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Let's assume for the sake of a conversation that this article is right, and Magic Leap (ML) is lackluster. What is it exactly that makes VR tech so difficult, t

Let's assume for the sake of a conversation that this article is right, and Magic Leap (ML) is lackluster. What is it exactly that makes VR tech so difficult, then? ML had all the money in the world, and still (presumably) couldn't hit the mark. What exactly is missing - is it the material sciences for eye-projection systems? Ability to downsize the graphics and processing tech into a small package? What critical milestones are still missing that, when available, will allow truly immeresive VR? And anyone dare predict when they will be available?

rossdavidh 8y ago
Just a hypothesis here: they failed because of, not in spite of, the amount of money they had. VR/AR will succeed by making just-barely-good-enough products for specific, limited environments (surgery, repair, control of robots in remote environments, education). Then, it will get slightly better. This requires that a product with a limited market is acceptable, at first, as it was for the very early computers. Big funding encourages one to strive for too much, too soon, too all-in-one-project. Incremental change is required, and that requires that an incremental improvement in market size is good enough. I have no particular inside knowledge of this, it's just an idea/hypothesis.
- koboll 8y ago
  Also, another factor - Magic Leap decided, perplexingly, to locate itself in a suburb west of Fort Lauderdale. Not the most far-flung location, but not exactly a tech hub, either. I was repeatedly contacted by their recruiters despite living in a completely different part of the country and having limited experience at the time. The impression it left me with is that they were really hurting for talent. Maybe the location is one reason why.
  - joezydeco 8y ago
    About 20 years ago, Motorola had a large plant in Boynton. Employed a few thousand engineers working on paging systems and eventually cellular telephony. Lots of it moved up to Chicago later on, but not all of it. What’s left there are the echoes of the employees that hung around. IIRC, XM Satellite Radio has their engineering office in Lauderdale. Wonder where they found all the RF people needed to spin that one up.
    - majewsky 8y ago
      > Boynton Which one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boynton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boynton I'm guessing the Detroit one since you said "lots of it moved up to Chicago later on".
      - joezydeco 8y ago
        Boynton Beach. http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2004-01-23/business/0401221048_1_motorola-s-plant-motorola-s-strategy-quantum-park http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2004-01-23/business/0401221...
- RodoBobJon 8y ago
  With the caveat that I also have no particular inside knowledge of this, I think you're on to something. I keep seeing these demos which show virtual video game characters or hyper-realistic objects and I can't help but think that it's complete overkill for a first generation consumer product. From a visual perspective, all I need out of my first gen AR glasses is to project some text annotations next to a real object, or show an arrow where I need to turn left. You don't need to fool me into thinking a virtual object is real. I'm looking for utility, not immersion.
xt00 8y ago
Being able to make 2 stacked displays per eye that you can see through and made out of lightweight materials at a reasonable cost is quite challenging. Magic leap could have made the entire waveguide structure out of glass and probably made more progress quicker with that. Making waveguides is hard, especially 6 of them per eye.. I think the having multiple focal planes likely is over indexing on one thing that likely is not the most important thing..
Kapura 8y ago
So, AR is harder than VR because of things like surface detection and occlusion. That being said, the problems with closed-headset VR are twofold: the price and the arid software landscape. A Vive Pro headset, the most advanced consumer-ready VR headset, costs $800, plus a few hundred $ more for each of the base stations and controllers. On top of that, you need a good PC to run any VR software. That's a lot of money to invest. And if you do, you're met with a bunch of weird experiments, a few weird experiments with some polish, and a handful of games that offer a truly novel experience in VR. But because the barrier to getting into VR is so high, it doesn't make financial sense for most companies to try to make software for the space. And because there are too few games, there isn't a good reason to buy a headset, so the whole ecosystem goes full ouroboros. So, I guess the thing that is missing is the price falling low enough that the VR ecosystem can become self-sustaining. Good VR systems totally exist; they just cost $4000 and you can't do anything with them, lol.
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  I don't think it's fair to use the Vive Pro as your benchmark for the price of VR. The Rift is equally consumer-ready and half the price, with all base stations and controllers included.
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  +1 for using the phrase "goes full ouroboros"
mattnewport 8y ago
Michael Abrash (of Oculus research) has given several good talks that discuss this. Here's one example: https://www.oculus.com/blog/vrs-grand-challenge-michael-abrash-on-the-future-of-human-interaction/ https://www.oculus.com/blog/vrs-grand-challenge-michael-abra...
saltcured 8y ago
What do you think is "truly immersive VR"? The technical challenges for VR depend on what you think makes it "truly" work or makes you dismiss previous solutions. I think I experienced immersive VR over 20 years ago in the CAVE system, which had shutter glasses, head tracking with stereo projection on either multiple walls or a thing they called an ImmersaDesk, and a user-input device called "the wand." It used a multi-rack SGI Origin, which I am sure is outclassed by a modern gamer's PC. There were some artistic demos and many science/visualization application demos. I saw these in multiple research labs, but I'm not sure they ever really served a real application base. They were in constant use by grad students and postdocs writing new experimental apps and demos. Unfortunately, I think real technical users often find that immersion is a gimmick rather than a real tool. You'd rather spend your money or compute resources on higher resolution and high dynamic range images than stereo rendering. And, when you have challenging visualization problems you are often struggling to sustain any interactive rendering and exploration at all, much less the high framerates needed for immersion. You could have immersion at any time, if you are willing to adjust your problem size and expectations. Stereo rendering always means rendering twice as much as for a regular screen, so you are also going to require a larger hardware investment for any given application and quality metric. Natural, immersive navigation always means limiting your model such that the working set remains well cached and you don't have massive drops in rendering rate as the user moves. People get aggravated when ripped out of immersion by application stalls. Also, it is hard to make an immersive display system low friction/accessible to casual use. But, if you have to design your application to easily degrade to normal screens and keyboard+mouse, then you cannot really focus on and exploit the compelling parts of immersive rendering and immersive user inputs. Can you ever find enough users to agree on this set of compromises to make a product successful?
aaron695 8y ago
> What is it exactly that makes VR tech so difficult, then? Content Grand Theft Auto 5 cost $265 million to create. VR content is going to be much harder and expensive to create to just equal it. It also has to work sitting down. No one wants to come home after a hard days work and relax standing. (And don't even bother with the it will be useful in work environments, high end users often don't even use gui's and prefer text. Even the cliche of buying a house even with a cookie cutter plan the cost to make it 3D and look good from pre existing CAD drawings is probably too much)

