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Another heavily-funded AR headset startup is shutting down

125 points by mathattack 7y ago

viklove 7y ago
Discussing rape in animal populations has always seemed like such a strange concept to me. How can if you tell a Mallard has given consent? Do Mallards even understand the concept of consent?
bbmario 7y ago
Magic Leap next?
- monkeydust 7y ago
  What have they achieved, has anyone been blown away by them? For me just getting into VR thanks to Oculus Quest which I have to say is an amazing product for the price.
  - emef 7y ago
    I tried their demo at CVPR a few months ago. It was super immersive and crisp. You interact with an AI "guide" who shows you how to look around, pick things up, stick them on the wall, etc. It was surprisingly unnerving to look the AI in the eyes and have her react to my gestures. Beyond a sweet demo, not sure what the value in the product would be for a general consumer option, but cool technology for sure.
    - woah 7y ago
      They have a demo now???
      - emef 7y ago
        Had to wait forever to get a time slot. They do 10-15 minute demos in a temporary room they put up on the expo floor.
    - EpicEng 7y ago
      Interesting considering this comment from about the same time frame. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253177
  - petersonh 7y ago
    I've heard it's pretty meh, not the revolution they promised - Hololens 2 is supposed to be better.
    - Tinfoilhat666 7y ago
      I don't like the clumsy look of Magic Leap or Hololens 2. Nreal has created glasses which look like sunglasses. That's the future. I could wear them in public. https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/1/9/18176083/nreal-augmented-reality-ar-smart-glasses-features-pricing-release-date-ces-2019 https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/1/9/18176083/nr...
  - milesward 7y ago
    We collaborated with them to build a demo for visualizing Google Cloud infrastructure thru their system: it was super impressive and fun, made me think of building a whole AR vNOC. Wild times!
  - twic 7y ago
    The AR hype bubble is collapsing now. The not-actually-tech bubble (WeWork, Uber) is next. I think it'll be AI after that (is that bubble even still around?). Great times to be picking up cheap office furniture!
    - bitL 7y ago
      ML is unlikely to bust; it actually works well and it's integrated into most services any of us uses regularly; just because you don't feel it/see it advertised openly, doesn't mean it is not going to be needed. I'd rather assume it's going to accelerate for even more (cognitive) automation, unlike AR/VR/BTC etc.
magashna 7y ago
Part of the magic of VR is the immersion. AR doesn't appeal to me, it seems more of a gimmick.
- melling 7y ago
  Except for the fact you spend most of your time in the real world. I can probably think of a million different uses for an AR display. What’s really missing is a good way to interact with that display. Voice recognition and hand gesture recognition need to improve.
  - magashna 7y ago
    Yes, I spend most of my time in real life, which is why the modern equivalent of a pop-up book isn't that interesting to me. AR needs to have its "killer app" to draw me in. It's not there yet. Meanwhile, VR can take me to another world. Games like Thumper, Audioshield and Beat Saber are enough to sell me on a crazy musical experience.
    - jackbrookes 7y ago
      The cool thing about AR is you can think of any single app and it could be a killer app people would pay for. Imagine eye glasses that allowed you to just "zoom in" by clicking your fingers. Or glasses that seamlessly translate written text into your native language. Or highlighted the path you should take whilst walking to work using GPS navigation. Any of those alone would be compelling products, the cool thing is these are just possible "apps" for an AR device.
      - shkkmo 7y ago
        Once you reach an actual "eye glasses" form factor that is capable of general purpose use, a lot more things before viable. But the "killer apps" you mention are all just slightly more convenient versions of existing products (smart phones, binoculars) and are thus very dependent on a small enough form factor to realize that convenience. Not having to carry and pullout a laptop out to view live Google maps directions is a killer app. Not having to pull my phone out is a much smaller convenience. It only becomes a killer app when the convenience of wearing smart glasses surpasses that of having a smart phone in your pocket (which is a long way off). I do think there are killer apps that are in the nearer future. Anything where the rapidity of access to information conveys significant advantages is far less dependent of the form factor for success. You see this in the existing success of AR for business where those efficiencies can boost productivity.
mdszy 7y ago
The company I work for is trialing AR solutions for remote support purposes. We've tried the glasses and customers hate it because it literally makes them motion sick. Our current thing is phone/tablet based where you can basically stream real time video to our support staff and each party can draw on the screen, and whatever they draw stays where it is in physical space. Customers love it, it works great. Nobody wants dorky glasses that make you sick.
- RangerScience 7y ago
  What's the company?
  - mdszy 7y ago
    The company with the software we're trying? It's PTC's Vuforia Chalk: https://chalk.vuforia.com/ https://chalk.vuforia.com/
    - iamjk 7y ago
