Why I Doubt Quest 3 Lite Will Support Color Perspective Mixed Reality

Meta甚至将Quest 3宣传为“第一款主流混合现实头戴式显示器”。尽管如此，Quest商店中的大多数应用仍然只支持虚拟现实。一些应用将透视作为可选的背景，而不是与真实环境完全融合的混合现实内容。

This is because most Quest users are still using Quest 2, while only Quest 3 can automatically generate a 3D mesh of your real environment.Quest 2 can do some basic room-aware mixed reality, but it requires manually labeling walls and furniture, a very responsible and inaccurate process that most users simply don't want to bother with. Also, it can only be rendered in black and white, which isn't appealing.

Quest 3 Lite Should Expand the Mixed Reality Market

A leaked Meta roadmap from last year showed that Meta plans to release a new head-mounted display called Ventura after the Quest 3 in 2024, with "the most attractive price point in the VR consumer market" as the project's goal. Reports from the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and a reliable analyst in China in the past suggest that the head-mounted display will utilize the Quest 3's Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipset, but use the Quest 2's older Fresnel lens to achieve a price point low enough to replace the Quest 2 in Meta's lineup.

The Chinese analyst believes that Quest 3 Lite will only support only black and white perspective like Quest 2, but there's reason to believe he's wrong.

By including the XR2 Gen 2 chipset, Meta will enable the Quest 3 Lite to run the same VR content at the same level of quality as the main Quest 3. Developers will see no difference between the two. But if the Quest 3 Lite doesn't have similar mixed reality features, developers will have to treat it very differently when integrating mixed reality features.

Support for Quest 3 Lite must include support for mixed reality perspectives, and last week, Meta's Director of Engineering seemed to directly imply that all future Quest head-mounted displays will support mixed reality. In a recent Meta blog post, XR's Director of Technical Engineering, Paul Fogel, stated, "After Quest 3, I believe perspective and MR will become standard features on all future head-mounted displays."

While the dual 4 megapixel color cameras on the Quest 3 may have some special capabilities, such as a global shutter, they are unlikely to cost much. The real cost of perspective is in having a chip that can effectively handle 8 megapixels per frame, and the XR2 Gen 2 can fulfill that need.

Even without a depth projector

However, one of the factors that pushed the price beyond Meta's Quest 2 replacement target may have been the inclusion of an infrared depth projector. However, there is evidence that the Quest 3 Lite will not include a depth projector.

Quest 3 is codenamed Eureka, as in:

• Quest Pro (the result of Project Cambria) was codenamed Seacliff
• Quest 2's code name is Hollywood.
• Oculus Quest (the result of Project Santa Cruz) is codenamed Monterrey
• Oculus Go's codename is Pacific

Last October, Quest firmware data miner Samulia discovered a new helmet codename called "Panther". A year earlier, Samulia had discovered many of the specifications of the Quest Pro, as well as the resolution and 3D room mesh capabilities of the Quest 3.

Reference to the debugging function that "simulates" a certain helmet (Eureka) In this setup, the use of the depth projector is blocked according to the text in the debugging log.

Many people think that Quest 3's depth projector is an essential part of making its perspective features work, but this is not the case. In fact, it is only used to generate a 3D scene mesh when setting up a room. The real-time depth map used to re-project perspective and exposed by the new depth API to support dynamic occlusion is generated by a computer vision software algorithm that compares views acquired from two front-facing grayscale tracking cameras.

Theoretically, even without hardware-level depth sensing, a depth projector is not required to generate a 3D scene mesh. Depth estimation without hardware-level depth sensing is a rapidly growing area in computer vision, and Quest 3 has already made progress in this area, showing that the same estimation method can be used to generate scene meshes. While it may be less accurate than Quest 3, and may require you to approach each wall to make an estimate, these look like an acceptable compromise for developing a significantly less expensive device.

To me, the mockup text above strongly suggests this. And there's not much point in putting so much effort into a helmet that only has black and white perspective.

Critical to Meta's Mixed Reality Ecosystem

If Meta abandons mixed reality after making it the primary focus of Quest 3, it will send a signal to developers that it's not a technology worth developing, killing any real chance Meta has of building a mixed reality content ecosystem to compete with Apple's Vision Pro and Samsung's Google Headset.

With Color Perspective, the Quest 3 Lite will become a cheaper Quest 3 with a bulkier form factor and a less sharp lens. It's lower quality, but not a radically different device. It will push VR forward and expand the mixed reality market. While Meta may be sacrificing mixed reality goals for relentless VR cost-cutting, Paul Fogel's hints and Samulia's findings suggest otherwise.

source:uploadvr