Video-based AR

Camera passthrough is a capability of a VR headset to pass through a video feed to the user inside the headset. It shows the outside world to the user so they don't get disoriented. It is also known as "video passthrough". This makes it a sort of pseudo-augmented reality or some people call it mixed reality.

Video passthrough was first popularized by the Lynx R1 and further popularized by the Quest 2 and Quest Pro.

One of the difficulties of doing passthrough right is the positional difference between cameras on the outside of a headset and the eyes of the user. So the image has to go through a distortion process. On the Quest Pro and Quest 3, this uses a neural network. Other devices potentially also use a neural network.