11 ms·

Modeling the Magic Leap One Experience

114 points by GW150914 9y ago

eat_veggies 9y ago
Google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.kguttag.com/2018/04/13/the-magic-leap-one-experience-part-2-ml1-terrible-view-of-the-real-world/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
- kguttag 9y ago
  Thanks, There are so many hits on the site that it got throttled. I just upgrade the hosting plan to hopefully solve the problems, but I won't take effect until 2AM PDT.
matte_black 9y ago
After all this time (and money) this is really the best they can do? This has to be some sort of early prototype thing. Surely they will never ship this to market in it's current form.
jaggederest 9y ago
I think the FOV estimates are pessimistic by a good margin, your eye looks around edging very well, as you can see in binoculars and other low FOV devices. The rest is absolutely spot on though, without IPD adjustments any head mounted display is going to have real problems.
cromwellian 9y ago
I'm skeptical of the analysis because it seems the author has a singular fixation on constantly criticizing ML, and apparently works for competitors. He may be right, but whether or not ML1 is a success really won't depend on whether or not stuff like the original concept of fibre optical scanning light fields will work, the ML1 will succeed or fail based on consumer experience and content availability. And I really don't think this Kremlinology-based approach could capture it anymore than people speculating on what the Apple watch or iPhones would be like based on photos of the device and patents.
- hammerandtongs 9y ago
  I suggest you spend some time reading his pretty extensive set of high quality articles on many companies and aspects of AR. This is an industry where outsiders have a very limited understanding of the serious serious problems in front of AR. It's also an industry that is taking advantage of the very limited understanding of just about everyone not in it to hype things far beyond their capabilities. If you care about AR in even an offhand way you should spend some time self educating and Karl Guttag's site is a good way to get started. It's very interesting field but there are tremendous challenges in front of it and it serves no purpose to just assume the companies involved have actual magic leaps that solve the problems.
  - freeone3000 9y ago
    It's also entirely possible they offer partial solutions to some problems, no solution to other problems, and still produce am experience worth paying money for.
    - joe_the_user 9y ago
      That's a natural argument extrapolating from the phone, electronics and laptop market. I think it is wrong in this case, however. As I understand it, the problem is "half-working" in the case of VR/AR/etc isn't something like less convenient that early adopters can simply put up with. Half-working VR has ability to sicken a person and injure the vision system. See for example. https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/13/health/virtual-reality-vr-dangers-safety/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/13/health/virtual-reality-vr-dan...
      - hammerandtongs 9y ago
        That is a pretty bad article about VR that might have been excusable in 2013 but is not on firm ground in 2017 much less 2018. Broadly, almost everything in it has been either not born out (vision concerns) or less of a problem then first assumed (motion sickness) once the limitations of different users were understood. Many people using VR find that the vestibular concerns are not an issue over time as long as the framerate of the system is high enough (90fps+). People actually do get their "sea legs" over time and many (largely gamers so far) ask for locomotion systems that were considered terrible ideas even 2 years ago.
ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
Sorry for the really basic question but why is the narrow field of view a problem? This wasn't ever supposed to be like Google Glass, a device that you wear all day as you walk around. You put the glasses on for a specific experience. If I'm putting them on to play a game, or read interactive motion comics from Marvel, I'm fine looking through a smaller window. I used to stare at my GameBoy screen for hours and its only a couple inch rectangle.
