Fresnel vs. Pancake Lenses For VR – Which Ones Are Better?

Which types of lenses are best for virtual reality headsets? Here are some science backed arguments for and against each type of lenses most commonly used in modern VR goggles, alongside with the list of pros and cons for each of the solutions. Are Fresnel lenses or Pancake lenses better for virtual reality goggle experiences and VR gaming? What is the future of VR headsets in terms of the lens technology? Let’s take a deep dive in the wonderful world of VR optics to find out!

In this article, we won’t be really focusing on the maths & physics of lenses and light refraction, albeit this is a really interesting and broad topic all by itself. If you want to know more about the Fresnel lenses and the much newer Pancake lenses from the strictly scientific side, check out the resources dedicated to both of these (click the names in this very sentence to view them).

You might also like: Quest 2 Today – Hands On Review (Still Worth It?)

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Fresnel Lenses in VR Equipment

Fresnel lenses are first and foremost the cheaper option, and for years they were the most popular one in VR headsets. The Meta Quest 2 (now discontinued) has a pair of them on board, and so does the Quest 3S, which is Meta’s current budget headset.

These kinds of lenses are built in such a way that they feature characteristic circular ridges that can be rather easily seen once you look up close inside a VR headset that has them built in. On the image above you can see the Fresnel lenses used in the Meta Quest 2.

These ridges are the vital mechanical component of the Fresnel lens itself, but while being able to offer a wide field of view, good lower light level performance and relatively low production costs, they introduce quite a few disadvantages for an average VR headset user. Let’s take a look at the most common cons of Fresnel lenses.

Their one clear advantage is price. Industrial production of small scale Fresnel lenses is relatively easy, and quite a lot of manufacturers already make and sell them for the VR market, so they are still the more cost-effective option for headset makers. That’s exactly why the budget Quest 3S still uses them.

Fresnel lenses commonly suffer from these problems:

• They are quite bulky – a headset making use of Fresnel lenses has to have enough space to accommodate them, and they are quite large, especially depth-wise. With this, comes the fact that VR headsets with Fresnel lenses require more distance from the lenses to the display – or in other words, from your eyes to the internal screen. Pancake lenses improve on that immensely, as you’ll see in a short while.
• No real FOV advantage anymore – Fresnel lenses used to be credited with a slightly wider field of view, but current headsets show the opposite. The Meta Quest 3 with Pancake lenses has about 110° of horizontal FOV, while the Fresnel-based Quest 3S and Quest 2 have about 96°. Keep in mind that FOV values also depend on the distance from your eyes to the lenses, the display size and your current IPD setting, so the lens type alone doesn’t decide it.
• The ridge design introduces god rays – Yes, the ridge design which the Fresnel lenses do make use of, introduces many unwanted light scattering phenomena such as the so-called “god-rays”. In practice, you’ll see them as glare streaks around bright objects on dark backgrounds, like white text on a black loading screen. An interesting thing is, that this phenomenon isn’t really as distracting as it sounds like.
• Smaller “sweet-spot” compared to Pancake lenses – the space in the middle of the view where the image is the sharpest and least distorted is noticeably larger on headsets with Pancake lenses. With Fresnel lenses, the image gets visibly less sharp and more blurry towards the edges of your field of view.
• Prone to chromatic aberration – this phenomenon, probably known well by most professional photographers among our readers, is yet another source of image distortion – this time visible as slight color fringing on the edges of objects displayed on-screen.
• Prone to pincushion (center-outwards) image distortion – this type of distortion is a bit different, as it needs to be corrected live using various displayed image processing techniques at the cost of computational power.

These Fresnel lenses cons are the ones that are picked up the most in all “Fresnel vs. Pancake lens” discussions. Keep in mind, that while these can look pretty scary on paper, and after reading this list you might assume that VR headsets with Fresnel lenses are simply not worth using, this is not the case. And I’m saying that after thoroughly testing the Meta Quest 2 making use of the old Fresnel lens design.

