Forget The Quest 3, Meta's New Tiramisu Prototype Has 14X The Brightness And 3.6X The Resolution
The company just put up a blog post announcing that Reality Labs Research (RLR) will be at SIGGRAPH this year with two devices to demo: the Tiramisu ultra-high-resolution prototype, and the Boba 3 super-wide-FOV headset. Of the two, only the Boba 3 is likely to become a real product anytime soon, but the Tiramisu is arguably the more impressive headset thanks to some truly outstanding specifications.
When we talk about computer screen resolutions, we often talk in terms of absolute pixel values, but that's not really the most useful metric. A better way to talk about screen resolutions is "PPI", or pixels per inch, because this describes pixel density—the metric that actually describes the sharpness of the screen.
Similarly, while companies often talk about the absolute resolution of the tiny LCDs or OLEDs their headsets use, the more useful metric is "PPD", or pixels per degree. This is a measure of pixel density relative to the field of view of the screen; the higher this number, the sharper the image in the headset. The Quest 3 has a PPD of about 25; Meta's new Tiramisu headset has a PPD of about 90.
That is, as the headline says, about 3.6 times the resolution of the extant standalone headset, and a good bit higher than any other headset to date. The micro-OLED screens in the Tiramisu concept can also shine at up to 1400 nits, which—in combination with the perfect brightness control of OLED—allows them to recreate life-like scenes with extremely true-to-life clarity. Meta's Lisa Brown Jaloza writes that the Tiramisu is the closest anyone has come to passing "the visual Turing test," her name for a hypothetical virtual scene that viewers can't tell apart from reality.
Tiramisu isn't planned to come to a product anytime soon. That's because it has some serious drawbacks. For one, it's big and heavy. This is partially because it uses complicated optics to achieve such high resolution, and partially because those optics are made from real glass instead of synthetics. That's because real glass has a higher refractive index and lower dispersion compared to plastics.
The other big problem with Tiramisu is that it has an extremely limited field of view of just 33 degrees both horizontally and vertically. Remember those complicated optics we just mentioned? The way Tiramisu achieves a resolution impossible with conventional headsets is by narrowing the field of view (FOV). In essence, it's visually compressing the full resolution of its screens into a small area, giving a high pixel density.
This makes Tiramisu uniquely poorly suited for productization, because it is expensive, uncomfortable and impractical. Still, it's apparently a tantalizing glimpse into the future of high-end VR headsets. Reality Labs' Display Systems Research (DSR) director Douglas Lanman says "It's something new, and it's hard to understand this combination of numbers on a page really feeling different. Honestly, it's the first headset in a while that really gives me a sense of wonder. It's the most realistic VR image I've seen yet."
Meanwhile, the Boba 3 headset prototype goes in the opposite direction. Where Tiramisu is ultra high-resolution with a narrow FOV, the Boba 3 is only "high" resolution with an absurdly wide FOV. Meta says the horizontal FOV on the Boba 3 is 180°, while the vertical FOV is 120°. For comparison's sake, the Quest 3's values are 110° and 96° respectively, and only a couple of other headsets (like the StarVR back in 2020) could ever challenge the Boba 3's numbers.
Human vision is typically considered to have a 200° horizontal FOV and a 135-150° vertical FOV. The Boba 3 doesn't fully cover that range, but it gets pretty damn close—and it does it without completely dumpstering the image resolution like the aforementioned StarVR. Most of this is simply down to developments in screen and graphics technology. Back in 2020, the technology simply didn't exist to create and then drive a headset with 4K x 4K per-eye resolution.
That's an incredible number of pixels, but due to the extremely wide FOV, it "only" results in a PPD value of about 30—still higher than the Quest 3, and higher than many other contemporary headsets, too. The thing to understand is that it's delivering better-than-Quest-3 sharpness across nearly the entire range of human vision, which is crazy.
As DSR optical scientist Yang Zhao explains, even if he could take the Boba 3 back to 2017, he wouldn’t have been able to use it. "It’s just way too many pixels," he says, but "thanks to AI and gaming, crazy-spec GPUs exist on the consumer market and let us power that many pixels."
Unlike the Tiramisu—which is packed full of bespoke advancements—the Boba 3 was designed to re-use as many components and advancements from Meta's extant VR hardware as possible. That's because this is absolutely intended for for release, but Zhao is careful to temper expectations. "It’s something that we wanted to send out into the world as soon as possible, but it’s not for everyone," he says, continuing, "it’s not going to easily hit a mass-market price point, and it requires a top-of-the-line GPU and PC system."
If you're keen to experience both near and far futures of VR, head to British Columbia, because Meta is bringing both of these concept devices to SIGGRAPH 2025. The company says that the headsets will be available from 10:30 AM on August 11 thru 3:00 PM on August 14 in the West Building Exhibit Hall 3.