- ssewell 9y ago
  There is a pretty significant difference between the expectations of a GameBoy screen, in which your focusing your fovea on the screen, and a visual projection in AR. The biggest issue with narrow FOV in this case is AR strives to make items appear as if they are in the real world. The moment you slightly turn your head and item is clipped by the projected FOV, yet you can still see the real world where the AR item "was", breaks the immersive illusion. With VR, even a narrow FOV doesn't have this problem: As you rotate your head and a virtual item moves out of the FOV, it's simply clipped into blackness... no visual dissonance as you have with AR item vs. real world it lives within. Edit to address the article: I think the fixed IPD is the real deal-breaker here. People have greatly varied IPDs. Some VR HMDs, such as the Oculus Rift, have a physical IPD adjustent. I don't see why the ML headset couldn't have this feature in the consumer version as well, though.
- TipVFL 9y ago
  The current/near future of augmented reality is mainly about preparing for the future of AR, and the future of AR is full-FOV devices that you wear all the time to seamlessly integrate data with the world around you. As it is, a tiny FOV drastically changes the experience and the possibilities of the equipment. It could also mask issues that are only apparent at higher FOVs (like lagging overlays causing motion sickness). They've managed to make one of the smaller and sleeker AR devices, which will be important for mass adoption, but based on the current state of the tech it's probably putting the cart before the horse. At this point I'd rather work on a tethered and bulky system with a massive FOV like Leap Motion's Project North Star, as it more closely matches the capabilities (but not form factor) of what we should expect from the first mass market AR devices.
vokep 9y ago
kind of unfortunate but if they can get this out and then do it better the second time around... Where have all the billions gone? did they spend it already?
- yborg 9y ago
  >where have all the billions gone? Hookers and blow, same as always. The good news is that the huge investors who were hoodwinked here will be highly incentivized to avoid the embarrassment of shareholder lawsuits. And unlike Theranos, they at least have some kind of product that does something vaguely related to their claims. Still, you'd think that at this point the CEO/founder black mock turtleneck should abort any pitch meeting instantly.
capdotnet 9y ago
its seem all the AR headsets have this "Small view range" problem. .... Hololens , Magic Leaps, .... Anyone know the view range of the meta 2?
- modeless 9y ago
  Leap Motion (which is not Magic Leap) recently showed a design with a much larger FOV, using so-called "bird bath" optics (which Meta 2 is also based on). It's not anything you'd want to actually wear in everyday life, but it should be an interesting platform for prototyping AR software. http://blog.leapmotion.com/northstar/ http://blog.leapmotion.com/northstar/
  - Dibbles 9y ago
    To be fair, VR headsets look ridiculous as well. So, use them in the same settings and it'd be fine.
    - dkersten 9y ago
      But how much does it really buy over VR if you only use it in the same setting?
      - Dibbles 9y ago
        It would buy a lot more if it wouldn't only be in the same setting, but I think pretty much all current day AR headsets are too dorky to wear on the subway anyway. But it would still help a lot with office work, being able to continue working and doing small chores is still a big pro that VR can't fulfill.
- michaelbuckbee 9y ago
