Introducing the Team Behind Half Dome—Facebook Reality Labs’ Varifocal Prototype.
At this year’s F8, Oculus Head of Product Management Maria Fernandez Guajardo gave attendees a sneak peek at Half Dome—a prototype headset that incorporates earlier research on varifocal displays and some preliminary perceptual testbed findings with a wider field of view in an ergonomic form factor. Earlier this week, Facebook Reality Labs Director of Computational Imaging Douglas Lanman delivered a keynote at SID Display Week in Los Angeles, where he explained how these varifocal technologies matured over a three-year period. Today, we’re excited to share that story with the Oculus community.
“I started at Facebook Reality Labs (FRL), then Oculus Research, in June of 2014,” says Lanman. “I’d worked on VR/AR before, but it took about a year to help recruit the team and select a technical problem that could have significant real-world impact—after all, that’s what FRL was founded for: to tackle hard, industry-changing problems.”
The small and scrappy initial team looked into multiple ways VR displays could be improved, from greatly enhanced resolutions and higher dynamic ranges to more compact form factors. Soon, however, solving for vergence-accommodation conflict stood out as the right challenge to tackle.
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Some members of the Half Dome team at a recent group event.
“It’s something I’d worked on briefly before but never had the full set of collaborators to practically resolve,” Lanman explains. “Prior solutions always made some unacceptable trade-off in resolution, image quality, or system bulk. One day, I took a look around the growing lab and saw we had quickly assembled the best team in the world to make meaningful progress on varifocal displays, including experts in mechanical engineering, computer vision, and perception science. As a researcher, this was the first time I looked at a problem and realized lack of talent, time, or resources wouldn’t be the deciding factor.”
Together with Mechanical Engineering Lead Ryan Ebert, Lanman pitched the idea of building a team to construct a groundbreaking varifocal VR headset, one that would work seamlessly with both eye tracking and refined optics to advance the clarity and comfort of VR.
“Fortunately, it wasn’t all a bluff,” Lanman says. “Within a couple months, Ryan, Alex Fix, our lead computer vision scientist on the effort, and I delivered our first working prototype. We’ve been at it ever since, methodically refining the system together with a greatly expanded set of collaborators.”
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Developed roughly three years ago, Prototype 1 showed the function of varifocal displays as a basic proof of concept.
Given that this was a large research program spanning 40 contributors across both Oculus and Facebook, there were complex challenges to face—all of which the team took in stride. “The synergy on this team is like nothing else I have experienced before,” notes Technical Program Manager Kim Corson. “We’re fortunate to have a team full of people with varying technical backgrounds who continuously go above and beyond their individual roles to ensure the team as a whole is moving towards our longer-term goals.”
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Meanwhile, Optical Scientist Brian Wheelwright and Research Intern Joyce Fang concentrated their efforts on the moving varifocal screens. “The lenses were designed to work with the active mechanical system to perform over the full varifocal range while maintaining wide field of view,” notes Wheelwright. “The core of Half Dome hardware isn’t optics—it’s optomechanics.”
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Unveiled at F8 2018, Half Dome demonstrates the benefits of varifocal displays with wide-field-of-view optics while further refining varifocal actuation and eye tracking.
Stay tuned to the blog next week for even more insights on Half Dome, and check out UploadVR for a detailed overview of Lanman’s Display Week keynote!
Source: Oculus