Your Oculus Quest 2’s resolution isn’t as high as you think, but that's not a problem

techradar.com:

While giving a talk at Display Week 2022 Meta display engineer, Cheon Hong Kim, revealed several details about the Meta Quest 2 (formerly Oculus Quest 2), including that its resolution isn’t quite what we’ve thought it was.

The Quest 2 uses a 1920 x 1832 resolution display for each eye, but because of its lenses, that’s not the resolution we actually see (via UploadVR). For starters, the lenses are circular whereas the screen is rectangular, so the corners are cut off – and Meta has literally cut the corners off the displays to remove unnecessary bulk.

On top of this, as you toggle the lenses between their three IPD settings – which changes how far apart they are – the section of the screen that can be seen through them also changes.

When the lenses are closest to each other, the outermost parts of the screen won’t be visible, and vice versa when the lenses are pushed to their furthest apart. To save on processing and battery power, these invisible parts of the display aren’t activated.

However, as Meta goes on to explain, the fact that we aren’t seeing the screen’s full resolution isn’t really a problem. It's not the resolution of the display that matters but its pixel density.

One problem with VR headsets is something called the screen door effect. Because displays use an array of pixels in a repeating pattern it's possible to notice lines in the image – an effect that makes it feel like you’re looking through a screen door – especially when you’re right up close to them. 

While this effect can never be entirely eliminated, it can be made much less noticeable by improving a screen’s pixel density. With pixels more tightly packed together in the same area, the gaps become much less noticeable.

As such, Meta aims to use