  Everything has tradeoffs and Hololens, MagicLeap and Meta have made different choices resulting in different ones. The Meta2 has quite a large field of view (though a very different design compared to the Meta1, Hololens or ML). It is conceptually similar to taping a smartphone to the underside of a baseball cap lid and hanging plastic googles off the lens to reflect the light back into your eyes. Also, you need to connect a bunch of cables back to a gaming level PC to make everything work. Hololens is very light, but is using tiny projectors to reflect back into your eye (also entirely self contained in the headset!). MagicLeap has a different display tech, along with a bunch of other refinements and additions (eye tracking for foveated rendering, occlusion, etc.) also requires a smartphone sized battery pack/processor with a cable that goes to the glasses. So you have on the physical UX front: Hololens (headset) beats MagicLeap (headset + pack) beats Meta (headset + gaming PC). And then on the FOV front: Meta beats Hololens beats MagicLeap And then on the "number of super promising and ambitions technologies put into a single device: MagicLeap beats Hololens beats Meta. ALL of these devices are still clearly being pitched as "Developer" Units, none of them are ready for even the level of (still somewhat lackluster) consumer adoption that VR has seen. Which is not to say that they're bad or that ML has blown $2B dollars, etc. I really don't think this is Theranos situation, it's just EARLY. In cell phone terms, AR still isn't quite to the Motorola razor level of development (and everybody's expectations are at iPhone/Android level).
slg 9y ago
Just from my anecdotal experience of using the HoloLens, (but not the ML1) the FOV problem these devices have is more tied to the display size than the unobstructed view of the real world. You brain will compensate for the obstructed view and you will forget about it pretty quickly. A larger FOV is obviously better, but it isn't a deal breaking flaw. The display being limited to an even smaller area will be something your brain will never get used to. You will have to be looking directly at a virtual object to see it. As soon as you slightly turn away the virtual object will disappear and immediately break any immersion.
- gumby 9y ago
  It's not simply the size of the display device, it's the optics of getting the image to your eye, at a distance (virtual or real) you can focus on and clear throughout the whole FOV. A few hours strugglng with Zemax will convince you it's a Hard Problem.
h9283y 9y ago
"The Model-T is a piece of shit. I has hard tires that don't absorb the bumps, requires a manual crank, and no cup holders." Seriously, does no one realize product development is a process? Self-aggrandizing voices like this really turn me off. "Sorry the world didn't do better by you! We'll all really try harder next time, dad."
- drcode 9y ago
  Well, I think what folks hope for on HN is a certain "meritocracy" for news surrounding advanced technology. Magic Leap has arguably been trying to build buzz around their product with slick marketing and has been gaming the tech press to get unfair attention for their project and syphoning investment money away from other companies in this process. I think it's only fair, in turn, to keep the company accountable to at least a tiny sliver of their original claims.
- rburhum 9y ago
  I think the issue is that some people think that $2,000,000,000 USD and 8 years should be able to produce a better first product.
  - Holomakerbot 9y ago
    2b is a drop in the bucket compared to other companies like Microsoft and Apple. They’re not just building a headset, but the software to run it and funding both 1st and 3rd party content.
    - oldgradstudent 9y ago
      $2.3 billion dollars is an almost incomprehensible amount of money. Amazon raised total of $108 million before its IPO. Google raised less than $50 million before its IPO. Facebook raised $2.3 billion before the IPO, and most of it was after it became a world-wide phenomena.
      - Holomakerbot 9y ago
imh 9y ago
The title implies (and some commenters seem to believe) that this is about an actual magic leap product, not a speculative recreation thereof. Can we get a title change to something like "Recreating a Magic Leap device" or "The view through a magic leap recreation"
- dang 9y ago
  Sure. I put "model" in the title because that's the word the article uses for this.
  - imh 9y ago
    Thanks. I feel like a good 5-10% of my comments are me curmudgeonly grumbling about titles. I hope it's not a bother.
    - dang 9y ago
      I see it as a collaborative effort by the community to have at least one place on the internet that isn't driven by baitiness and spin. That seems worth doing and we're happy to help.

