13 ms·

The thing that got me about the Magic Leap is I couldn't find a reliable video of what it looked like through the lenses. Everything was clearly a CGI overlay

• jayd16 7y ago
  Its not bad but it wouldn't make sense really. Microsoft built a custom camera rig to show off the Hololens which they could have done.
• 1MoreThing 7y ago
  The problem is that a video through the lenses isn't going to tell you anything about the experience of actually wearing one of these things.
  • mumblemumble 7y ago
    Neither is an artist's conception. I think that this is inevitably going to be a serious problem for selling a product like this to a generation that still remembers Virtual Boy.
  • IshKebab 7y ago
    It's going to tell you more than a CGI artist's impression nonsense. People were able to film through the lenses for standard VR glasses. I can't find anyone that tried it for Hololens but given that they also cost several thousand dollars it's probably not that surprising. I have used the Hololens quite a bit and I can't see any reason why you couldn't film from the eye's point of view.
    • Holomakerbot 7y ago
      Notice that zero VR companies show you through the lens footage. This is not restricted to Magic Leap. You can find amateur attempts by owners to shoot through Magic Leap, Hololens, and various VR headsets if you go on Youtube and Twitter. But no company does this at all. Just another misunderstanding by people here who think they've found another reason to nitpick at Magic leap, but it's a widespread industry issue. VR is actually the worst about this because they only show straight from the PC output with none of the limitations you actually experience like FOV and screen door effect.
      • LegitShady 7y ago
        The thing is that for HoloLens and VR sets we did have people showing it as best they could in a camera and for vr projecting into a monitor. Magic leap held it all secret and we'd be told how magical it was.
        • Holomakerbot 7y ago
          Not really. Remember that before their device launched they were ridiculed for being too honest and showing the rock throwing guy demo. This was months before you could buy it: https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/273280-magic-leaps-first-demo-is-anything-but-impressive https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/273280-magic-leaps-first-...
          • LegitShady 7y ago
            It was hyped for a long time before that. That they released the underwhelming demo is just them failing. But they kept what it actually displayed confidential for a long time.
      • gumby 7y ago
        > But no company does this at all. CastAR/Tilt5 all demos. We also allowed the press to film through our hardware.
  • DonHopkins 7y ago
    But the fact that they absolutely will NOT permit developers or reviewers to post a video through the lenses, and they tried to pawn off totally fake "artist conceptions" as live demos of actual software they run daily at the office, does tell you a hell of a lot about what the actual experience and the company itself is like. Magic Leap originally lied about the concept video they posted to youtube, then retroactively white-washed it after they got caught by Time Magazine. The most infamous misleading video that currently claims to be a "concept video" was originally deceptively titled "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap" and described as "This is a game we’re playing around the office right now". Only AFTER they got busted, did Magic Leap retroactively change the title and description so they were not so blatantly false and misleading. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM Before they got busted and white-washed the lies, a skeptical Time magazine reporter didn't think it looked real, and asked Magic Leap about it directly. The official Magic Leap company spokesman mendaciously lied to him that "the video was authentic": http://time.com/3752343/magic-leap-video/ http://time.com/3752343/magic-leap-video/ >It's unclear whether the video shows an actual game overlaid onto a real-world office space or just an artistic rendering of what the game might look like in the future. The way the gun rests so realistically in the gamer's hand certainly raises suspicions. Still, a company spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo that the video was authentic. >"This is a game we’re playing around the office right now," Magic Leap wrote on its official YouTube account. The "game they were playing around at the office" was actually called "lying to the public and investors".
  • mch82 7y ago
    One of the funniest eras of advertising was the ads for HD TV broadcast on 480p TV. They’d always include all these video clips & that always made me laugh :-)
    • pavlov 7y ago
      A pedantic side note: analog TV broadcasts in America were 480i, not even 480p.
• Kapura 7y ago
  it's a bit better than the hololens, but it's a much less slick piece of hardware.
• tootie 7y ago
  Overlayed content is sharp enough, not great. Ghostly opacity. Biggest blocker by far is field of view vertically. Images outside the "screen" get badly cropped and look very unnatural.
