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Magic Leap One Video – Diffractive Waveguides Confirmed

174 points by IntronExon 9y ago

deelowe 9y ago
That was painful to read and the comments are even worse. I'm not sure I trust anything stated in this write-up.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- IntronExon 9y ago
  Why? His grammar could use a bit of work, but his write ups are often in depth and quite accurate. He’s hardly an unknown in the world of optics, and his previous analysis of Magic Leap have all proven accurate. For example http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-house-of-cards/ http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-house-of-cards/ http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-fiber-scanning-display-fsd-the-big-con-at-the-core/ http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-fiber-scanning-...
  - leoc 9y ago
    He certainly can't simply be dismissed. OTOH he was recently seen promoting the idea that Magic Leap can't get camera-based inside-out positional tracking working, which is probably quite preposterous.
    - IntronExon 9y ago
      I hadn’t seen that, can you link me to it?
      - leoc 9y ago
        Here you go: http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/17/magic-leap-how-rigged-was-the-rolling-stone-demo/ http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/17/magic-leap-how-rigged-was-... Then he defended it on /r/magicleap: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicleap/comments/7r267v/blog_article_based_on_tidbit_of_information_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/magicleap/comments/7r267v/blog_arti...
        IntronExon 9y ago
        He doesn’t seem to make any claim about what they can’t do regarding tracking, he just says that there are likely IR markers in the demo. The counter argument as usual seems to come down to awe at how much money ML raised and from whom, as well as the talent pool they bring. None of this is to say they have perfected it, or anywhere close. That will be a long way off. We have struggled with ambient IR light and glass since the days of the Wii and Xbox Kinect, and we still struggle with it now, and will probably continue to struggle with it for quite some time. It may well rely on getting LIDAR or something along those lines in the headset to truly provide reliable tracking in all environments. That from the op of the Reddit thread, after explaining his incredulity thst ML wouldn’t have tracking down. Meanwhile Karl doesn’t seem to appeal to anything other than released material, patents, and physics. I’m inclined to beleieve him.
        leoc 9y ago
        > He doesn’t seem to make any claim about what they can’t do regarding tracking, he just says that there are likely IR markers in the demo. From Guttag's article: > Adding markers to the frames is a crutch to make up for poor registration and SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). > The counter argument as usual seems to come down to awe at how much money ML raised and from whom, as well as the talent pool they bring. Hang on: earlier you seemed to be expressing incredulity that Guttag had claimed ML didn't have acceptably-working SLAM by now. Is your position now that in fact Guttag was correct to make this claim?
        ethbro 9y ago
        IR markers would seem to hint at reliability issues of tracking. Presumably one could reply "algorithms are still being developed and fine tuned". But if it's not reliable, then I can't see how it would be usable by the mass market. People don't generally respond well to half of their visual world desyncing from their physical body, even if it's 1:1000 seconds.
  - deelowe 9y ago
    I think some of the issues pointed out with his assessment in the comment section hold merit. His "no your wrong" response without any real evidence as to why doesn't sit well with me. That said, if he's well known for his knowledge perhaps that's enough. I personally have no idea who he is.
    - IntronExon 9y ago
