Welcome back for the tenth episode of Boz to the Future, a podcast from Reality Labs (RL). In today’s episode, our host, Head of RL and Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth is joined by Douglas Lanman, Director of Display Systems Research within RL Research at Meta.

In today’s episode, Bosworth and Lanman talk about the depth and breadth of developing VR display systems that could one day deliver experiences as vivid and detailed as the physical world as well as the trade-offs that come with exploring the various technical challenges that the team faces.

Over the past seven-plus years, Lanman’s cross-disciplinary team of researchers, engineers, and project managers has explored these challenges head-on, making significant strides toward their goal of passing the visual Turing test through a series of research prototype headsets that address specific challenges in the display stack — including the Half Dome (varifocal) series, Butterscotch (retinal resolution), a distortion simulator based on 3D TV technology, Starburst (HDR), Holocake 2 (the thinnest, lightest headset RL Research has ever built), and the Mirror Lake research concept that brings together many of these advanced visual experiences into a lightweight, compact headset.

In the second deep dive, Lanman and Bosworth talk about how pioneering research cannot be done in a vacuum — and how advances in the industry will impact different aspects of the work, and potentially even the paths they’ll take to achieve breakthroughs. As Lanman quotes from The Legend of Zelda, one of his favorite video games: “It’s dangerous to go alone!”

You can tune into Boz to the Future on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Facebook — or right here on Tech at Meta. We’ll see you next month for a new episode.

You can follow Bosworth on Instagram and Twitter @boztank. You can also follow Lanman on Twitter @douglaslanman.