Passing the visual Turing test has long been a major goal in the field of VR development. Virtual experiences being indistinguishable from the real world may seem be a mission loaded with ethical, even spiritual questions, but the chief obstacle has been the technology itself.
SIGGRAPH 2025 attendees were given a chance to try Meta’s Tiramisu and Boba 3 prototypes for themselves. [Image: SIGGRAPH]
Meta showed off its latest (and apparently strongest) attempt to bring users compelling realism that inches ever closer to passing the visual Turing test at this year’s SIGGRAPH. Touting two newly unveiled prototypes dubbed Tiramisu and Boba 3, Meta claims to be closer than ever to truly realistic VR.
A Taste of Tiramisu
Combining high contrast, a 90 pixels per degree (PPD) angular resolution, and 1400 nits of brightness, Tiramisu eclipses retinal resolution (equivalent to human 20/20 vision) and marks an exciting development for VR. Dual µOLED displays made with glass lenses add heft to the prototype’s visual strength. Given time, perhaps only a few years, the tech already present in Tiramisu could be our best bet yet to experience truly believable virtual worlds.
Brighter brights, darker darks, and NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) 3 all for such rich detail and clarity that text can be easily read in a VR experience, even when as small as the words in a novel set open on a table in a living room space.
Xuan Wang, research scientist for Meta Reality Labs Optics, Photonics, and Light Systems (OPALS) division, provided background on this heavy focus on visual fidelity.
OPALS Optical Research Scientist Xuan Wang wears Meta’s Tiramisu prototype. [Image: Meta]
“Obviously, we wanted to focus on the optical performance, which is why we used custom glass lenses and the µOLED panels that give us high contrast.” Wang explained. “And we built the custom optical module based on existing system architectures like what you find in Quest 2. We tried to leverage existing products as much as we could.” This custom optical module does away with the fresnel and pancake lens systems used in previous Meta headsets. Pancake lenses, the most recently utilized, were more compact and brought stronger visual fidelity than fresnel lenses but sacrificed a huge amount of brightness to do so.
As with any major leap forward, there are drawbacks to Tiramisu. A bulky, heavy device with a limited field of view (FOV) of 33°x33°, Tiramisu has some way to go before it will move the market, if it ever does. (Meta did reveal that Tiramisu 2 is also in development.)
Boba 3 Bubbles Up
With Tiramisu looking very much like a prototype and not a finished product, the excitement for Boba 3’s VR and MR variants should be going through the roof. With a sleek design that already looks ready to hit the store shelves, Boba 3 seems the most likely device of the pair to be in customers’ hands first.
Meta Boba 3 looks ready to hit the shelves but there’s no word yet on a release date. [Image: Meta]
Weighing just 660g, Boba 3 appears to be aimed at a comfortable and compact yet powerful user experience. The biggest known selling point here is Boba 3’s vast field of view. Offering 180° and 120° vertical FoV with 4K per-eye resolution, a significant increase over the 110° and 96° FoV of Quest 3, almost doubling the overall coverage of a user’s field of view.
According to Meta Display Systems Research Optical Scientist Yang Zhao, Boba 3 requires a high-end PC with top-of-the-line GPU to handle the processing demands of such a large field of view.
“[Boba 3] is something that we wanted to send out into the world as soon as possible,” Zhao noted, giving Meta devotees and VR visual explorers something to whet their appetites for the next stage of immersive possibilities.