      As with his proofreading, I’m not terribly interested in his comment section people skills. His decades in the field, his track record of tear downs and predictions, and his expertise do interest me. I’m noting a paucity of technical, rather than personal counterpoints here, or in those afformentioned comments on that level. Loads of appeals to authority, and a kind of, “well they must have something valuable!” credulity abounds.
- stuntkite 9y ago
  I love this guys blog, he does fantastic tear downs of display technology and I just don't see anyone else doing it in the space. He called out the 85% shade when they presented the initial preview a couple months ago. He is genuinely not impressed by much and maybe he should be in some cases, but if you look at his body of work he's not just some yahoo brigading on magic leap hate and if there's a better technical voice on display tech out there, I haven't seen it.
  - radiorental 9y ago
    While true, there's just no way you can infer the opacity from those frame grabs. On the one hand he says he says he used the whites of Shaq's eyes as a reference and on the other he states that the design of the glasses hugs the users head to block out ambient light getting in from the side. There's a slew of issues with this derivation. To arrive at a number like 15%, without showing his homework, is as questionable as the marketing claims of Leap themselves. I'm not saying he's wrong but it does sound like a lot of bias.
    - TheCabin 9y ago
      He is saying that it is an approximation (see in comments): "I looked at what I thought were comparable regions. I checked several frames of the video and the frame at 0:51 in the article is what I used. The method is admittedly very approximate as you have to guess the “gamma curve” of the video capture device to back out the linear value (I used a gamma of 2.2)."
jxramos 9y ago
"""The rest of the video made my ears bleed. It was the usual Rony doing his hype and buzzword salad trying to fit in as much hype in as he could without really saying anything.""" Hype and buzzword salad, I'm going to be taking that one with me into the future.
- RobertoG 9y ago
  No need you bother to take it with you, I'm sure there is going to be plenty.
aaron695 9y ago
"The rest of the video made my ears bleed." UBeam, Theranos, Magic Leap. The Emperor has no clothes.
throwaway145679 9y ago
These guys were definitely going to be using diffractive waveguides (photonic crystal waveguides). Look at the LinkedIn profiles of some of the folks on their optical design team (especially the ones with titles that include "Diffractive Optics Engineer"). One had a PhD adviser at Berkeley (Eli Yablanovitch) who originally coined the term "photonic crystal", another wrote a widely used open source implementation of RCWA (S4) while working with a top group in photonic crystal design at Stanford (Shanhui Fan), and some of their engineering leadership came to the company from what was Digital Optics Corporation.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  It might not have been clear to investors who were fed patents with fiber scanning all over them. http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-fiber-scanning-display-fsd-the-big-con-at-the-core/ http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-fiber-scanning-...
olympus 9y ago
There seems to be several people with a tech hardware background that doubt that Magic Leap can deliver on their promises. But somehow they have no problem raising money or getting publicity. Either they have something that is real and extremely convincing to investors that they have been able to keep very secret, or they have a really slick slide deck made of lies. We’ll know for sure if/when the first production devices go on sale, but if Shaq was wearing a real pair then I don’t want them.
- ebbv 9y ago
  Look how long Theranos was able to keep it up despite experts calling b.s. from basically day one.
  - tehlike 9y ago
    Enron is a prime example for keeping things secret for long time.
    - IntronExon 9y ago
      Bernie Madoff is another standout example, and the many scams in the supposedly expert world or wine, such as Rusy Kurniawan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Kurniawan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Kurniawan
      - fapjacks 9y ago
