Facebook published new research today which the company says shows the "thinnest VR display demonstrated to date," in a proof-of-concept headset based on folded holographic optics. Facebook Reality Labs, the company's AR/VR R&D division, today published new research demonstrating an approach which combines two key features: polarization-based optical 'folding' and holographic lenses. In the work, researchers Andrew Maimone and Junren Wang say they've used the technique to create a functional VR display and lens that together are just 9mm thick. The result is a proof-of-concept VR headset which could truly be called 'VR glasses'. The approach has other benefits beyond its incredibly compact size; the researchers say it can also support significantly wider color gamut than today's VR displays, and that their display makes progress "toward scaling resolution to the limit of human vision." Let's talk about how it all works. Why Are Today's Headsets So Big? [caption id="attachment_87875" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Photo by Road to VR[/caption] It's natural to wonder why even the latest VR headsets are essentially just as bulky as the first generation of headsets that launched back in 2016. The answer is simple: optics. Unfortunately the solution is not so simple. Every consumer VR headset on the market uses effectively the same optical pipeline: a macro display behind a simple lens. The lens is there to focus the light from the display into your eye. But in order for that to happen the lens need to be a few inches from the display, otherwise it doesn't have enough focusing power to focus the light into your eye. That necessary distance between the display and the lens is the reason why every headset out there looks like a box on your face. The approach is still used today because the lenses and the displays are known quantities; they're cheap & simple, and although bulky, they achieve a wide field of view and high resolution. Many solutions have been proposed for making VR headsets smaller, and just about all of them include the use of novel displays and lenses. The new research from Facebook proposes the use of both folded optics and holographic optics. Folded Optics What are folded optics? It's not quite what it sounds like, but once you understand it, you'd be hard pressed to come up with a better name. While the simple lenses in today's VR headsets must be a certain distance from the display in order to focus the light into your eye, the concept of folded optics proposes 'folding' that distance over on itself, such that the light still traverses the same distance necessary for focusing, but its path is folded into a more compact area. You can think of it like a piece of paper with an arbitrary width. When you fold the paper in half, the paper itself is still just as wide as when you started, but it's width occupies less space because you folded it over on itself. But how the hell do you do that with light? Polarization is the key. [caption id="attachment_96512" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Image courtesy Proof of Concept Engineering[/caption] It turns out that beams of light have an 'orientation'. Normally the orientation of light beams at random, but you can use a polarizer to only let light of a specific orientation pass through. You can think of a polarizer like the coin-slot on a vending machine: it will only accept coins in one orientation. Using polarization, it's possible to bounce light back and forth multiple times along an optical path before eventually letting it out and into the wearer's eye. This approach (also known as 'pancake optics' allows the lens and the display to move much closer together, resulting in a more compact headset. But to go even thinner—to shrink the size of the lenses themselves—Facebook researchers have turned to holographic optics. Holographic Optics Rather than using a series of typical lenses (like the kind found in a pair of glasses) in the folded optics, the researchers have formed the lenses into... holograms. If that makes your head hurt, everything is fine. Holograms are nuts, but I'll do my best to explain. Unlike a photograph, which is a recording of the light in a plane of space at a given moment, a hologram is a recording of the light in a volume of space at a given moment. When you look at a photograph, you can only see the information of the light contained in the plane that was captured. When you look at a hologram, you can look around the hologram, because the information of the light in the entire volume is captured (also known as a lightfield). [irp posts="95100" name="Hand-tracking Text Input System From Facebook Researchers Throws Out the Keyboard (sort of)"] Now I'm going to blow your mind. What if when you captured a hologram, the scene you captured had a lens in it? It turns out, the lens you see in the hologram will behave just like the lens in the scene. Don't believe me? Watch this video at 0:19 at look at the magnifying glass in the scene and watch as it magnifies the rest of the hologram, even though it is part of the hologram itself. This is the fundamental idea behind Facebook's holographic lens approach. The researchers effectively 'captured' a hologram of a real lens, condensing the optical properties of a real lens into a paper-thin holographic film. So the optics Facebook is employing in this design is, quite literally, a hologram of a lens. Continue Reading on Page 2: Bringing it All Together Bringing it All Together [caption id="attachment_96508" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Image courtesy Facebook[/caption] So, we learned about folded optics and we learned about holographic lenses. And now the phrase 'folded holographic optics' hopefully sounds a bit less like technical mumbo-jumbo. The whole goal of this approach is to enable truly glasses-sized VR displays. Even in this proof-of-concept stage, the researchers have already demonstrated a headset equipped with such displays that could really be called 'glassed-sized' even more fairly than 'goggles'. And they say it achieves the "resolution and FOV of a modern VR headset." [caption id="attachment_96506" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Image courtesy Facebook[/caption] It's important to note though that the sleek headset pictured does not include critical components necessary for a real product. In order to focus squarely on the heart of their research (the optics), they left out things that would normally be inside the headset, like the light source (laser in this case), driving electronics, tracking cameras, etc. Among the design's limitations, the researchers "acknowledge size reduction challenges when integrating light sources into the glasses, as current laser modules tend to be larger than commonly used LED sources." With further R&D, the researchers say, folded holographic optics could be a practical approach to making compact VR headsets that offer a wide field of view, very large color gamut, and perhaps even retinal resolution. Which makes us wonder... When Will We See This Technology in a Headset? [caption id="attachment_96509" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Image courtesy Facebook[/caption] My guess is not for another 10 years at least. Although the research demonstrates some really compelling possibilities, there's still much work to be done before this technology leaves the labs. As such, the researchers explored the limitations of their present design. First, they have yet to demonstrate a full-color version of their work in the glasses-sized form-factor (though they did demonstrate full-color in a proof-of-concept that was not head-worn). [caption id="attachment_96511" align="alignright" width="320"] The complete VR display, lens, screen, and all. | Image courtesy Facebook[/caption] Another issue is the eye-box of the optics (the volume of space where your eye can actually see the image). The proof-of-concept demonstration had an eye-box of 8 mm, but it will need at least 10–12 mm to make a "practical [stereoscopic] headset," the researchers say. Further, the researchers note that while the technology is likely to support retina resolution, much higher resolution displays will still need to become widely available. That and a calibration protocol will need to be developed to improve "geometric uniformity, intensity uniformity, color uniformity, and color alignment." And then there's the whole matter of being able to build the rest of the components into such a small form factor. The researchers envision a standalone Quest-like VR headset with everything on-board for the complete VR experience with no tether. "Our prototypes were monoscopic and used external light sources and display drivers. A truly portable and practical display would integrate a pair of display modules, a computing platform, batteries, positional trackers, and all external components into a sunglasses-like frame." So it's going to be a while before this tech makes it out of the lab, and that's only if a better solution isn't found by then. Still, this is a very exciting proof-of-concept, primarily because of the combination of form-factor, resolution, field of view, and color gamut. If you really want to take a technical deep dive, check out the full research paper titled Holographic Optics for Thin and Lightweight Virtual Reality.