      What's the company you work for?
      - mdorazio 7y ago
        Looks like https://szy.io/ https://szy.io/
        mdszy 7y ago
        Well, that's my own little dealio where I make/sell electronics kits and resell used equipment. That's not involved in AR at all and it's just a little side-thing I do. I have a separate full time job and I'm not totally comfortable with sharing who I work for, my apologies.
      - mdszy 7y ago
        Sorry, I'm not comfortable with sharing that. I'll just say that it's a company that manufactures high-end industrial converting equipment.
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
The most widespread, successful use case AR which I can see currently is AR Filter i.e. snapchat filters and those who copied it. The reason IMO, is most of the users who use snapchat filters wouldn't even know what Augmented Reality is. It is that intuitive use case which can make high-tech get widespread consumer adoption. Looking at the rate at which limited attention, instant gratification apps are conquering market, the demand for AR filters aren't going to decline anytime soon and those who offer AR as a service would have enough buyers in the form of the copy cat apps wanting AR filters. In fact, snapchat itself supposedly acquired the AR filter tech from a Ukranian company called Looskery in 2015.
- RangerScience 7y ago
  Consumer AR is very, very different from industrial AR. The business case for industrial is huge, I have no idea what the business case is for consumer :P
  - jackbrookes 7y ago
    Now instead of content being constrained to a tiny 2D rectangle - it can now encompass your entire field of view. The world will be overlaid with holograms that everyone can see and interact with.
    - joezydeco 7y ago
      This video always comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
    - RangerScience 7y ago
      I can see why other people want me to have that experience, but not why I would want to have that experience (as a consumer). Then again, I'm not exactly a representative sample.
  - sfifs 7y ago
    The problem with Industrial AR is that most use cases I've seen (maintainance, instruction manuals, support etc) are cost centers, not profit centers. It will generally cost more to produce than the current methods - so business investments will me made only where the benefits are an order of magnitude than the "paper or iPad manual" solution. I'm sure there will be a few use cases but not as many as most people seem to expect.
RangerScience 7y ago
I was at Daqri from employee ~12 to ~300. It was a wild ride and I've got some really amazing memories with only a bit of scarring to show for it :) Daqri was really good at recruiting amazing people, and really bad at turning them into a functioning company. Communication between teams (and particularly offices) was really lacking; I remember back when the helmet was built on Android (in LA) and all the vision scientists were working on iOS (in Sunnyvale), they had this amazing world-tracking demo that we just couldn't use. The Two Trees photonics tech is absolutely amazing, check it out if you get a chance - field programmable holograms. Point the thing at any glass surface and you get a hologram "in" it. Blew my mind the first time I saw it! Dunno if it ever made it into headware.
- RangerScience 7y ago
  PS - I can't actually offer an AMA - there's things I can't or shouldn't talk about - but I am absolutely up for questions :)
  - ladon86 7y ago
    Are there any videos of the Two Trees tech, or does that not do it justice? How far out do you think consumer AR is realistically?
    - therein 7y ago
      I believe it should be essentially what Envisics has, which is probably represented best below. What we are used to: https://youtu.be/p-lH4mufXHw?t=44 https://youtu.be/p-lH4mufXHw?t=44 What they have: https://youtu.be/p-lH4mufXHw?t=63 https://youtu.be/p-lH4mufXHw?t=63
    - RangerScience 7y ago
      I don't know either way, but, it's supposed to be in every 201x Land Rover, I think? If you see a hologram projected into a car windshield on behalf of the driver, that might be the tech. 3-5 years, would be my optimistic guess? The tech is getting there (Magic Leap and Hololens), but it's not there yet, and it's not going to seriously accelerate until there's a really compelling consumer use-case / app to go with it.
rococode 7y ago
I spent 3 months working on an AR project on the Magic Leap (the best funded AR startup, I think?). My conclusion was that the hardware just isn't there yet. VR tech feels impressive because the hardware works well. AR tech, on the other hand, still feels very much like a prototype, and far from real production use. Some of the main deal-breaker issues are heat, discomfort, dizziness, and software instability (I wrote more about the specific issues I encountered with the Magic Leap in a past thread [1]). To me it felt significantly worse than the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 (the second public release of a VR device back in 2014). Back then when I got that version because I was super hyped for VR, I thought "Woah, clearly needs more work but this is amazing". With AR, my experience thus far has sadly been "Oh, this is it?". A lot of it is presumably because AR is much harder to do well. A very simplified way of thinking of VR is basically it's a screen close to your face that can track its own pitch/yaw/roll/small amounts of movement and redraw accordingly. This is tricky, but totally doable (and thus, it was done). Smartphones have basically been able to do most