        I watched a documentary about this guy (though I can't remember the name). What a totally fascinating story! The fact that even today there are people who think that he wasn't involved in forging wines really speaks to how easily and thoroughly people can get caught up in a convincing lie proliferated by a convincing liar.
        lreeves 9y ago
        Sour Grapes I believe.
DaveSapien 9y ago
I Think its also quite telling that they found the biggest person they could find (Shaquille) to do the physical showcase. On an average sized person these will be massive, and not just look(and feel) like large weird sunglasses. And no, I dont believe that these where the "large" version, except in the regard of the headband. I doubt the core unit will be meaningfully smaller. Where in comparison, the HoloLens team seemed to take more care in the design of a large device on a person's head. Looking strange but functional.
- giarc 9y ago
  You also have to consider that they were interviewing the commissioner of the NBA and Shaq is still one of the biggest personalities associated with the league. He does a ton of on air promotion for the sport. It's a big headset, but I don't believe the set out to find the biggest person just so they could deceive people to think they aren't big.
paul7986 9y ago
AR Glasses are going to be as big as the Apple Watch.....
- yoz-y 9y ago
  So pretty good then? Apple Watch is doing extremely well.
- whywhywhywhy 9y ago
  Would Apple still even bother to sell the Watch if they had the Apple ideal version of AR glasses.
kbenson 9y ago
I'm still waiting for more info on Near Eye Light Field devices.[1][2] Actually, it appears there's more on this now[3][4], but the video's audio is a weird translation of some paper or something. 1: https://research.nvidia.com/publication/near-eye-light-field-displays https://research.nvidia.com/publication/near-eye-light-field... 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g 3: http://research.nvidia.com/publication/2017-11_%09Near-eye-Light-Field http://research.nvidia.com/publication/2017-11_%09Near-eye-L... 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdTycenXID8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdTycenXID8
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  > 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g > "In 1968, Ivan Sutherland introduced the first graphics driven headmounted display, of HMD" Ivan Sutherland? As in: the guy who made Sketchpad? What hasn't this guy done?
colordrops 9y ago
What does "more VR than AR" even mean? Either the user is seeing virtual objects overlaid on the real world or not. It has nothing to do with the opacity of the lenses.
- kbenson 9y ago
  If you can't see much of the real world (15% light penetration by this account), how useful is that overlay? If it was 1% light penetration it would look almost completely black, to the point you may not detect any real world at all. At 99% light penetration, you probably can't even tell there's any shading at all. Somewhere in the middle different people will draw the line as to what's usable as AR and what isn't (and even then, it may depend on the action being attempted).
  - colordrops 9y ago
    Yeah but it's not 1%. At 15% your eyes will adjust. Why bother with 15% if the point is not to overlay on your surroundings?
    - nothrabannosir 9y ago
      > Why bother with… Because they might have no choice. The million (billion?) dollar question is: are they full of bull? That’s what this is all about. He’s saying: they want to go higher than 15%, but they can’t. Not ‘they choose not to.’ They would have if they could. And they can’t go 0% and full VR because that would be admitting defeat, and the end of the gravy train.
- moron4hire 9y ago
  I've found the Meta 2 AR headset to be quite dark (and it's still not quite as dark as what was shown in the pictures in the article) and it becomes very difficult to look at the graphics and understand them as part of the real scene behind them. With the real surroundings so darkened out, it creates a completely different contextual space. You definitely get to a point that you forget to pay attention to the real space and only pay attention to the visualization on its own. So that's what "more VR than AR" means. Continuity of context between real and virtual is the defining attribute of AR. Without it, you just don't have AR.
