Facebook Reality Labs recently previewed a headset they’ve been working on that can display a pair of eyes on the outside of the headset. This technology will serve as a better bridge to connect a user in VR with outside people when a passthrough is enabled.
As XR headsets become more advanced and compact, rather than taking off the headset entirely, users can leave them on and use cameras to view the outside world. The Quest 2 demonstrates this by using its passthrough shortcut of double-tapping the headset to view surroundings.
What Facebook envisions with its prototype is that when passthrough is enabled, it can read where the user’s eyes are and replicate them on the outside display, complete with screen depth for a more natural look. This is accomplished by using a 3D model of the user’s face with eye-tracking applied on a light-field display. This gives the headset a sense of realism of the user’s actual eyes with the added closeness to the face the light-field display can do with depth.
This concept can also be applied not only to immersive VR headsets but to devices such as Hololens since those types of devices currently face an issue regarding reflections from the display obscuring users’ eyes from the outside. With improved waveguides and display projections this could be eliminated but Facebook’s concept could be an intermediate solution. The concept was demoed as part of a paper submitted to SIGGRAPH 2021, a convention focused on interactive computing and technologies. While the prototype looks clunky now, it’s yet another look into what could be the future of the XR space. The field advances quickly and it’ll be exciting to see what the future holds.
