What is the name of Meta’s new VR headset?
Project Cambria is the internal name for Meta’s project of a premium headset and not the product name. Meta will probably announce the latter only at the full unveiling. According to a Bloomberg report, the device will be called “Quest Pro,” the name already used by tech chief Andrew Bosworth and Mark Zuckerberg himself.
With this name, Meta could build on an already established brand. The fact that that brand is associated with what is essentially a game console speaks against this naming. A new name would suit the device better, especially since it is an entirely new product line aimed at professionals and companies.
Different codenames for Project Cambria appear in the Quest firmware, including Arcata, Seacliff, and Seabright. Seabright possibly stands for a more technically advanced, second Cambria model potentially coming in 2024.
Is Project Cambria the successor to Meta Quest 2?
No. With Project Cambria, Meta is building a new product line with premium features. The headset will be backward compatible with Meta Quest’s app ecosystem while offering new technology at a higher price. The Meta Quest 2 is expected to be replaced by the Meta Quest 3 (report) in late 2023.
Who and what does Meta want to achieve with Project Cambria?
With Project Cambria, Meta is testing new VR technologies from its own research labs on the market. As soon as these have matured on the software side and are cheaper to produce, they could find their way into future iterations of the Meta Quest line. The aggressively priced product line is aimed at the masses and serves to penetrate the market as quickly as possible.
For Project Cambria, the goal is different. The much more expensive high-end product line is aimed at VR enthusiasts and professional users and is an experimental field for new, particularly advanced VR technologies.
In April and May 2022, Zuckerberg specified target use cases. The focus is on work and productivity. Project Cambria is the first in a series of devices that Meta wants to sell to “enterprises and knowledge workers.” The headset is expected to one day replace Chromebooks and laptops, allowing users to take their office with them wherever they go. By the end of the decade, Meta’s long-term vision is for headsets of this type to become the primary work device.
With the Cambria product line, Meta is pursuing the project of a “work headset” that will sooner or later revolutionize the workplace. This is another reason why Meta is working hard on a virtual office and a new multitasking interface. According to VR leaker Brad Lynch, the device will be optimized for Meta’s conference app Horizon Workrooms.
To what extent Project Cambria will also appeal to gamers remains to be seen. Improved ergonomics and PC VR support, a sharper and higher-contrast display, and more precise hand tracking could convince gamers to spend more. Cambria-exclusive VR games are not expected.
What is new about Project Cambria?
At the announcement (see video above), Zuckerberg and Meta’s head of product for VR devices Angela Chang confirmed three new technical features and improvements.
Eye and face tracking
New sensors will enable natural eye contact between avatars and real-time transmission of facial expressions into VR. This is said to make emotions easier to read and social interactions more realistic.
We’ve got way better cameras, so both RGB and black and white cameras working in conjunction to do color passthrough. We also use active rather than passive depth detection with infrared beams, so we’re using infrared beams to make sure that we have depth-sensing that allows us to have a better reconstruction of the image,” Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth said in May 2022.
Improved displays and narrower form factor
Things are also happening with the display and optics. Project Cambria is Meta’s first VR headset to rely on pancake lenses.
These can be placed close to the display, allowing for a much narrower profile. Thanks to the new lenses, Project Cambria supposedly offers a high-quality and artifact-free display and the best optics of all Meta VR devices so far.
What kind of display does Project Cambria use?
Meta has not given any concrete details so far. According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Meta uses two 2.48-inch mini-LED displays from JDI and Sharp with a resolution of 2,160 by 2,160 pixels per eye.
Project Cambria would thus have a higher resolution than the Meta Quest 2, whose LC display can show 1,832 by 1,920 pixels per eye. That corresponds to about 33 percent more pixels. However, according to Lynch, the headset renders below the maximum resolution.
Project Cambria could excel in color reproduction and black value.
Mini-LEDs are a further developed form of LC displays, whose backlight consists of tiny LEDs. Groups of these LEDs can be switched off via software and thus enable local dimming, i.e. areas of more natural black. Mini-LED displays thus achieve better contrast than conventional LC displays.
Lynch also claims to have found out that Project Cambria uses QLED technology. In practice, this means that the headset can display an expanded color spectrum and thus more and nicer colors.
What are the specifications of Project Cambria?
Meta has not revealed the exact specifications yet.
In March 2022, Lynch, citing a “trusted source,” reported that Cambria’s specs had been finalized. In late July, he published an update on the technical features.
The speculated specs are below. Take them with a grain of salt until Meta confirms them:
SoC: Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 5G with 30 percent more performance potential. Display: Dual Tianjin-3 QLED panels with 2,160 by 2,160 pixels per eye (render resolution: 1,800 by 1,920 pixels per eye), a Quantom Dot layer for an extended color spectrum and a MiniLED backlight for local dimming. Field of View: Panels rotated 21 degrees for a vertically higher field of view, horizontal field of view is similar to Meta Quest 2. Optics: Custom pancake lenses. IPD: Stepless hardware lens distance control Memory: 12 GB LPDDR5 RAM Storage: 256 GB Network: WiFi 6E support Audio: Improved surround sound, better microphones with echo cancellation Battery: Li-Ion battery with 5,000 mAh capacity and charging cradle Sensor technology: A total of 10 sensors and an IR depth projector. 2 x “Canyon” – 640 by 480 pixels (for IOT, constellation tracking, hand tracking) 2 x “Glacier” – 1,280 by 1,024 pixels (for stereoscopy, luma passthrough, constellation tracking, hand tracking) 1 x “Teton” – 2,328 by 1,748 pixels (16MP, for RGB passthrough) 5 x “Esker” – 400 by 400 pixels (for facetracking & eyetracking)Meta uses a revision of the Snapdragon XR2, according to Lynch, which provides a performance gain of up to 30 percent over Quest 2. Cambria’s alleged dual fan could further increase the performance.
Lynch’s Datamining Network found concrete hints of Cambria’s new passthrough sensor technology in the Quest firmware. According to the firmware, the headset has three sensors for passthrough mode: two low-resolution Luma cameras that capture motion and depth of space and enable stereoscopy (“Glacier”) and a third, high-resolution RGB camera in the center of the housing (“Teton”) responsible for the color reproduction of the environment. The video image of the physical environment is thus created from a fusion of these three sensor data. Meta’s head of technology Andrew Bosworth confirmed this later.
According to an article on the Oculus blog, the pass-through RGB camera has four times the resolution of the Meta Quest 2’s sensors. The headset also has a dedicated depth sensor for active room recognition, which may work similarly to Apple’s LIDAR scanner and support both the pass-through mode and hand tracking.
Further possible details about the hardware exist in a supposed hands-on report of questionable authenticity, as well as in leaked blueprints. The hardware report of a Chinese hardware analyst goes into even more detail and names the individual components as well as their specifications.