dmix 9y ago
Very interesting insight from a former GPU developer at Magic Leap: https://imgur.com/a/hIXTQ#e6Vdo3B https://imgur.com/a/hIXTQ#e6Vdo3B He believes they should have focused on making the headset and gone with integrating with a mobile device instead of an integrated SoC...That said there's usually a reason (low-level) engineers are engineers and not product people... but he makes some good points. The one I most disagree with is "why develop Apps with ML when you could develop apps on Apple (iOS)" Well one good reason is that a) game developers and VR/AR devs aren't necessarily developing on iOS already yet and b) it's an entirely new (potentially large) new market where you could become a top developer more easily. And they'd still have to build a significant part of their SDK on top of iOS or Android, no?
- simias 9y ago
  It's also a very niche market and you end up completely captive in their ecosystem if you do this. It's reasonable to assume that there'll still be a market for iPhone and Android apps 5 years from now, I don't even know if Magic Leap One will still exist in 5 months or if they'll ever achieve commercial success. Yeah it'll probably be vastly easier to be the top ML developer but it won't do you much good if you end up with 12 users and a dead platform. IOs/Android development is reasonably mature now and they're backed by huge companies (and other smaller companies who make dedicated tools for that ecosystem). It would make sense to build on top of that instead of starting from scratch. Also, price-wise you'll never be able to compete with smartphones when it comes to bang-for-the-buck. The economies of scale are huge. These AR/VR need as much processing power as you can throw at them, it's very hard for a small team to come up with a competitive offering, especially for an embedded wearable solution. If they were making their own custom SoC with specialized hardware to enhance the AR experience it might make some sense, but as far as I understand they're only using off-the-shelf components. It does seem like a strange design choice.
  - vanderZwan 9y ago
    > It's also a very niche market and you end up completely captive in their ecosystem if you do this. During my masters in Interaction Design I kind of "accidentally specialised" in gesture interfaces (the pointing kind, not the touchscreen kind). So obviously I have an old-school Kinect, and later got a Leap Motion[0]. This is exactly the problem with the latter. Your only real options are either doing research, or doing some kind of custom job like designing an AR/VR installation for a museum. [0] https://www.leapmotion.com/ https://www.leapmotion.com/
mrarjen 9y ago
Getting this whole "silicon valley tv show" vibe here, where it's the VR company that gets to much hype. Almost seems like they are too deep in and need to keep going hoping it will be accepted in the market. Still think AR has a lot more potential than VR in the long run. Just need to get that "Yes!" moment where the technology has a perfect fit and use for it.
- Doxin 9y ago
  Side-note: The Vive pro has two cameras.
- metavrsl 9y ago
  I’d argue that VR has more potential. Once we get to OASIS level VR, it’ll kick the ass of having a HUD in your glasses.
  - mrarjen 9y ago
    Let's hope we won't have to physically move around, and it's slightly more like Altered Carbon VR :)
russdill 9y ago
It seems like the way they made things appear to have substance in AR then is to drop down visual light to 15%.
- taneq 9y ago
  Maybe they reproject the view onto the screen in order to have (effectively) passthrough VR while still looking like they have AR?
  - russdill 9y ago
    Pretty doubtful. One of their original claims was to produce blacks, which is really hard in AR as you need to selectively block light. It initially sounds easy until you realize your light blocking mechanism needs to be in focus. If you use a lens to put it in focus, the things around it are now out of focus, etc. If you can't produce blacks, things behind AR objects bleed though. Your objects appear as sci-fi holograms instead of real objects. Reducing pass through light by 85% reduces bleed through by 85% and makes your objects appear 85% more real.

