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Meta: The Most Advanced Augmented Reality Interface

128 points by bensandcastle 13y ago

timfrietas 13y ago
Does Google Glass have stereo cameras? The specs suggest no: https://support.google.com/glass/answer/3064128?hl=en https://support.google.com/glass/answer/3064128?hl=en I have to feel v2 will, given the possibilities of applications as demoed here.
- DanBC 13y ago
  Google glass only outputs to one eye, so 3d vision isn't possible. 3d input is still useful, but less fun.
  - devindotcom 13y ago
    Furthermore, Glass doesn't put itself 'over' the world, but out of the way - it's not about augmented reality. That's part of why I think its approach is ultimately going to be abandoned.
  - Schwolop 13y ago
    Depth cameras using infra-red projection aren't going to work outside due to solar saturation, so I think Google would be foolish not to embed a second camera and enable stereo vision. It's the only light-weight and low-power way to get depth information in a glasses form factor. In principle (assuming some off-device computation), you could run SLAM and get a decent estimate of head orientation to then do AR with Google's glasses. Unlikely in the near future, but inevitable at some point.
DanBC 13y ago
Showing a pixel-art 3d bike is a good idea. It's going to appeal to the Minecraft crowd. Give me something like this that I can run through my MC worlds on and I'm paying.
- orangethirty 13y ago
  I would hate to fight the ender dragon like this.
- pazimzadeh 13y ago
  This reminds me of Minecraft Reality: http://minecraftreality.com/ http://minecraftreality.com/.
silverlight 13y ago
Is it just me, or is there very little "real software" being shown here? Everything in the video was just "artist's interpretations" of what it "could look like", no?
- devindotcom 13y ago
  Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of "what it could be like," in a video that probably cost thousands to produce. The big round $100K number is suspicious to me as well. They're making... a dev kit? For an environment, device, and service platform that doesn't exist (nor the technologies to enable it, just yet), and their budget to create all this is exactly $100K? If so, that's not gonna happen. If not, and this is just cherry on the cake funding, I don't think that's what Kickstarter is "for," as much as Kickstarter can be "for" one thing and not another.
  - npsimons 13y ago
    Another thing that bothers me is no mention of license for software. I'm not about to fund a kickstarter for closed source software. I'd login and post a question, but I'm kind of busy with code of my own right now.
  - sp332 13y ago
    This is not their only source of funding. I think the round number is fine since it's basically "hey we could do even cooler stuff if people gave us an extra $100k."
  - bensandcastle 13y ago
    Hey, You're right, $100k is nowhere near enough to build all the supporting technology. Our software development is covered by investment, including YC. The Kickstarter is purely about covering hardware costs and the $100k threshold is for minium production runs. Filming stereoscopic video through the glasses is very complicated which is why we used concept visualisation to give an idea how it will feel. We're working on a rig to film through the glasses, but right now there's no way we'll be able to convey how impressive it is in person through live video.
Pxtl 13y ago
What I'm not seeing is anything about positioning. I don't see the usual white balls for the camera (or colored ones as used in Sony's Move). So is it relying entirely on the 3D camera and dead reckoning with accelerometers to figure out where the user is? Because that stuff inevitably fails the moment you start walking around the room. I'm mostly thinking about ARQuake and the like, where the AR objects are walking around the room or hallways rather than being confined to a table in front of you.
- devindotcom 13y ago
  The white balls are a color-separation process for location, the Kinect uses an IR emitter. The Kinect is perfectly capable of creating sets of objects based on its depth map. Normally it's a "skeleton" in a whole body, but it can just as easily make a skeleton of your hand, with the fingertips automatically tracked and used as activation points.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    Yes, but the kinect camera isn't moving around a space. That's what I'm talking about. Figuring out the camera's position in an unknown environment using a depth camera is much more difficult than figuring out the position of objects moving through a static space with a depth camera.
daeken 13y ago
Totally just backed this. I haven't been so excited about a piece of tech in ages. This is truly a game-changer if it works anywhere near as well as they're showing.
- timdorr 13y ago
  Sorry, but it's not going to work anywhere near as well as they showed. Look at the quick "From the labs" video down the page. It's grainy, messy, and raw. There's simply too much noise for it to look good. Without a significant bump in sensor resolution (it's only 320x240! https://forum.libcinder.org/topic/future-is-here-time-of-flight-camera-for-150-from-intel-with-sdk https://forum.libcinder.org/topic/future-is-here-time-of-fli...), it's not possible to have both smooth and performant results.
  - petermelias 13y ago
    I am more optimistic. While they could have done a better job disclaiming the early videos, I don't believe that they are dumb enough to make such exciting claims to an educated audience if they cannot deliver. I have also seen the Intel depth camera in action first-hand and that alone is a very promising piece of hardware.
clicks 13y ago
Interesting to note that Meta is in fact YC-funded: http://allthingsd.com/20130517/meta-wants-to-become-the-next-augmented-reality-glasses-phenom/ http://allthingsd.com/20130517/meta-wants-to-become-the-next...
modeless 13y ago
The videos there are misleading. The level of quality shown is nowhere near what that hardware can achieve. For example, in the "video from the lab", virtual objects are shown occluding someone's hands. That is not possible with the display technology they're using. Your real experience with the device will not be anything like the videos shown. The display will be more like a ghostly, low resolution overlay, with significant latency. The sad thing is that the hardware actually looks pretty neat. This device should be cool enough that a realistic demo could easily sell it without misleading people. I hope Kickstarter starts cracking down on projects using pie-in-the-sky concept videos to raise expectations that they can't possibly deliver on.
