I’m pretty sure I won’t buy the $1,299 Meta VR glasses. It’s too rich for my blood in today’s economy, and my feelings about Meta are… conflicting. But I want you to understand that Meta has just changed the game. We had glasses, but we never had glasses like that.
The Meta VR Glasses are not an opaque VR headset. These are not a pair of transparent AR glasses. They might be the better of the two. After playing with the Meta VR Glasses, Valve’s Steam Frame, the Apple Vision Pro, and the Google/Xreal Aura back to back, I think this is the first design that could convince regular people to give VR a chance.
It’s not because they look like glasses. It’s not just that they are five times lighter than a typical helmet, weighing around 100 grams. It’s certainly not the $1,300 price tag, although it’s a lot less than a $3,700 Vision Pro.
It’s about what you see and feel – and what you don’t do it see and feel – when you put Meta’s VR glasses on your head.
You’re not completely locked in. You are not isolated. Because Meta VR Glasses are glasses, not glasses, you have true peripheral vision. You see a live video feed of your room in the center, thick “circles” around it, and then a real naked-eye view of your surroundings around those edges. Even when gaming, you still have peripheral vision.
I know people who aren’t comfortable with VR at home because they can’t afford to feel isolated from their children or pets. Personally, I’ve never felt comfortable wearing headsets on a plane, train, or in a park because I don’t like being around strangers who I can’t easily see.
Women told me VR was a failure because they had long hair or wore makeup. Many helmets balance their weight by sandwiching your head between a rear strap and a front cushion, and they don’t want to have to deal with the hassle of a high ponytail or stains every time they strap on.
Glasses are a potential solution, sitting on your ears and floating in front of your eyes instead of pushing on your head. For years, the industry has suggested that headsets would eventually give way to glasses.
But generally when we talk about glasses, they are transparent. We imagine glasses that are indistinguishable from glasses that allow you to see the real world in all its glory, then magically make virtual objects appear in the entire frame.
Today’s clear lens glasses have come leaps and bounds, but they’re not there yet. While basic lenses may look like glasses and give you a glasses-like field of vision, screens inside the glasses illuminate a much smaller area. When I swipe my head left or right, up or down, I see virtual objects disappear even though I’m still roughly looking in their direction.
In 2013, I briefly wore Google Glass, a small screen above my right eye with a 15-degree diagonal field of view the size of a postage stamp. In 2015, I tried Microsoft’s HoloLens, with a 34-degree field of view. Four years later, HoloLens 2 reached 52 degrees diagonal, the Xreal One Pro glasses I tested offered 57 degrees, and the Xreal Aura would finally push clear glasses to 70 degrees diagonal this fall.
But even with the Aura, a 70 degree diagonal is more like 60 degrees horizontal by 40 degrees vertical. Humans alone have about 120 degrees of binocular vision, and VR headsets like the Meta Quest 3 and Steam Frame offer about 110 degrees of horizontal vision so you can feel like a virtual world is all around you.
Clear lenses are also transparent. Glasses like the Aura need to make their projected light rival the real world while still allowing you to see through it. This often means spotlights directly against your forehead. Virtual objects can appear ghostly unless you activate electrochromic lenses, which darken clear lenses with the press of a button, blocking your view of the world.
Even then, you can see games, movies, and virtual desktops much better in a VR headset, where virtual light and real light don’t have to compete. You see the real world through what’s called “passthrough vision” – a live camera feed – with virtual objects appearing realistically at the right depth and blocking real objects behind them.
This is how Steam Frame, Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro work. But once again, they weigh four to eight times as much and are completely enclosed. What if there was a pair of lighter, open-air glasses that used pass-through vision instead of clear lenses? You see where I’m going with this.
Instead of 60 degrees horizontal by 40 degrees vertical, the Meta VR glasses offer 70 degrees by 66 degrees, and let me tell you, that seems like a bigger difference than it seems. But the difference isn’t just in the raw field of view: my real and virtual fields of view are different too. the same. Wherever I look inside the lenses, virtual objects can fill that frame, instead of being abruptly cut off where the display portion of the transparent screen ends.
It also doesn’t hurt that VR glasses offer much higher angular resolution than most AR or VR devices (37 ppd), making text easier to read.
What you don’t get at 70 degrees by 66 degrees is total immersion. Some nerds like me will say that Meta VR glasses don’t offer TRUE VR, because it’s hard to feel “there” if you see so much less of your game. But I also didn’t feel like I had tunnel vision, and the fact that the headset can track your hands well outside of your field of vision helps.
Wearing the Meta VR glasses was the first time I asked myself: is there such a thing as a “enough” field of vision? I’ll always want more, but maybe the problem with VR isn’t feeling immersed. The industry’s problem is convincing enough people that it’s worth wearing any type of head covering.
The 1-pound Steam Frame was a step in the right direction, but it’s still for obsessives like me. Quarter-pound VR glasses that let you see your real world clearly will be a much easier sell. Even if you’re not considering buying a $1,300 set from Meta, I suspect other companies are close to copying Meta’s homework.
When it announced VR glasses, Meta called it “a new era for virtual reality,” and in an interview, VP of wearables Alex Himel told my colleague Victoria Song that “the future of everything we do is a pair of augmented reality glasses.”
Back in February, it looked like Meta was producing even more glasses – but if the VR glasses work well, I wouldn’t be surprised if they stopped making headsets in the future.
Gn tech