174 points by IntronExon 9y ago

deelowe 9y ago

That was painful to read and the comments are even worse. I'm not sure I trust anything stated in this write-up.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
IntronExon 9y ago
Why? His grammar could use a bit of work, but his write ups are often in depth and quite accurate. He’s hardly an unknown in the world of optics, and his previous analysis of Magic Leap have all proven accurate. For example http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-house-of-cards/ http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-house-of-cards/ http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-fiber-scanning-display-fsd-the-big-con-at-the-core/ http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-fiber-scanning-...
- leoc 9y ago
  He certainly can't simply be dismissed. OTOH he was recently seen promoting the idea that Magic Leap can't get camera-based inside-out positional tracking working, which is probably quite preposterous.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    I hadn’t seen that, can you link me to it?
    - leoc 9y ago
      Here you go: http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/17/magic-leap-how-rigged-was-the-rolling-stone-demo/ http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/17/magic-leap-how-rigged-was-... Then he defended it on /r/magicleap: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicleap/comments/7r267v/blog_article_based_on_tidbit_of_information_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/magicleap/comments/7r267v/blog_arti...
      - IntronExon 9y ago
        He doesn’t seem to make any claim about what they can’t do regarding tracking, he just says that there are likely IR markers in the demo. The counter argument as usual seems to come down to awe at how much money ML raised and from whom, as well as the talent pool they bring. None of this is to say they have perfected it, or anywhere close. That will be a long way off. We have struggled with ambient IR light and glass since the days of the Wii and Xbox Kinect, and we still struggle with it now, and will probably continue to struggle with it for quite some time. It may well rely on getting LIDAR or something along those lines in the headset to truly provide reliable tracking in all environments. That from the op of the Reddit thread, after explaining his incredulity thst ML wouldn’t have tracking down. Meanwhile Karl doesn’t seem to appeal to anything other than released material, patents, and physics. I’m inclined to beleieve him.
        leoc 9y ago
        > He doesn’t seem to make any claim about what they can’t do regarding tracking, he just says that there are likely IR markers in the demo. From Guttag's article: > Adding markers to the frames is a crutch to make up for poor registration and SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). > The counter argument as usual seems to come down to awe at how much money ML raised and from whom, as well as the talent pool they bring. Hang on: earlier you seemed to be expressing incredulity that Guttag had claimed ML didn't have acceptably-working SLAM by now. Is your position now that in fact Guttag was correct to make this claim?
        ethbro 9y ago
        IR markers would seem to hint at reliability issues of tracking. Presumably one could reply "algorithms are still being developed and fine tuned". But if it's not reliable, then I can't see how it would be usable by the mass market. People don't generally respond well to half of their visual world desyncing from their physical body, even if it's 1:1000 seconds.
- deelowe 9y ago
  I think some of the issues pointed out with his assessment in the comment section hold merit. His "no your wrong" response without any real evidence as to why doesn't sit well with me. That said, if he's well known for his knowledge perhaps that's enough. I personally have no idea who he is.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    As with his proofreading, I’m not terribly interested in his comment section people skills. His decades in the field, his track record of tear downs and predictions, and his expertise do interest me. I’m noting a paucity of technical, rather than personal counterpoints here, or in those afformentioned comments on that level. Loads of appeals to authority, and a kind of, “well they must have something valuable!” credulity abounds.
stuntkite 9y ago
I love this guys blog, he does fantastic tear downs of display technology and I just don't see anyone else doing it in the space. He called out the 85% shade when they presented the initial preview a couple months ago. He is genuinely not impressed by much and maybe he should be in some cases, but if you look at his body of work he's not just some yahoo brigading on magic leap hate and if there's a better technical voice on display tech out there, I haven't seen it.
- radiorental 9y ago
  While true, there's just no way you can infer the opacity from those frame grabs. On the one hand he says he says he used the whites of Shaq's eyes as a reference and on the other he states that the design of the glasses hugs the users head to block out ambient light getting in from the side. There's a slew of issues with this derivation. To arrive at a number like 15%, without showing his homework, is as questionable as the marketing claims of Leap themselves. I'm not saying he's wrong but it does sound like a lot of bias.
  - TheCabin 9y ago
    He is saying that it is an approximation (see in comments): "I looked at what I thought were comparable regions. I checked several frames of the video and the frame at 0:51 in the article is what I used. The method is admittedly very approximate as you have to guess the “gamma curve” of the video capture device to back out the linear value (I used a gamma of 2.2)."

jxramos 9y ago

"""The rest of the video made my ears bleed. It was the usual Rony doing his hype and buzzword salad trying to fit in as much hype in as he could without really saying anything.""" Hype and buzzword salad, I'm going to be taking that one with me into the future.

RobertoG 9y ago
No need you bother to take it with you, I'm sure there is going to be plenty.

aaron695 9y ago

"The rest of the video made my ears bleed." UBeam, Theranos, Magic Leap. The Emperor has no clothes.

throwaway145679 9y ago

These guys were definitely going to be using diffractive waveguides (photonic crystal waveguides). Look at the LinkedIn profiles of some of the folks on their optical design team (especially the ones with titles that include "Diffractive Optics Engineer"). One had a PhD adviser at Berkeley (Eli Yablanovitch) who originally coined the term "photonic crystal", another wrote a widely used open source implementation of RCWA (S4) while working with a top group in photonic crystal design at Stanford (Shanhui Fan), and some of their engineering leadership came to the company from what was Digital Optics Corporation.

