. It ditches the array of external cameras favored by current headsets for a unique “lightfield passthrough” design that pairs image sensors with apertures that physically control the light reaching the sensors. Light that would contribute an incorrect perspective is blocked, while light that provides an accurate perspective is allowed to reach the sensors.
The result is strange when viewed directly through the lens: It’s a bit like watching the world through holes poked through paper. The headset rearranges the raw image to remove gaps and reposition the sensor data. Once complete, the headset delivers an accurate view of the world around the user. ...
“There was no latency, and no differences between what my eyes would see and where my hand was positioned, verses where my hand was really located.” ...
But that’s not to say Meta has cracked passthrough AR wide open. Flamera’s technology is a long way from shipping in a headset available for purchase, and currently suffers some drawbacks relative to traditional passthrough AR. ...
See the full story here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/meta-flamera