114 points by GW150914 9y ago

Google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.kguttag.com/2018/04/13/the-magic-leap-one-experience-part-2-ml1-terrible-view-of-the-real-world/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

kguttag 9y ago
Thanks, There are so many hits on the site that it got throttled. I just upgrade the hosting plan to hopefully solve the problems, but I won't take effect until 2AM PDT.

matte_black 9y ago

After all this time (and money) this is really the best they can do? This has to be some sort of early prototype thing. Surely they will never ship this to market in it's current form.

jaggederest 9y ago

I think the FOV estimates are pessimistic by a good margin, your eye looks around edging very well, as you can see in binoculars and other low FOV devices. The rest is absolutely spot on though, without IPD adjustments any head mounted display is going to have real problems.

cromwellian 9y ago

I'm skeptical of the analysis because it seems the author has a singular fixation on constantly criticizing ML, and apparently works for competitors. He may be right, but whether or not ML1 is a success really won't depend on whether or not stuff like the original concept of fibre optical scanning light fields will work, the ML1 will succeed or fail based on consumer experience and content availability. And I really don't think this Kremlinology-based approach could capture it anymore than people speculating on what the Apple watch or iPhones would be like based on photos of the device and patents.

hammerandtongs 9y ago
I suggest you spend some time reading his pretty extensive set of high quality articles on many companies and aspects of AR. This is an industry where outsiders have a very limited understanding of the serious serious problems in front of AR. It's also an industry that is taking advantage of the very limited understanding of just about everyone not in it to hype things far beyond their capabilities. If you care about AR in even an offhand way you should spend some time self educating and Karl Guttag's site is a good way to get started. It's very interesting field but there are tremendous challenges in front of it and it serves no purpose to just assume the companies involved have actual magic leaps that solve the problems.
- freeone3000 9y ago
  It's also entirely possible they offer partial solutions to some problems, no solution to other problems, and still produce am experience worth paying money for.
  - joe_the_user 9y ago
    That's a natural argument extrapolating from the phone, electronics and laptop market. I think it is wrong in this case, however. As I understand it, the problem is "half-working" in the case of VR/AR/etc isn't something like less convenient that early adopters can simply put up with. Half-working VR has ability to sicken a person and injure the vision system. See for example. https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/13/health/virtual-reality-vr-dangers-safety/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/13/health/virtual-reality-vr-dan...
    - hammerandtongs 9y ago
      That is a pretty bad article about VR that might have been excusable in 2013 but is not on firm ground in 2017 much less 2018. Broadly, almost everything in it has been either not born out (vision concerns) or less of a problem then first assumed (motion sickness) once the limitations of different users were understood. Many people using VR find that the vestibular concerns are not an issue over time as long as the framerate of the system is high enough (90fps+). People actually do get their "sea legs" over time and many (largely gamers so far) ask for locomotion systems that were considered terrible ideas even 2 years ago.

ghostbrainalpha 9y ago

Sorry for the really basic question but why is the narrow field of view a problem? This wasn't ever supposed to be like Google Glass, a device that you wear all day as you walk around. You put the glasses on for a specific experience. If I'm putting them on to play a game, or read interactive motion comics from Marvel, I'm fine looking through a smaller window. I used to stare at my GameBoy screen for hours and its only a couple inch rectangle.

ssewell 9y ago
There is a pretty significant difference between the expectations of a GameBoy screen, in which your focusing your fovea on the screen, and a visual projection in AR. The biggest issue with narrow FOV in this case is AR strives to make items appear as if they are in the real world. The moment you slightly turn your head and item is clipped by the projected FOV, yet you can still see the real world where the AR item "was", breaks the immersive illusion. With VR, even a narrow FOV doesn't have this problem: As you rotate your head and a virtual item moves out of the FOV, it's simply clipped into blackness... no visual dissonance as you have with AR item vs. real world it lives within. Edit to address the article: I think the fixed IPD is the real deal-breaker here. People have greatly varied IPDs. Some VR HMDs, such as the Oculus Rift, have a physical IPD adjustent. I don't see why the ML headset couldn't have this feature in the consumer version as well, though.
TipVFL 9y ago
The current/near future of augmented reality is mainly about preparing for the future of AR, and the future of AR is full-FOV devices that you wear all the time to seamlessly integrate data with the world around you. As it is, a tiny FOV drastically changes the experience and the possibilities of the equipment. It could also mask issues that are only apparent at higher FOVs (like lagging overlays causing motion sickness). They've managed to make one of the smaller and sleeker AR devices, which will be important for mass adoption, but based on the current state of the tech it's probably putting the cart before the horse. At this point I'd rather work on a tethered and bulky system with a massive FOV like Leap Motion's Project North Star, as it more closely matches the capabilities (but not form factor) of what we should expect from the first mass market AR devices.

vokep 9y ago

kind of unfortunate but if they can get this out and then do it better the second time around... Where have all the billions gone? did they spend it already?

yborg 9y ago
>where have all the billions gone? Hookers and blow, same as always. The good news is that the huge investors who were hoodwinked here will be highly incentivized to avoid the embarrassment of shareholder lawsuits. And unlike Theranos, they at least have some kind of product that does something vaguely related to their claims. Still, you'd think that at this point the CEO/founder black mock turtleneck should abort any pitch meeting instantly.

capdotnet 9y ago

its seem all the AR headsets have this "Small view range" problem. .... Hololens , Magic Leaps, .... Anyone know the view range of the meta 2?

