Last year Meta started building its Presence Platform on the Quest VR headset, which has limited mixed reality capabilities. It can, for example, show your real keyboard in your virtual work environment. Or it can anchor virtual objects to real life places, e.g. if you put a virtual chess board on your coffee table, it will stay there between sessions.
The company is working on a much more advanced headset, which is know as “Project Cambria” for now. It will take the mixed reality capabilities of the Quest to the next level.
The new headset will have better cameras, which will allow for high resolution, full-color pass-through. Improved sensors and algorithms will be able to reconstruct a more accurate representation of your environment, allowing the virtual world to conform and interact with the real one more realistically.
Here is CEO Mark Zuckerberg trying out Cambria. The headset itself is pixelated as its still in production, but the video gives you an idea of what kind of interactions you can expect. This demo is dubbed The World Beyond.
The World Beyond will be available as a demo on the Quest for users to try out soon, but without the color pass-through the experience will be limited. If you have a Quest, you will be able to download it from the App Lab.
Also check out this video, which summarizes what Meta has achieved with the Quest and how Cambria will improve on the virtual presence tech, which is the cornerstone of the Metaverse.
The Project Cambria headset is coming out later this year, but the software features used to meld the virtual and real worlds together will be released sooner so that developers can get to work creating their own mixed reality experiences. Cambria is one of four headsets that Meta plans to release over the next couple of years.