Pancake Lenses in VR Equipment

Pancake lenses are a much newer concept in VR equipment. Back when I first wrote this, they were still the exception. Today almost every new headset uses them, from the Meta Quest 3 and Pico 4 Ultra to the Samsung Galaxy XR and Valve’s Steam Frame. The Quest 3S is now the main headset still sold with Fresnel lenses.

Instead of one thick lens, a Pancake lens is a thin stack of optics with polarizing layers that fold the light path. The light bounces back and forth inside the stack before it reaches your eye, so the display can sit much closer to the lenses. Here is which lenses the current headsets use:

These types of lenses offer many substantial improvements on the Fresnel lens VR applications, while introducing only a few, barely noticeable drawbacks. Let’s go over some of these.

Here are all the advantages that the Pancake lenses give you in a VR headset:

• They are much thinner and lighter than Fresnel lenses – as Pancake lenses are much lighter and more slim than Fresnel lenses, they also require less space in the actual VR headset. This means that 1 – there is more physical space inside the headset for other components, 2 – the headsets with Pancake lenses can be made lighter and more comfortable to wear.
• Little to no chromatic aberration – Pancake lenses are known for having little to no visible chromatic aberration.
• The “god-rays” issue is mostly gone – god rays are also almost completely gone thanks to the Pancake lens design.

With that said, Pancake lenses also do have some small drawbacks including their lower light efficiency when compared to Fresnel lenses. Every time the light bounces inside the lens stack, some of it is lost. This simply means that using Pancake lenses calls for utilizing brighter displays, which in standalone VR headsets can cause faster battery drainage, and most importantly produces more heat which may cause discomfort during longer gaming sessions.

Fresnel vs. Pancake Lenses For Virtual Reality Headsets

All in all, Pancake lenses in VR headsets will give you visibly better image quality and better viewing comfort compared to the Fresnel lenses, having relatively few drawbacks when compared to them.

The only notable con of Pancake lenses is that they need more light than Fresnel lenses – and so, need to be paired with brighter displays. The narrower FOV they were once known for is gone in current headsets like the Quest 3.

Their higher production cost is also one of the things to note, although that really depends on the particular lens manufacturer, and it keeps changing with time as more and more headsets switch to Pancake lenses.

Fresnel lenses are usually cheaper, but they are also quite bulky, and their design has many flaws that affect and limit their magnified image quality. Among these cons that we’ve already listed are pincushion distortion, chromatic aberration, and the lenses suffering from the “god-rays” issue.

To sum it up, if you’re choosing your new headset and simply want to know which kind of lenses are really “better” – Pancake or Fresnel, the technical answer would be – Pancake lenses are generally better for VR.

The longer answer as always would be: in the end, your virtual reality headset choice should be based not only on the type of lenses the headset uses, but also on the other parts of the device specification, among them the display resolution, max screen refresh rate and wearing comfort.

The image in this section is taken from the great write-up going into the deeper technical comparison between these two types of lenses over on vrx.vr-expert.com – be sure to give it a read if you want to know more!

The Conclusion – Which Ones Are Better In The End?

So in conclusion, we can safely say that Pancake lenses are almost always the better choice when you’re going for a new VR headset. However! Keep in mind that the lenses are only one part of a VR headset as a whole. There is much more to choosing a VR headset than just comparing the lens technologies used in various different devices.

So, are Pancake lenses worth paying extra for? For most people, yes. If you’re choosing between the Quest 3S and the Quest 3, the 3S uses the same Fresnel lenses as the Quest 2, while the Quest 3 gets Pancake lenses, a wider field of view and a sharp image across more of the view. If your budget only stretches to the 3S, it’s still a good headset, and as I found on the Quest 2, the Fresnel downsides are much less distracting in practice than they sound on paper.

While Pancake lenses are surely a great advancement in the field of VR, you really shouldn’t base your buying decisions solely on the lens type used in your chosen headset. The overall quality of the VR experience, including the display image quality is a sum of quite a few factors, all of which are in a sense almost equally important.

With that said, in most VR contexts on average, Pancake lenses will yield better image quality than Fresnel solutions provided similar testing conditions. We hope we were able to help!