IntronExon 9y ago
It might not have been clear to investors who were fed patents with fiber scanning all over them. http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-fiber-scanning-display-fsd-the-big-con-at-the-core/ http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-fiber-scanning-...

olympus 9y ago

There seems to be several people with a tech hardware background that doubt that Magic Leap can deliver on their promises. But somehow they have no problem raising money or getting publicity. Either they have something that is real and extremely convincing to investors that they have been able to keep very secret, or they have a really slick slide deck made of lies. We’ll know for sure if/when the first production devices go on sale, but if Shaq was wearing a real pair then I don’t want them.

ebbv 9y ago
Look how long Theranos was able to keep it up despite experts calling b.s. from basically day one.
- tehlike 9y ago
  Enron is a prime example for keeping things secret for long time.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    Bernie Madoff is another standout example, and the many scams in the supposedly expert world or wine, such as Rusy Kurniawan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Kurniawan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Kurniawan
    - fapjacks 9y ago
      I watched a documentary about this guy (though I can't remember the name). What a totally fascinating story! The fact that even today there are people who think that he wasn't involved in forging wines really speaks to how easily and thoroughly people can get caught up in a convincing lie proliferated by a convincing liar.
      - lreeves 9y ago
        Sour Grapes I believe.

DaveSapien 9y ago

I Think its also quite telling that they found the biggest person they could find (Shaquille) to do the physical showcase. On an average sized person these will be massive, and not just look(and feel) like large weird sunglasses. And no, I dont believe that these where the "large" version, except in the regard of the headband. I doubt the core unit will be meaningfully smaller. Where in comparison, the HoloLens team seemed to take more care in the design of a large device on a person's head. Looking strange but functional.

giarc 9y ago
You also have to consider that they were interviewing the commissioner of the NBA and Shaq is still one of the biggest personalities associated with the league. He does a ton of on air promotion for the sport. It's a big headset, but I don't believe the set out to find the biggest person just so they could deceive people to think they aren't big.

paul7986 9y ago

AR Glasses are going to be as big as the Apple Watch.....

yoz-y 9y ago
So pretty good then? Apple Watch is doing extremely well.
whywhywhywhy 9y ago
Would Apple still even bother to sell the Watch if they had the Apple ideal version of AR glasses.

kbenson 9y ago

I'm still waiting for more info on Near Eye Light Field devices.[1][2] Actually, it appears there's more on this now[3][4], but the video's audio is a weird translation of some paper or something. 1: https://research.nvidia.com/publication/near-eye-light-field-displays https://research.nvidia.com/publication/near-eye-light-field... 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g 3: http://research.nvidia.com/publication/2017-11_%09Near-eye-Light-Field http://research.nvidia.com/publication/2017-11_%09Near-eye-L... 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdTycenXID8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdTycenXID8

vanderZwan 9y ago
> 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g > "In 1968, Ivan Sutherland introduced the first graphics driven headmounted display, of HMD" Ivan Sutherland? As in: the guy who made Sketchpad? What hasn't this guy done?

colordrops 9y ago

What does "more VR than AR" even mean? Either the user is seeing virtual objects overlaid on the real world or not. It has nothing to do with the opacity of the lenses.

kbenson 9y ago
If you can't see much of the real world (15% light penetration by this account), how useful is that overlay? If it was 1% light penetration it would look almost completely black, to the point you may not detect any real world at all. At 99% light penetration, you probably can't even tell there's any shading at all. Somewhere in the middle different people will draw the line as to what's usable as AR and what isn't (and even then, it may depend on the action being attempted).
- colordrops 9y ago
  Yeah but it's not 1%. At 15% your eyes will adjust. Why bother with 15% if the point is not to overlay on your surroundings?
  - nothrabannosir 9y ago
    > Why bother with… Because they might have no choice. The million (billion?) dollar question is: are they full of bull? That’s what this is all about. He’s saying: they want to go higher than 15%, but they can’t. Not ‘they choose not to.’ They would have if they could. And they can’t go 0% and full VR because that would be admitting defeat, and the end of the gravy train.
moron4hire 9y ago
I've found the Meta 2 AR headset to be quite dark (and it's still not quite as dark as what was shown in the pictures in the article) and it becomes very difficult to look at the graphics and understand them as part of the real scene behind them. With the real surroundings so darkened out, it creates a completely different contextual space. You definitely get to a point that you forget to pay attention to the real space and only pay attention to the visualization on its own. So that's what "more VR than AR" means. Continuity of context between real and virtual is the defining attribute of AR. Without it, you just don't have AR.

