Can VR glasses save VR?

I’m pretty sure I won’t be buying the $1,299 Meta VR Glasses. That’s too rich for my blood in today’s economy, and my feelings about Meta are… conflicted. But I want you to understand that Meta just changed the game. We’ve had glasses, but we’ve never had glasses like this.

The Meta VR Glasses are not an opaque VR headset. They are not a pair of transparent AR glasses. They might be the best of both. 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 they’re 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’re five times lighter than a typical headset at around 100 grams. It’s certainly not the $1,300 price tag, even if that’s much less than a $3,700 Vision Pro.

It’s about what you see and feel — and what you don’t see and feel — when you put Meta’s VR Glasses on your head.

You aren’t fully enclosed. You aren’t isolated. Because the Meta VR Glasses are glasses, not goggles, you have real peripheral vision. You see a live video feed of your room in the center, thick “rims” around that, then an actual naked-eye view of your surroundings around those rims. Even when you’re in a game, you still have peripheral vision.

I know people who aren’t comfortable in VR at home because they can’t afford to feel isolated from their kids or pets. I’ve personally never felt comfortable wearing headsets on a plane or train or in a park because I don’t like being surrounded by strangers I can’t easily see.

Women have told me VR is a nonstarter because they have long hair or wear makeup. Many headsets balance their weight by sandwiching your head between a back strap and a front cushion, and they don’t want to deal with the hassle of a high ponytail or smears every time they strap in.

Glasses are a potential solution, resting on your ears and floating before your eyes instead of pushing on your head. For years, the industry has suggested headsets will eventually make way for glasses.

But typically when we talk about glasses, they’re transparent. We’re imagining indistinguishable-from-eyeglasses spectacles that let you see the real world in all its glory, then magically make virtual objects appear within the entirety of the frame.

Today’s transparent-display glasses have made leaps and bounds, but they’re not there yet. While the basic lenses might look like glasses and give you a glasses-like field of view, the displays inside the glasses light up a much smaller area. When I sweep my head left or right, up or down, I see virtual objects disappear even when I’m still looking roughly in their direction.

In 2013, I briefly wore Google Glass — a tiny screen above my right eye with a postage stamp-sized 15-degree diagonal field of view. In 2015, I tried Microsoft’s HoloLens, with a 34-degree field of view. Four years later, HoloLens 2 achieved 52 degrees diagonally, the Xreal One Pro glasses I’ve been testing offer 57 degrees, and the Xreal Aura will finally push transparent glasses to 70 degrees diagonal this fall.

Oh look, it’s me from 2013. Guy had no idea what he was getting into. Photo: Google

But even with the Aura, 70 degrees diagonal is more like 60 degrees horizontal by 40 degrees vertical. Humans have roughly 120 degrees of binocular vision alone, and VR headsets like the Meta Quest 3 and Steam Frame offer around 110 degrees horizontal so you can feel like a virtual world is all around you.

Transparent glasses are also, well, transparent. Glasses like the Aura have to make their projected light compete with the real world while still letting you see through. That often means projectors right up against your brow. Virtual objects can seem ghostly unless you activate electrochromic lenses, which turn the clear lenses dark at the push of a button, blocking your view of the world.

Even then, you can see games, movies, and virtual desktops far 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 realistically appearing at the correct depth and blocking real-life objects behind them.

The Steam Frame is one of the smallest, lightest, and most comfortable standalone VR headsets, but it’s still goggles. Photo: Kelsey McClellan / The Verge

That’s how the Steam Frame, Meta Quest, and Apple Vision Pro all work. But again, they weigh four to eight times as much and are fully enclosed. What if there were a lighter, open-air set of glasses that used passthrough vision instead of transparent 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, it feels like a bigger difference than it sounds. But the difference isn’t just the raw field of view — it’s that my real and virtual fields of view are the same. Anywhere I look inside the lenses, virtual objects can fill that frame, instead of getting abruptly cut off where the display part of the transparent display ends.

It also doesn’t hurt that the VR Glasses offer much higher angular resolution than most AR or VR devices (37ppd), making it easier to read text.

What you don’t get at 70 degrees by 66 degrees is full immersion. Some nerds like me will argue that the Meta VR Glasses don’t offer true VR, because it’s hard to feel like you’re “there” if you see so much less of your game. But it didn’t feel like I had tunnel vision, either, and it helps that the headset can track your hands far outside your field of view.

Wearing the Meta VR Glasses was the first time I thought to myself: Is there such a thing as “enough” field of view? I’ll always want more, but maybe the problem with virtual reality isn’t about feeling immersed. The industry’s problem is convincing enough people that it’s worth wearing any sort of headgear at all.

The 1-pound Steam Frame was a step in the right direction, but it’s still just 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 don’t plan to buy a $1,300 set from Meta, I suspect other companies are about to copy Meta’s homework.

When it announced the 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’re doing is a pair of augmented reality glasses.”

As of February, it sounded like more goggles were still coming from Meta — but if the VR Glasses do well, I wouldn’t be surprised if it stops making headsets in the future.

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