rossdavidh 8y ago

Just a hypothesis here: they failed because of, not in spite of, the amount of money they had. VR/AR will succeed by making just-barely-good-enough products for specific, limited environments (surgery, repair, control of robots in remote environments, education). Then, it will get slightly better. This requires that a product with a limited market is acceptable, at first, as it was for the very early computers. Big funding encourages one to strive for too much, too soon, too all-in-one-project. Incremental change is required, and that requires that an incremental improvement in market size is good enough. I have no particular inside knowledge of this, it's just an idea/hypothesis.

koboll 8y ago
Also, another factor - Magic Leap decided, perplexingly, to locate itself in a suburb west of Fort Lauderdale. Not the most far-flung location, but not exactly a tech hub, either. I was repeatedly contacted by their recruiters despite living in a completely different part of the country and having limited experience at the time. The impression it left me with is that they were really hurting for talent. Maybe the location is one reason why.
- joezydeco 8y ago
  About 20 years ago, Motorola had a large plant in Boynton. Employed a few thousand engineers working on paging systems and eventually cellular telephony. Lots of it moved up to Chicago later on, but not all of it. What’s left there are the echoes of the employees that hung around. IIRC, XM Satellite Radio has their engineering office in Lauderdale. Wonder where they found all the RF people needed to spin that one up.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    > Boynton Which one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boynton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boynton I'm guessing the Detroit one since you said "lots of it moved up to Chicago later on".
    - joezydeco 8y ago
      Boynton Beach. http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2004-01-23/business/0401221048_1_motorola-s-plant-motorola-s-strategy-quantum-park http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2004-01-23/business/0401221...
RodoBobJon 8y ago
With the caveat that I also have no particular inside knowledge of this, I think you're on to something. I keep seeing these demos which show virtual video game characters or hyper-realistic objects and I can't help but think that it's complete overkill for a first generation consumer product. From a visual perspective, all I need out of my first gen AR glasses is to project some text annotations next to a real object, or show an arrow where I need to turn left. You don't need to fool me into thinking a virtual object is real. I'm looking for utility, not immersion.