of this for years (not so much the movement, but that's also a pretty new thing in VR). AR actually has to interact with the real world. If you have a virtual image anchored to, say, a pendulum, that's fairly non-trivial computation-wise to recalculate without prior knowledge of the pendulum's movements. It's basically object detection which ML models can do fairly well, but they do it with latency. And when the latency is in something your brain is trying to process as the real world, it's nauseating. Add on the fact that it takes a lot of energy to do inference, and that AR devices need to be standalone devices that can be taken anywhere by themselves, and you also have a serious heat problem where the compute needed to constantly analyze the real world means you just have a hot brick on your head or in your pocket. I think it's going to take a lot more time to get it right. It feels like a hard enough problem that I think the first truly production-grade AR device will have to come from one of the big companies, possibly Microsoft with HoloLens. Of course, I write all this with the definition of AR as "something you wear on your head that overlays your full field-of-view with virtual graphics". Other forms of AR like Snapchat filters or camera overlays are probably less challenging. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253177
- Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
  I managed to try out Microsoft's HoloLens 2 at MS Build this year in Seattle. My impressions were that it's a very cool, very impressive prototype. FOV is still quite low, although I hear it's significantly improved from v1. Framerate felt too low for real-world stuff; as you were alluding to, our brains are used to screens operating at 60fps, but there's something about putting the screen right up next to your eyeballs and adding tracking (whether VR or AR) that kills that illusion and mandates at least 90fps, and very smooth. I'm not surprised by the reports of people getting motion sick. Having said that, the fundamental interactions are very cool. I had slight difficulty figuring out where the tracking was actually registering (e.g., how far do I have to move my finger to 'tap' a button), but once I figured that out it worked just like you expected it to.
neogodless 7y ago
I'm suddenly feeling super behind on the news. While I believe I've heard rumors about Apple working on augmented reality, I can't think of any such product announcements coming down the pipeline. > While Apple and Microsoft strain to sell augmented reality as the next major computing platform, Is that accurate? Is Apple putting a lot of effort into selling AR?
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  Well you have the references to some kind of Glass-esque product in Xcode, and ARKit has been a part of iPhones since the X. It's interesting stuff but Apple doesn't seem to be interested in the fully immersive headsets so many other companies are. Microsoft seems to be doing a bit of both? But they aren't super focused on it. Frankly I think the use of the word "strain" in that quote is a strain itself. They're definitely working on it, and it's there, but I wouldn't call it a feature they expect to shift units.
- redisman 7y ago
  Not that I've heard. They have ARKit which is getting decent updates but it seems to be limited to the Pokemon GO / AR measurement tool that ships with iOS -type phone use-cases. Not one of their top priority afaik.
nnq 7y ago
AR seems like one of those things that needs to be executed "perfectly" to work. VR can benefit a bit from suspension of disbelief etc. ...but with AR the real world is harsh :) But I bet we'll have "the iPhone" of AR doing it right and popping open the market! Someone will sure get lucky betting on it!
- prongletown 7y ago
  Apple has the resources, the install base, and (crucially) the data to make it happen. The "iPhone of AR" is probably going to be an iPhone.
  - pradeep_m 7y ago
    It always seems like incumbents have it all (resources, distribution, talent, etc) until they don't. For ex, the "iPhone" theoretically should have come from Nokia by that logic. AR particularly requires truly novel innovations for it to work in mass-market. There might be niche-cases that work for AR (studio/arcade games, sports tech) before the mass market use-cases.
    - prongletown 7y ago
      Apple is well documented (for it being a secret project) as throwing tons of resources into compelling AR products. I'm not saying they're going to succeed, but they're certainly trying - unlike Nokia, who was in the middle of a massive internal war over Symbian when the first iPhone hit.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    Apple is (or used to be) very good at waiting for the right time when all necessary components for a good product are ready or close to ready. There is a lot of value in watching other companies fail and learn from them.
  - fragmede 7y ago
    Apple has ARKit on iPhones, and it's usable right now. Apple has the built-in "measure" app, though that can only measure things on a tabletop, and the Mac Pro table-top demo (https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ in Safari on iOS). The iOS game Egg, Inc. has a mode where you can see your farm projected on top of a nearby surface. It's kind of neat to see the little chickens run around on my kitchen table. What's holding AR back (on the iPhone) then, is a killer app. Vuforia Chalk is one for remote support. See what the supportee sees, and point out things, visually, to them. Circle which lever to pull, and using Apple's ARKit[] means the circle stays on the right lever, even when the phone is jostled. It's a cool use case, though their UX is horrible. IMO the problem is a hand-held smartphone is an awkward AR platform. [0] Note that there's some vendor lock-in by Apple. The Vuforia Chalk feature I mentioned above is image stabilization and an overlay. Image stabilization (and face detection) is an old problem in computer vision, it's commonly used to add silly hats to faces in video calls.