• fossuser 7y ago
  There was a twitter video that comically showed their marketing demo of the whale and then the real life example of the product (with related music). It appears to have been scrubbed from the internet though because I was trying to find it a while back to show someone and I searched for a while, but couldn't find anything. Magic Leap seems like a case study of how not to release a product, but maybe they were more focused on raising money? Either work on your thing in public, shipping units (Oculus/FB) or work on it entirely in secret (Apple), but don't loudly and continuously talk vaguely about how amazing your thing is with no real public examples for years. This plus all the fake marketing video demos - if you're going to do this you better be as good as you're pretending to be. Someone that good probably wouldn't need to show marketing videos, they'd just show the product itself. I finally did get to play with one (friend who personally knows an investor had one) and it was pretty disappointing. AR seems likely to be the next computing platform, but the hardware is not ready yet. Magic Leap reminds me a lot of the General Magic documentary - crazy hype, right general idea, but too early and bad product. I'm not sure if they have the same talent General Magic had though.
  • AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    I believe this is what you're referencing: https://twitter.com/fernandojsg/status/1017411969169555457 https://twitter.com/fernandojsg/status/1017411969169555457
    • fastball 7y ago
      Oh man I'd forgotten about that edit. Cracks me up every time.
      • rl3 7y ago
        Likewise. The same meme was also used for trashing the sorry state of No Man's Sky release in 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5jWtz3rzco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5jWtz3rzco To their credit, the developers diligently kept working on the game and I've heard it's quite polished now. I kind of doubt we'll see the same turnaround story with Magic Leap, but who knows.
• Holomakerbot 7y ago
  That's just how it goes with AR, you can find some amateur clips people have tried to shoot through the lens themselves but it's very difficult. Even Microsoft doesn't shoot through the lens and has gotten similar flack. Best they can do is composite imaging, which actually looks worse than through the lens.
• LegitShady 7y ago
  I thought the same thing. Even with VR people held cameras up to the displays, or projected what they saw onto a monitor. With magic leap it was sooo secret. I assumed garbage. I'm still not sure what I would be supposed to do with them.
  • criddell 7y ago
    I'd love to know how close the shipping product is to what Kevin Kelly and other journalists were shown under NDA before release.
    • LegitShady 7y ago
      me too because people were raving about it. I wonder how much influence was peddled, given the billions invested.
  • dylan604 7y ago
    VR allowed the signal going to the headset to also be displayed onto a regular monitor since the signal was the full image. With AR, it's just overlaying something onto a lens you see through to be able to see the real world. That signal displayed onto a regular monitor would probably just show the object with a matte or essentially the object over a black background. Think of a transparent PNG but in motion. That's not very exciting.
    • LegitShady 7y ago
      It would at least show fidelity and detail. Instead they showed nothing so I assumed it was vaporware.
      • dylan604 7y ago
        Apples and oranges I think. Take video signal reproduction as an example. You can have the same signal routed to different display devices, and they image produced will look better/worse than the original. Compare it on a 1980s 3 lens RGB projection screen compared to a CRT compared to a modern OLED screen. Compare Google Cardboard VR headsets with a cheap plastic lens compared to the higher quality headsets.
• simias 7y ago
  TFA says that they've shipped around 6000 units so far, how come nobody has made an independent video of the product yet? Surely some of these early adopters have a Youtube channel?
  • AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    There are plenty of independent videos available. Here's Tested's in-depth review from last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrq2akzdFq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrq2akzdFq8
• simias 7y ago
  I'm torn on this, on one hand it's a bit shady, on the other I get why they're doing it. The only impressive bit about this piece of hardware is to actually experience virtual 3D objects projected onto the real world. If you capture a 2D video of this through the lens you're effectively left with very mediocre 3D models in a darkened environment. There's simply no way it can look good without cheating. It'll look like VR but worse.
• caconym_ 7y ago
  VR looks shitty in video through the lenses too, but it's actually really cool. I wouldn't have been put off buying a Vive by lackluster video captures, because people were saying really good things about it (or, at least, a lot of the things I wanted to hear to convince me to be an early adopter). I guess Magic Leap's problem is that their product is thoroughly meh. Nobody is raving about it (that I'm aware of), and nothing I've seen makes me feel like going out of my way to try one.
