Ying 'Melissa' Geng
18 - 21 August 2025
Hyatt Regency Seattle
Seattle,
Events
Ying 'Melissa' Geng
Meta Reality Labs Research
Pushing the limits of VR displays (without breaking them)
Over the last decade, VR displays grew from early prototypes — held together by duct tape — to compelling consumer products used by millions. This talk describes the optical innovations necessary to realize this transformation, including addressing longstanding challenges in contrast and form-factor. While pursuing practical display architectures, we also built a new wave of prototypes, ones that push beyond the current generation and show the experiential impact that further breakthroughs in FOV, resolution, brightness, contrast and accommodation may yet bring. We’ll report not just the technological developments, but also our efforts to widely share this work through better-than-duct-taped public demos, beginning the cycle anew.
About the Speaker
Ying "Melissa" Geng is a research manager of “Optics, Photonics and Light Systems” at Reality Labs Research, Meta, where she leads investigations into advanced optics and display technologies. Together with her team, Melissa has explored “pancake” optics, carrying them from early incubation in 2015 to a successful transfer to product. More recently, she has led efforts to create a hyperrealistic VR demo — featuring above-retinal resolution, high brightness, and high contrast — demonstrating a step change in visual experiences that is the closest to “passing the visual Turing test” yet. Melissa’s prior research also includes studies on high-resolution retinal imaging using adaptive optics. She holds a Ph.D. in Optics from the University of Rochester.