babyslothzoo 7y ago
Is AR this generations VR? Full of promises and fantasy, but all of which is far from being usable or practical at any mainstream level.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  Less practical than VR. VR has a niche.
  - Animats 7y ago
    It's a very small niche, and it peaked around the 2017 holiday season. The VR game thing didn't sell. Except for Beat Saber. John Carmack, in a recent talk, doesn't seem to consider VR as a way to visit a virtual environment any more. It's just a way to get a wider field of view of screen space in a mobile-sized package. Watching Netflix with VR goggles emulating a wide screen, for people who don't have enough space for a wide screen, is seen as a primary use.
Robotbeat 7y ago
Can someone explain to me why sufficiently good VR can't function as AR? Just to lay out my point: AR has to have extremely good detail, framerate, and even depth of field to work well. It has to track everything perfectly and blend the two lightfields seemlessly or the immersion is broken and you risk nausea or at least annoyance. But if you have high framerate, ability to simulate depth of field, high knowledge of the environment (enough to overlay seemlessly), etc, then couldn't you just... operate purely in VR with reality streamed in via lightfield cameras? That would allow you to do things that are impossible in AR, like display darker overlays on lighter surfaces, and everything would be at the same framerate so it'd be easier to seemlessly integrate everything. So what does really, really good AR get you that really, really good VR with reality overlay does not? Seems like you can avoid a lot of super hard to effectively impossible hardware optics problems by just doing things with an opaque visor... I'm not an expert in this field, so I'm probably using terminology incorrectly.
- blululu 7y ago
  A number of challenges exist for pass through AR. I’m short the camera system that you need does not exist. Cameras add latency. This causes nausea. Camera resolution is low. When the screen is less than 10 cm from your eyes the grain is very noticeable. Cameras only have limited focal range. Camera dynamic range is low. I’m many settings it is hard to capture images that your eye could handle.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    Thank you. That makes sense. I know some crazy high resolution lightfield cameras exist, but the hardware is so heavy there's no chance of getting it on your head. (In principle you could address this with a huge array of tiny cameras on a headset, I suppose? Like this: https://www.deccanchronicle.com/150421/technology-mobiles-and-tabs/article/52-megapixel-cameras-smartphones https://www.deccanchronicle.com/150421/technology-mobiles-an... or this: https://newsbeezer.com/austriaeng/lg-patent-shows-smartphone-with-16-cameras/ https://newsbeezer.com/austriaeng/lg-patent-shows-smartphone... ) Apparently display technology is also a limitation. Here's one attempt to pass-through AR (thank you for that vocabulary, BTW): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNbTCpURpQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNbTCpURpQs Are you aware of any who do it better?
szczepano 7y ago
Innovation has always had many victims.
vertis 7y ago
Brief mention of Meta in that article. I had missed that they shut down, though I can't say I am surprised. Their first headset was uncomfortable and lacked the field of view or functionality of the Hololens. It was a cabled only experience. They were secretive and lacked decent SDK support. When we tried to buy the second one it was delayed again and again by an insistence on US manufacturing and an inability to scale. When they finally announced that our preorder was available 18 months later they wanted me to create a completely new order since my credit card was no longer valid (I decided not to waste my time or money).
peter303 7y ago
Solution looking for a problem to solve? I have seen VR demos at SIGGRAPGH and film festivals the past 20 years without seeing the 'killer app' yet.
- defterGoose 7y ago
  Shhh! There are still fools with too much money looking to invest!
AndrewKemendo 7y ago
It's really important to understand that funding for AR startups cooled off when Apple and Google decided to go hard into it in 2017. Almost across the board every major VC got spooked, then when Magic Leap turned out to be a turd the bottom fell out. I firmly believe that Apple and Google successfully took the entirely of the market opportunity for a startup to win the AR game long term. You could argue why this is good or whatever, but at the end of the day AR isn't going to be the platform a startup could knock FAANG off of their perch, and one or all of them will own the next hardware platform.
tus88 7y ago
Industrial VR/AR is above the only place it makes sense, and its failing there already. Imagine what thr future holds then for the far less compelling home use situation. Like many other I would like to be able to keep an eye on my kids and kiss my wife while I watch tv. I know, how disgustingly human of me, right?