  • kaibee 7y ago
    One major difference between VR and AR content is that VR can do blacks. Current AR is limited to overlaying more light onto a piece of your visual field. It has no way to make any spot more dark. This is fine for VR, since there should be no other light leaking in apart from what is produced by the unit. AR at the least needs a projector that can compete with the amount of light in the your scene already.
    • gumby 7y ago
      You could make an occlusion shutter but I haven’t seen a small lcd with the requisite speed and resolution.
      • drcode 7y ago
        You actually can't do that: People have tried, but the plane of focus makes the LCD too blurry. It's an unsolved technology problem.
        • pas 7y ago
          So the whole light field techbuzz was just vaporware hype? Or no, but even that can't do black?
          • drcode 7y ago
            Actually, my understanding is that light field is actually the ONLY way you could have ar with opaque black. However, you'd need orders of magnitude better light field tech than what's available.
• fuzzfactor 7y ago
  When you're selling someone a dream, especially their own dream, fantasy always needs to be presented as reality. Looks like they're making money from investors rather than customers, and the strongest marketing efforts are probably not focused on things which would appeal to ordinary buyers.
• lookdangerous 7y ago
  I went to a magic leap developer event and tried the headset first hand. It was truly magical. It made me giggle. Now, at the current price point it’s too high for me to buy as a toy and I haven’t really been struck with any killer app ideas to buy it as a dev kit, but I really think it’s an extremely cool piece of kit.
  • andybak 7y ago
    I think they are pretty cool but I wear glasses. Not entirely uncommon amongst their target market. Lens inserts kill the share-ability of the thing and mean that it's basically tailored to my personal prescription. They made a really myopic decision to exclude the short-sighted.
  • 4AoZqrH2fsk5UB 7y ago
    Same. I tried it in 2016 during an interview and it was incredible... but I don’t have a use case for it and so can’t justify.
• wpietri 7y ago
  Another dimension to consider: if it's good, how long is it good for? I just got done writing a long thread on the history of 3D as a novelty: https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1203074623232851970 https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1203074623232851970 But the basic summary is that since the 1850s, people keep coming up with exciting 3D innovations that sell lots of units for a while, but that never make much of a difference. Stereoscopic 3D is interesting and fun; we all loved our ViewMasters. But once the novelty wore off, we put it on a shelf and rarely picked it up again. The ViewMaster is basically a slinky for our eyeballs. I've talked with quite a number of people who have bought VR systems, and I have yet to find one who uses it with the sort of frequency that people use their gaming consoles, PCs, laptops, or phones to play games. Maybe this wave of innovation will eventually take face-mounted VR from "novelty" to "daily driver", but it doesn't sound like it's here yet.
  • greggman2 7y ago
    Well then you can come meet me and about 150 other friends. I pretty much play VR only at this point. Any time I try a typical flat screen 3D game something is missing. The frustration of having a camera stick. The boringness of having to "press the action button" instead of just reaching out and touch the thing I'm supposed to interact it. And of course most of all the feeling of "presence". The Citadel on the horizon in HL2 (old reference sorry) is a pretty picture but nothing more. The volcano in Farpoint is 3 miles high with a 15 mile high plumb of smoke and I feel that as though I was there. It's like a picture of the grand canyon vs actually being at the grand canyon. They aren't comparable and I can't go back to not feeling like "being there". This isn't a "gimmick" like 3D movies where they stick things in your face or throw stuff at you just show off the tech. It's qualitatively different. If there was more content I was interested in I'd spent even more time in VR. Unfortunately there isn't that much AAA VR content and worse for me I can't take horror in VR, it's way to intense, so I probably won't be able to play the new VR Half Life coming out in March. VR today is like an Apple Newton in 1993. Everyone laughed. Heck in 2007 PDAs where just for geeks. Then in 2008 Apple's PDA shipped, the iPhone, and now everyone has a PDA in their pocket to the point that's you'd be considered strange not to have one. It might be a while, it might even be another 15 years but VR will happen. It's just too compelling when it's good.
• gumby 7y ago
  This is why we always said “shot through the glasses” at CastAR.