xt00 8y ago

Being able to make 2 stacked displays per eye that you can see through and made out of lightweight materials at a reasonable cost is quite challenging. Magic leap could have made the entire waveguide structure out of glass and probably made more progress quicker with that. Making waveguides is hard, especially 6 of them per eye.. I think the having multiple focal planes likely is over indexing on one thing that likely is not the most important thing..

Kapura 8y ago

So, AR is harder than VR because of things like surface detection and occlusion. That being said, the problems with closed-headset VR are twofold: the price and the arid software landscape. A Vive Pro headset, the most advanced consumer-ready VR headset, costs $800, plus a few hundred $ more for each of the base stations and controllers. On top of that, you need a good PC to run any VR software. That's a lot of money to invest. And if you do, you're met with a bunch of weird experiments, a few weird experiments with some polish, and a handful of games that offer a truly novel experience in VR. But because the barrier to getting into VR is so high, it doesn't make financial sense for most companies to try to make software for the space. And because there are too few games, there isn't a good reason to buy a headset, so the whole ecosystem goes full ouroboros. So, I guess the thing that is missing is the price falling low enough that the VR ecosystem can become self-sustaining. Good VR systems totally exist; they just cost $4000 and you can't do anything with them, lol.

Ajedi32 8y ago
I don't think it's fair to use the Vive Pro as your benchmark for the price of VR. The Rift is equally consumer-ready and half the price, with all base stations and controllers included.
rossdavidh 8y ago
+1 for using the phrase "goes full ouroboros"

mattnewport 8y ago

Michael Abrash (of Oculus research) has given several good talks that discuss this. Here's one example: https://www.oculus.com/blog/vrs-grand-challenge-michael-abrash-on-the-future-of-human-interaction/ https://www.oculus.com/blog/vrs-grand-challenge-michael-abra...

saltcured 8y ago

What do you think is "truly immersive VR"? The technical challenges for VR depend on what you think makes it "truly" work or makes you dismiss previous solutions. I think I experienced immersive VR over 20 years ago in the CAVE system, which had shutter glasses, head tracking with stereo projection on either multiple walls or a thing they called an ImmersaDesk, and a user-input device called "the wand." It used a multi-rack SGI Origin, which I am sure is outclassed by a modern gamer's PC. There were some artistic demos and many science/visualization application demos. I saw these in multiple research labs, but I'm not sure they ever really served a real application base. They were in constant use by grad students and postdocs writing new experimental apps and demos. Unfortunately, I think real technical users often find that immersion is a gimmick rather than a real tool. You'd rather spend your money or compute resources on higher resolution and high dynamic range images than stereo rendering. And, when you have challenging visualization problems you are often struggling to sustain any interactive rendering and exploration at all, much less the high framerates needed for immersion. You could have immersion at any time, if you are willing to adjust your problem size and expectations. Stereo rendering always means rendering twice as much as for a regular screen, so you are also going to require a larger hardware investment for any given application and quality metric. Natural, immersive navigation always means limiting your model such that the working set remains well cached and you don't have massive drops in rendering rate as the user moves. People get aggravated when ripped out of immersion by application stalls. Also, it is hard to make an immersive display system low friction/accessible to casual use. But, if you have to design your application to easily degrade to normal screens and keyboard+mouse, then you cannot really focus on and exploit the compelling parts of immersive rendering and immersive user inputs. Can you ever find enough users to agree on this set of compromises to make a product successful?

aaron695 8y ago

> What is it exactly that makes VR tech so difficult, then? Content Grand Theft Auto 5 cost $265 million to create. VR content is going to be much harder and expensive to create to just equal it. It also has to work sitting down. No one wants to come home after a hard days work and relax standing. (And don't even bother with the it will be useful in work environments, high end users often don't even use gui's and prefer text. Even the cliche of buying a house even with a cookie cutter plan the cost to make it 3D and look good from pre existing CAD drawings is probably too much)