125 points by mathattack 7y ago

Discussing rape in animal populations has always seemed like such a strange concept to me. How can if you tell a Mallard has given consent? Do Mallards even understand the concept of consent?

bbmario 7y ago

Magic Leap next?

monkeydust 7y ago
What have they achieved, has anyone been blown away by them? For me just getting into VR thanks to Oculus Quest which I have to say is an amazing product for the price.
- emef 7y ago
  I tried their demo at CVPR a few months ago. It was super immersive and crisp. You interact with an AI "guide" who shows you how to look around, pick things up, stick them on the wall, etc. It was surprisingly unnerving to look the AI in the eyes and have her react to my gestures. Beyond a sweet demo, not sure what the value in the product would be for a general consumer option, but cool technology for sure.
  - woah 7y ago
    They have a demo now???
    - emef 7y ago
      Had to wait forever to get a time slot. They do 10-15 minute demos in a temporary room they put up on the expo floor.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    Interesting considering this comment from about the same time frame. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253177
- petersonh 7y ago
  I've heard it's pretty meh, not the revolution they promised - Hololens 2 is supposed to be better.
  - Tinfoilhat666 7y ago
    I don't like the clumsy look of Magic Leap or Hololens 2. Nreal has created glasses which look like sunglasses. That's the future. I could wear them in public. https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/1/9/18176083/nreal-augmented-reality-ar-smart-glasses-features-pricing-release-date-ces-2019 https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/1/9/18176083/nr...
- milesward 7y ago
  We collaborated with them to build a demo for visualizing Google Cloud infrastructure thru their system: it was super impressive and fun, made me think of building a whole AR vNOC. Wild times!
- twic 7y ago
  The AR hype bubble is collapsing now. The not-actually-tech bubble (WeWork, Uber) is next. I think it'll be AI after that (is that bubble even still around?). Great times to be picking up cheap office furniture!
  - bitL 7y ago
    ML is unlikely to bust; it actually works well and it's integrated into most services any of us uses regularly; just because you don't feel it/see it advertised openly, doesn't mean it is not going to be needed. I'd rather assume it's going to accelerate for even more (cognitive) automation, unlike AR/VR/BTC etc.

magashna 7y ago

Part of the magic of VR is the immersion. AR doesn't appeal to me, it seems more of a gimmick.

melling 7y ago
Except for the fact you spend most of your time in the real world. I can probably think of a million different uses for an AR display. What’s really missing is a good way to interact with that display. Voice recognition and hand gesture recognition need to improve.
- magashna 7y ago
  Yes, I spend most of my time in real life, which is why the modern equivalent of a pop-up book isn't that interesting to me. AR needs to have its "killer app" to draw me in. It's not there yet. Meanwhile, VR can take me to another world. Games like Thumper, Audioshield and Beat Saber are enough to sell me on a crazy musical experience.
  - jackbrookes 7y ago
    The cool thing about AR is you can think of any single app and it could be a killer app people would pay for. Imagine eye glasses that allowed you to just "zoom in" by clicking your fingers. Or glasses that seamlessly translate written text into your native language. Or highlighted the path you should take whilst walking to work using GPS navigation. Any of those alone would be compelling products, the cool thing is these are just possible "apps" for an AR device.
    - shkkmo 7y ago
      Once you reach an actual "eye glasses" form factor that is capable of general purpose use, a lot more things before viable. But the "killer apps" you mention are all just slightly more convenient versions of existing products (smart phones, binoculars) and are thus very dependent on a small enough form factor to realize that convenience. Not having to carry and pullout a laptop out to view live Google maps directions is a killer app. Not having to pull my phone out is a much smaller convenience. It only becomes a killer app when the convenience of wearing smart glasses surpasses that of having a smart phone in your pocket (which is a long way off). I do think there are killer apps that are in the nearer future. Anything where the rapidity of access to information conveys significant advantages is far less dependent of the form factor for success. You see this in the existing success of AR for business where those efficiencies can boost productivity.

mdszy 7y ago

The company I work for is trialing AR solutions for remote support purposes. We've tried the glasses and customers hate it because it literally makes them motion sick. Our current thing is phone/tablet based where you can basically stream real time video to our support staff and each party can draw on the screen, and whatever they draw stays where it is in physical space. Customers love it, it works great. Nobody wants dorky glasses that make you sick.

