Quest 3's passthrough quality could still improve incrementally, says Meta CTO
The Quest v64 update optimized the passthrough of the Quest 3. Further improvements are possible, but will be less impactful.
That's what Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth suggested in his latest AMA session on Instagram. He was asked if Quest 3's passthrough quality could be further improved. His answer:
When you do a passthrough thing, you have all these tests environments that you tested in, and then you see the real world usage come back and you can make some of the tweaks to the algorithm to try to, have a better appearance.
Now, of course, it's environment to environment and it's a little bit of subjective taste, there isn't like objectively one true answer to how to tune these things. But by and large people think that the geometry, distortion and the clarity is better in the new version. But that costs a little bit of contrast and brightness that some people miss, so it's not it's not a perfect science.
I think it'll get better. This feels like probably the biggest leap that we had left in it, but we can continue to incrementally get it a little bit better release over release.
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An improvement or a different set of trade-offs?
The passthrough improvements are part of update v64 that began rolling out this week. Meta claims to have improved perceived resolution as well as color, contrast, and dynamic range.
Bosworth posted a video on Threads that illustrates the visual differences. With v64, the smartphone display is easier to read, but the overall image appears darker and has a yellowish tint. As you can see, the improvements come with compromises in other areas and may not be to everyone's taste, exactly as Bosworth said.
Interesting is Bosworth's claim that the update addressed the distortion of Quest 3's passthrough, which is not mentioned in the release notes. In my testing, I did not see any significant improvement in this regard.
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