dmix 9y ago

Very interesting insight from a former GPU developer at Magic Leap: https://imgur.com/a/hIXTQ#e6Vdo3B https://imgur.com/a/hIXTQ#e6Vdo3B He believes they should have focused on making the headset and gone with integrating with a mobile device instead of an integrated SoC...That said there's usually a reason (low-level) engineers are engineers and not product people... but he makes some good points. The one I most disagree with is "why develop Apps with ML when you could develop apps on Apple (iOS)" Well one good reason is that a) game developers and VR/AR devs aren't necessarily developing on iOS already yet and b) it's an entirely new (potentially large) new market where you could become a top developer more easily. And they'd still have to build a significant part of their SDK on top of iOS or Android, no?

simias 9y ago
It's also a very niche market and you end up completely captive in their ecosystem if you do this. It's reasonable to assume that there'll still be a market for iPhone and Android apps 5 years from now, I don't even know if Magic Leap One will still exist in 5 months or if they'll ever achieve commercial success. Yeah it'll probably be vastly easier to be the top ML developer but it won't do you much good if you end up with 12 users and a dead platform. IOs/Android development is reasonably mature now and they're backed by huge companies (and other smaller companies who make dedicated tools for that ecosystem). It would make sense to build on top of that instead of starting from scratch. Also, price-wise you'll never be able to compete with smartphones when it comes to bang-for-the-buck. The economies of scale are huge. These AR/VR need as much processing power as you can throw at them, it's very hard for a small team to come up with a competitive offering, especially for an embedded wearable solution. If they were making their own custom SoC with specialized hardware to enhance the AR experience it might make some sense, but as far as I understand they're only using off-the-shelf components. It does seem like a strange design choice.
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  > It's also a very niche market and you end up completely captive in their ecosystem if you do this. During my masters in Interaction Design I kind of "accidentally specialised" in gesture interfaces (the pointing kind, not the touchscreen kind). So obviously I have an old-school Kinect, and later got a Leap Motion[0]. This is exactly the problem with the latter. Your only real options are either doing research, or doing some kind of custom job like designing an AR/VR installation for a museum. [0] https://www.leapmotion.com/ https://www.leapmotion.com/

mrarjen 9y ago

Getting this whole "silicon valley tv show" vibe here, where it's the VR company that gets to much hype. Almost seems like they are too deep in and need to keep going hoping it will be accepted in the market. Still think AR has a lot more potential than VR in the long run. Just need to get that "Yes!" moment where the technology has a perfect fit and use for it.

Doxin 9y ago
Side-note: The Vive pro has two cameras.
metavrsl 9y ago
I’d argue that VR has more potential. Once we get to OASIS level VR, it’ll kick the ass of having a HUD in your glasses.
- mrarjen 9y ago
  Let's hope we won't have to physically move around, and it's slightly more like Altered Carbon VR :)

russdill 9y ago

It seems like the way they made things appear to have substance in AR then is to drop down visual light to 15%.

taneq 9y ago
Maybe they reproject the view onto the screen in order to have (effectively) passthrough VR while still looking like they have AR?
- russdill 9y ago
  Pretty doubtful. One of their original claims was to produce blacks, which is really hard in AR as you need to selectively block light. It initially sounds easy until you realize your light blocking mechanism needs to be in focus. If you use a lens to put it in focus, the things around it are now out of focus, etc. If you can't produce blacks, things behind AR objects bleed though. Your objects appear as sci-fi holograms instead of real objects. Reducing pass through light by 85% reduces bleed through by 85% and makes your objects appear 85% more real.