RangerScience 7y ago
What's the company?
- mdszy 7y ago
  The company with the software we're trying? It's PTC's Vuforia Chalk: https://chalk.vuforia.com/ https://chalk.vuforia.com/
  - iamjk 7y ago
    What's the company you work for?
    - mdorazio 7y ago
      Looks like https://szy.io/ https://szy.io/
      - mdszy 7y ago
        Well, that's my own little dealio where I make/sell electronics kits and resell used equipment. That's not involved in AR at all and it's just a little side-thing I do. I have a separate full time job and I'm not totally comfortable with sharing who I work for, my apologies.
    - mdszy 7y ago
      Sorry, I'm not comfortable with sharing that. I'll just say that it's a company that manufactures high-end industrial converting equipment.

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago

The most widespread, successful use case AR which I can see currently is AR Filter i.e. snapchat filters and those who copied it. The reason IMO, is most of the users who use snapchat filters wouldn't even know what Augmented Reality is. It is that intuitive use case which can make high-tech get widespread consumer adoption. Looking at the rate at which limited attention, instant gratification apps are conquering market, the demand for AR filters aren't going to decline anytime soon and those who offer AR as a service would have enough buyers in the form of the copy cat apps wanting AR filters. In fact, snapchat itself supposedly acquired the AR filter tech from a Ukranian company called Looskery in 2015.

RangerScience 7y ago
Consumer AR is very, very different from industrial AR. The business case for industrial is huge, I have no idea what the business case is for consumer :P
- jackbrookes 7y ago
  Now instead of content being constrained to a tiny 2D rectangle - it can now encompass your entire field of view. The world will be overlaid with holograms that everyone can see and interact with.
  - joezydeco 7y ago
    This video always comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
  - RangerScience 7y ago
    I can see why other people want me to have that experience, but not why I would want to have that experience (as a consumer). Then again, I'm not exactly a representative sample.
- sfifs 7y ago
  The problem with Industrial AR is that most use cases I've seen (maintainance, instruction manuals, support etc) are cost centers, not profit centers. It will generally cost more to produce than the current methods - so business investments will me made only where the benefits are an order of magnitude than the "paper or iPad manual" solution. I'm sure there will be a few use cases but not as many as most people seem to expect.

RangerScience 7y ago

I was at Daqri from employee ~12 to ~300. It was a wild ride and I've got some really amazing memories with only a bit of scarring to show for it :) Daqri was really good at recruiting amazing people, and really bad at turning them into a functioning company. Communication between teams (and particularly offices) was really lacking; I remember back when the helmet was built on Android (in LA) and all the vision scientists were working on iOS (in Sunnyvale), they had this amazing world-tracking demo that we just couldn't use. The Two Trees photonics tech is absolutely amazing, check it out if you get a chance - field programmable holograms. Point the thing at any glass surface and you get a hologram "in" it. Blew my mind the first time I saw it! Dunno if it ever made it into headware.

RangerScience 7y ago
PS - I can't actually offer an AMA - there's things I can't or shouldn't talk about - but I am absolutely up for questions :)
- ladon86 7y ago
  Are there any videos of the Two Trees tech, or does that not do it justice? How far out do you think consumer AR is realistically?
  - therein 7y ago
    I believe it should be essentially what Envisics has, which is probably represented best below. What we are used to: https://youtu.be/p-lH4mufXHw?t=44 https://youtu.be/p-lH4mufXHw?t=44 What they have: https://youtu.be/p-lH4mufXHw?t=63 https://youtu.be/p-lH4mufXHw?t=63
  - RangerScience 7y ago
    I don't know either way, but, it's supposed to be in every 201x Land Rover, I think? If you see a hologram projected into a car windshield on behalf of the driver, that might be the tech. 3-5 years, would be my optimistic guess? The tech is getting there (Magic Leap and Hololens), but it's not there yet, and it's not going to seriously accelerate until there's a really compelling consumer use-case / app to go with it.

