Here's Mark Zuckerberg demonstrating Meta's high-end Project Cambria VR headset

Mark Zuckerberg shared a short demo video showcasing some of the capabilities of Meta's upcoming high-end virtual reality headset, Project Cambria. While keeping the device off on its own, Meta highlights the upcoming headset's ability to perform high-resolution, full-color passthrough so wearers can interact with virtual objects in their real-life environments.

The mixed reality experience is built using Meta's Presence platform, which was introduced last year. Current Quest headsets are only capable of displaying passthrough content in shades of gray, but Project Cambria will have much higher resolution image sensors inside the headset for better viewing of the real world.

Meta posted this two-and-a-half-minute video highlighting its Presence platform, highlighting the huge difference in experience between the Quest and Cambria headsets. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth wrote on Twitter that an SDK update next week will include "Machine Perception and AI-Passthrough, Spatial Anchor, View, Interaction and Voice SDKs, and several Attendance Platform tools powered by our recently updated Hand Tracking API." Will be included." Will be included." The complete set will be included."

The demo reel mostly features Zuckerberg pointing to the cartoony character in this OP video and drawing his environment on the real world. It also includes clips from other Meta AR projects, teasing again the possibility that you'll wear one of these to get into a virtual office environment and work on your cloud workstation using augmented reality.

We couldn't find any new details on the hardware itself. However, in Protocol Jenko Roetgers was able to briefly try out the unit running the same demo, noting that the video quality produced by Cambria's sensors is still not photorealistic, but closer to "decent quality home video". Zuckerberg also told them that another benefit of improving the sensor to include full color is that they are able to differentiate between different real-world objects by knowing where to place the virtual objects.

The demo, which was shown during a Facebook Connect event last year, is called The World Beyond, and Meta says it will soon be available to developers in the App Lab. Project Cambria is one of several virtual reality headsets that Meta plans to introduce over the next several years, and wants to use its technology to help developers create augmented reality experiences that are similar to mainstream AR devices. Huh. Huh. Huh. For is just one step in Meta's plan. , Cambria should come out "later this year".