On stage at Oculus Connect today, Facebook Reality Labs Chief Scientist Michael Abrash revealed two new prototype VR headsets from the company, Half Dome 2 and Half Dome 3. Both headsets offer improvements over the original Half Dome prototype showed off last year.
Last year Facebook showed off Half Dome, a prototype VR headset which offered up a much larger field of view than current Rift or Quest headsets, as well as varifocal displays which allows the headset to display a more comfortable and natural view to our human eyes.
Today the company revealed two new versions of Half Dome, simply called Half Dome 2 and Half Dome 3. While both still aim to deliver a wider field of view and varifocal display, they also focus on reducing the form-factor to make headsets smaller and more comfortable.
While the original Half Dome used mechanic actuators to move the screen in order to achieve the varifocal feature, Half Dome 2 does this through a voice coil actuator which reduces sound and vibrations of the varifocal mechanism to “imperceptible” levels.
What’s more, Half Dome 2 brings major advancements in the optical pipeline, substantially reducing the size of the headset form-factor. Abrash said this was achieved by “folding the optical path into a very small volume.” Indeed, renderings of the optical modules between Half Dome and Half Dome 2 show a drastic reduction in size.
![](https://roadtovrlive-5ea0.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/half-dome-2-640x377.jpg)
Half Dome 3 takes this one step further. Instead of physically moving the display in order to achieve varifocal capability, the Half Dome 3 prototype uses an electronically controlled lens array which allows it to cycle through 64 discrete focus planes.
![](https://roadtovrlive-5ea0.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/half-dome-3-640x377.jpg)
This further shrinks the size of the optical module, making Half Dome 3 even more compact.
Abrash did say that Half Dome 2 and 3 had to trade-off some of the original Half Dome’s field of view improvements in order to achieve these compact form-factors, but said that even so they still offered a larger field of view than current Rift and Quest headsets.
![](https://roadtovrlive-5ea0.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/oculus-rift-prototype-half-dome-2-3-640x295.jpg)
So far the company isn’t saying when these technologies will make their way into new Oculus headsets, but it doesn’t sound like it’ll be any time terribly soon.