rococode 7y ago

I spent 3 months working on an AR project on the Magic Leap (the best funded AR startup, I think?). My conclusion was that the hardware just isn't there yet. VR tech feels impressive because the hardware works well. AR tech, on the other hand, still feels very much like a prototype, and far from real production use. Some of the main deal-breaker issues are heat, discomfort, dizziness, and software instability (I wrote more about the specific issues I encountered with the Magic Leap in a past thread [1]). To me it felt significantly worse than the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 (the second public release of a VR device back in 2014). Back then when I got that version because I was super hyped for VR, I thought "Woah, clearly needs more work but this is amazing". With AR, my experience thus far has sadly been "Oh, this is it?". A lot of it is presumably because AR is much harder to do well. A very simplified way of thinking of VR is basically it's a screen close to your face that can track its own pitch/yaw/roll/small amounts of movement and redraw accordingly. This is tricky, but totally doable (and thus, it was done). Smartphones have basically been able to do most of this for years (not so much the movement, but that's also a pretty new thing in VR). AR actually has to interact with the real world. If you have a virtual image anchored to, say, a pendulum, that's fairly non-trivial computation-wise to recalculate without prior knowledge of the pendulum's movements. It's basically object detection which ML models can do fairly well, but they do it with latency. And when the latency is in something your brain is trying to process as the real world, it's nauseating. Add on the fact that it takes a lot of energy to do inference, and that AR devices need to be standalone devices that can be taken anywhere by themselves, and you also have a serious heat problem where the compute needed to constantly analyze the real world means you just have a hot brick on your head or in your pocket. I think it's going to take a lot more time to get it right. It feels like a hard enough problem that I think the first truly production-grade AR device will have to come from one of the big companies, possibly Microsoft with HoloLens. Of course, I write all this with the definition of AR as "something you wear on your head that overlays your full field-of-view with virtual graphics". Other forms of AR like Snapchat filters or camera overlays are probably less challenging. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20253177

Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
I managed to try out Microsoft's HoloLens 2 at MS Build this year in Seattle. My impressions were that it's a very cool, very impressive prototype. FOV is still quite low, although I hear it's significantly improved from v1. Framerate felt too low for real-world stuff; as you were alluding to, our brains are used to screens operating at 60fps, but there's something about putting the screen right up next to your eyeballs and adding tracking (whether VR or AR) that kills that illusion and mandates at least 90fps, and very smooth. I'm not surprised by the reports of people getting motion sick. Having said that, the fundamental interactions are very cool. I had slight difficulty figuring out where the tracking was actually registering (e.g., how far do I have to move my finger to 'tap' a button), but once I figured that out it worked just like you expected it to.

neogodless 7y ago

I'm suddenly feeling super behind on the news. While I believe I've heard rumors about Apple working on augmented reality, I can't think of any such product announcements coming down the pipeline. > While Apple and Microsoft strain to sell augmented reality as the next major computing platform, Is that accurate? Is Apple putting a lot of effort into selling AR?

FussyZeus 7y ago
Well you have the references to some kind of Glass-esque product in Xcode, and ARKit has been a part of iPhones since the X. It's interesting stuff but Apple doesn't seem to be interested in the fully immersive headsets so many other companies are. Microsoft seems to be doing a bit of both? But they aren't super focused on it. Frankly I think the use of the word "strain" in that quote is a strain itself. They're definitely working on it, and it's there, but I wouldn't call it a feature they expect to shift units.
redisman 7y ago
Not that I've heard. They have ARKit which is getting decent updates but it seems to be limited to the Pokemon GO / AR measurement tool that ships with iOS -type phone use-cases. Not one of their top priority afaik.

nnq 7y ago

AR seems like one of those things that needs to be executed "perfectly" to work. VR can benefit a bit from suspension of disbelief etc. ...but with AR the real world is harsh :) But I bet we'll have "the iPhone" of AR doing it right and popping open the market! Someone will sure get lucky betting on it!

prongletown 7y ago
Apple has the resources, the install base, and (crucially) the data to make it happen. The "iPhone of AR" is probably going to be an iPhone.
- pradeep_m 7y ago
  It always seems like incumbents have it all (resources, distribution, talent, etc) until they don't. For ex, the "iPhone" theoretically should have come from Nokia by that logic. AR particularly requires truly novel innovations for it to work in mass-market. There might be niche-cases that work for AR (studio/arcade games, sports tech) before the mass market use-cases.
  - prongletown 7y ago
    Apple is well documented (for it being a secret project) as throwing tons of resources into compelling AR products. I'm not saying they're going to succeed, but they're certainly trying - unlike Nokia, who was in the middle of a massive internal war over Symbian when the first iPhone hit.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Apple is (or used to be) very good at waiting for the right time when all necessary components for a good product are ready or close to ready. There is a lot of value in watching other companies fail and learn from them.
- fragmede 7y ago
  Apple has ARKit on iPhones, and it's usable right now. Apple has the built-in "measure" app, though that can only measure things on a tabletop, and the Mac Pro table-top demo (https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ in Safari on iOS). The iOS game Egg, Inc. has a mode where you can see your farm projected on top of a nearby surface. It's kind of neat to see the little chickens run around on my kitchen table. What's holding AR back (on the iPhone) then, is a killer app. Vuforia Chalk is one for remote support. See what the supportee sees, and point out things, visually, to them. Circle which lever to pull, and using Apple's ARKit[] means the circle stays on the right lever, even when the phone is jostled. It's a cool use case, though their UX is horrible. IMO the problem is a hand-held smartphone is an awkward AR platform. [0] Note that there's some vendor lock-in by Apple. The Vuforia Chalk feature I mentioned above is image stabilization and an overlay. Image stabilization (and face detection) is an old problem in computer vision, it's commonly used to add silly hats to faces in video calls.

babyslothzoo 7y ago

Is AR this generations VR? Full of promises and fantasy, but all of which is far from being usable or practical at any mainstream level.