modeless 9y ago
Leap Motion (which is not Magic Leap) recently showed a design with a much larger FOV, using so-called "bird bath" optics (which Meta 2 is also based on). It's not anything you'd want to actually wear in everyday life, but it should be an interesting platform for prototyping AR software. http://blog.leapmotion.com/northstar/ http://blog.leapmotion.com/northstar/
- Dibbles 9y ago
  To be fair, VR headsets look ridiculous as well. So, use them in the same settings and it'd be fine.
  - dkersten 9y ago
    But how much does it really buy over VR if you only use it in the same setting?
    - Dibbles 9y ago
      It would buy a lot more if it wouldn't only be in the same setting, but I think pretty much all current day AR headsets are too dorky to wear on the subway anyway. But it would still help a lot with office work, being able to continue working and doing small chores is still a big pro that VR can't fulfill.
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
Everything has tradeoffs and Hololens, MagicLeap and Meta have made different choices resulting in different ones. The Meta2 has quite a large field of view (though a very different design compared to the Meta1, Hololens or ML). It is conceptually similar to taping a smartphone to the underside of a baseball cap lid and hanging plastic googles off the lens to reflect the light back into your eyes. Also, you need to connect a bunch of cables back to a gaming level PC to make everything work. Hololens is very light, but is using tiny projectors to reflect back into your eye (also entirely self contained in the headset!). MagicLeap has a different display tech, along with a bunch of other refinements and additions (eye tracking for foveated rendering, occlusion, etc.) also requires a smartphone sized battery pack/processor with a cable that goes to the glasses. So you have on the physical UX front: Hololens (headset) beats MagicLeap (headset + pack) beats Meta (headset + gaming PC). And then on the FOV front: Meta beats Hololens beats MagicLeap And then on the "number of super promising and ambitions technologies put into a single device: MagicLeap beats Hololens beats Meta. ALL of these devices are still clearly being pitched as "Developer" Units, none of them are ready for even the level of (still somewhat lackluster) consumer adoption that VR has seen. Which is not to say that they're bad or that ML has blown $2B dollars, etc. I really don't think this is Theranos situation, it's just EARLY. In cell phone terms, AR still isn't quite to the Motorola razor level of development (and everybody's expectations are at iPhone/Android level).

slg 9y ago

Just from my anecdotal experience of using the HoloLens, (but not the ML1) the FOV problem these devices have is more tied to the display size than the unobstructed view of the real world. You brain will compensate for the obstructed view and you will forget about it pretty quickly. A larger FOV is obviously better, but it isn't a deal breaking flaw. The display being limited to an even smaller area will be something your brain will never get used to. You will have to be looking directly at a virtual object to see it. As soon as you slightly turn away the virtual object will disappear and immediately break any immersion.

gumby 9y ago
It's not simply the size of the display device, it's the optics of getting the image to your eye, at a distance (virtual or real) you can focus on and clear throughout the whole FOV. A few hours strugglng with Zemax will convince you it's a Hard Problem.

h9283y 9y ago

"The Model-T is a piece of shit. I has hard tires that don't absorb the bumps, requires a manual crank, and no cup holders." Seriously, does no one realize product development is a process? Self-aggrandizing voices like this really turn me off. "Sorry the world didn't do better by you! We'll all really try harder next time, dad."

drcode 9y ago
Well, I think what folks hope for on HN is a certain "meritocracy" for news surrounding advanced technology. Magic Leap has arguably been trying to build buzz around their product with slick marketing and has been gaming the tech press to get unfair attention for their project and syphoning investment money away from other companies in this process. I think it's only fair, in turn, to keep the company accountable to at least a tiny sliver of their original claims.
rburhum 9y ago
I think the issue is that some people think that $2,000,000,000 USD and 8 years should be able to produce a better first product.
- Holomakerbot 9y ago
  2b is a drop in the bucket compared to other companies like Microsoft and Apple. They’re not just building a headset, but the software to run it and funding both 1st and 3rd party content.
  - oldgradstudent 9y ago
    $2.3 billion dollars is an almost incomprehensible amount of money. Amazon raised total of $108 million before its IPO. Google raised less than $50 million before its IPO. Facebook raised $2.3 billion before the IPO, and most of it was after it became a world-wide phenomena.
    - Holomakerbot 9y ago

imh 9y ago

The title implies (and some commenters seem to believe) that this is about an actual magic leap product, not a speculative recreation thereof. Can we get a title change to something like "Recreating a Magic Leap device" or "The view through a magic leap recreation"

dang 9y ago
Sure. I put "model" in the title because that's the word the article uses for this.
- imh 9y ago
  Thanks. I feel like a good 5-10% of my comments are me curmudgeonly grumbling about titles. I hope it's not a bother.
  - dang 9y ago
    I see it as a collaborative effort by the community to have at least one place on the internet that isn't driven by baitiness and spin. That seems worth doing and we're happy to help.