It was the same Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta and co-founder of Facebookto give a preview of what Project Cambria, the viewer for the company’s metaverse, will be like.
Zuckerberg, who last week was in Italy and he met with companies and also with Prime Minister Draghidescribed the device, which has already been talked about since the fall of 2021, while exploring The World Beyond (in Italian, TheOverseas), a mix between game and platform that merges physical and virtual world: the device is not shown in detail, but is expected to be unveiled by the end of 2022 and arrive in stores between next Christmas and the first months of 2023.
From what we understand, even Meta would be veering more towards augmented reality (better: mixed) than towards virtual realitythe use of which is more complicated: Project Cambria is equipped with a feature called passthrough, that is, it allows the passage of the vision from the virtual world to the real one, which is shown clearly, and in color, thanks to the cameras mounted on the external device.
Unlike competitive headsets, like Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap 2which have transparent lenses and send holographic images in front of the user’s eyes, Project Cambria is a viewer with a more classic appearance, close to the current Oculus Quest 2 (company acquired in 2014 by Meta).
Project Cambria isn’t the only one using the tecnologia passthroughbut from what we understand (and from what we see) it would be the first to make it available at a high resolution, which should allow the wearer to move more easily in the real world: according to what Zuckerberg explained, Cambria will provide “high resolution color video” to “make the experience more realistic and useful”.
The World Beyondthe app used in the demonstration, was developed on the Presence Platform, a digital creation platform that brings together code writing and artificial intelligenceto simplify the creation of 3D worlds, even for those who are not an expert developer.