Robotbeat 7y ago
Less practical than VR. VR has a niche.
- Animats 7y ago
  It's a very small niche, and it peaked around the 2017 holiday season. The VR game thing didn't sell. Except for Beat Saber. John Carmack, in a recent talk, doesn't seem to consider VR as a way to visit a virtual environment any more. It's just a way to get a wider field of view of screen space in a mobile-sized package. Watching Netflix with VR goggles emulating a wide screen, for people who don't have enough space for a wide screen, is seen as a primary use.

Robotbeat 7y ago

Can someone explain to me why sufficiently good VR can't function as AR? Just to lay out my point: AR has to have extremely good detail, framerate, and even depth of field to work well. It has to track everything perfectly and blend the two lightfields seemlessly or the immersion is broken and you risk nausea or at least annoyance. But if you have high framerate, ability to simulate depth of field, high knowledge of the environment (enough to overlay seemlessly), etc, then couldn't you just... operate purely in VR with reality streamed in via lightfield cameras? That would allow you to do things that are impossible in AR, like display darker overlays on lighter surfaces, and everything would be at the same framerate so it'd be easier to seemlessly integrate everything. So what does really, really good AR get you that really, really good VR with reality overlay does not? Seems like you can avoid a lot of super hard to effectively impossible hardware optics problems by just doing things with an opaque visor... I'm not an expert in this field, so I'm probably using terminology incorrectly.

blululu 7y ago
A number of challenges exist for pass through AR. I’m short the camera system that you need does not exist. Cameras add latency. This causes nausea. Camera resolution is low. When the screen is less than 10 cm from your eyes the grain is very noticeable. Cameras only have limited focal range. Camera dynamic range is low. I’m many settings it is hard to capture images that your eye could handle.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  Thank you. That makes sense. I know some crazy high resolution lightfield cameras exist, but the hardware is so heavy there's no chance of getting it on your head. (In principle you could address this with a huge array of tiny cameras on a headset, I suppose? Like this: https://www.deccanchronicle.com/150421/technology-mobiles-and-tabs/article/52-megapixel-cameras-smartphones https://www.deccanchronicle.com/150421/technology-mobiles-an... or this: https://newsbeezer.com/austriaeng/lg-patent-shows-smartphone-with-16-cameras/ https://newsbeezer.com/austriaeng/lg-patent-shows-smartphone... ) Apparently display technology is also a limitation. Here's one attempt to pass-through AR (thank you for that vocabulary, BTW): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNbTCpURpQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNbTCpURpQs Are you aware of any who do it better?

szczepano 7y ago

Innovation has always had many victims.

vertis 7y ago

Brief mention of Meta in that article. I had missed that they shut down, though I can't say I am surprised. Their first headset was uncomfortable and lacked the field of view or functionality of the Hololens. It was a cabled only experience. They were secretive and lacked decent SDK support. When we tried to buy the second one it was delayed again and again by an insistence on US manufacturing and an inability to scale. When they finally announced that our preorder was available 18 months later they wanted me to create a completely new order since my credit card was no longer valid (I decided not to waste my time or money).

peter303 7y ago

Solution looking for a problem to solve? I have seen VR demos at SIGGRAPGH and film festivals the past 20 years without seeing the 'killer app' yet.

defterGoose 7y ago
Shhh! There are still fools with too much money looking to invest!

AndrewKemendo 7y ago

It's really important to understand that funding for AR startups cooled off when Apple and Google decided to go hard into it in 2017. Almost across the board every major VC got spooked, then when Magic Leap turned out to be a turd the bottom fell out. I firmly believe that Apple and Google successfully took the entirely of the market opportunity for a startup to win the AR game long term. You could argue why this is good or whatever, but at the end of the day AR isn't going to be the platform a startup could knock FAANG off of their perch, and one or all of them will own the next hardware platform.

tus88 7y ago

Industrial VR/AR is above the only place it makes sense, and its failing there already. Imagine what thr future holds then for the far less compelling home use situation. Like many other I would like to be able to keep an eye on my kids and kiss my wife while I watch tv. I know, how disgustingly human of me, right?