- nobbis 13y ago
  Not true. Looks like it's an Intel depth camera (http://goo.gl/ivrwY http://goo.gl/ivrwY) glued to some Epson glasses. With the depth map from the camera, occluding virtual objects is possible.
  - modeless 13y ago
    Occluding virtual objects (real hands in front of virtual sphere) is possible. Occluding real objects (real hands behind virtual sphere) is not.
    - nobbis 13y ago
      You're right. I misread your post and didn't realize they demo hands being 100% occluded by virtual objects. Can't believe they're that brazen.
      - nsxwolf 13y ago
        Not understanding the objections. These glasses are a display, right? There's a computer in between ultimately responsible for what the eyes see. With enough clever processing of the scene, why wouldn't you be able to achieve this?
slashedzero 13y ago
Isn't the camera just Intel's 3D gesture cam? It also has an SDK that integrates very well with unity. http://software.intel.com/en-us/vcsource/tools/perceptual-computing-sdk http://software.intel.com/en-us/vcsource/tools/perceptual-co... The first screen shot from the second video shows exactly what their gesture tracking looks like. When doing the perceptual challenge, this was mainly the stuff we were thinking of as applications for the hardware, funny to see someone now taking it and simply mounting it on glasses.
bleachtree 13y ago
Seriously one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Can't wait until this vision is a reality.
ryderm 13y ago
Meron (founder) came to my computer vision class the other day to talk to us about Meta. He took the same class at my uni and has since hired some professors. Seemed like a great guy and a great product. I hope this takes off and isn't eaten by Google.
BasDirks 13y ago
Wow, what completely uninspiring consumerist bullshit. "Hacker's, this one's for you". Right.
- ryderm 13y ago
  It's an SDK, not for the general public, so what's wrong with saying that?
blhack 13y ago
I think this stuff is cool, but I think it is going to be held back by a romantic attachment to "real". Why not use something like the occulus rift? Instead of projecting new objects over the top of existing ones; replace the users field of vision completely. I'd love that. One of the guys in our hackerspace (plug: heatsync labs, Phoenix AZ) got an occulus, and we've been talking about how cool it would be to build a "virtual office" of sorts. Sit down with an occulus and some noise cancelling headphones, and have an infinitely large workspace. 2 monitors? or 1000 monitors; it doesn't matter because your entire field of vision (or your entire environment) is being rendered for you. -- I think people are very attached to the idea of your eyes seeing the "real" world instead of a re-displayed one. I understand that, but I think that ideology is going to hold AR back for a while.
- kronholm 13y ago
  I do believe the retail version of the Oculus Rift will come with two cameras on the front, and I've heard rumors of a depth camera as well. We'll see. Exciting times we live in, that's for sure.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  I think the reason is that people like to consider being able to move around environments that you don't have memorized without tripping on things. Do I have to step out of my virtual office to go get a beer from the fridge, or can I get the real-life obstacles that are in the way projected into my virtual office? Imagine a virtual office with a thousand monitors that is your apartment that has been plopped down in the middle of a forest with the walls knocked out.
- npsimons 13y ago
  Why not use something like the occulus rift? While the occulus rift is cool, I think you're missing the point. VR has been around for quite some time, and while it has it's applications, AR, IMHO, is more immediately applicable today. Even if you are selectively reproducing pieces of reality in your VR, that's going to take extra processing power and not going to be quite realistic (or real-time) for a long time. AR, on the other hand, is just rife with applications that we can use now. The classic one I always think of is helping someone with Alzheimer's get home by "painting" a path of footsteps on the ground. Try that with an occulus rift, or any other VR setup. Almost guaranteed to be cumbersome and dangerous, if it can even be used outside of a lab at all.
DanBC 13y ago
I'd love a 3D interface to HN. Upvoted, busy, threads float nearer me. Flame-fests shrink back from me.
cracker_jacks 13y ago
I'm a little bit skeptical of some of the artist renderings here. Being a researcher in the computer vision field, rendering accurately onto arbitrary surfaces simply is nowhere near this precise. It requires an extraordinary amount of scene understanding. Factors like shape, surface normals, illumination, reflectance, etc. all need to be separated. These properties are extremely entangled together and state of the art methods require a great deal of computational power to do significantly worse than what's being shown here.
L0j1k 13y ago
Yeah, okay. Yet another hardware Kickstarter with egregious claims? No, thanks.
petermelias 13y ago
Backed. If they can deliver on this the value of the application potential is completely worth the relatively low up front risk.
- muyuu 13y ago
  Backed as well. Even the prototype shown in the video below, rough as it may be, is good enough to try a lot of things. Looks really promising and they are not asking for much. First thing I ever back in Kickstarter, too.
namelesstrash01 13y ago
Okay. Yet another hardware Kickstarter with egregious claims? No, thanks.
- namelesstrash01 13y ago
  Because there's so much technical information about this project on the campaign page... There's just no way you are probably throwing your money into a hole by backing it.
z-e-r-o 13y ago
This technique, as it is shown, is not going to be possible for at least the next 5 years. They either know it and are making a huge fake marketing campaign (for a possible Google acquisition) or haven't realized it yet will have a really hard moment when they realize it. Couple of components which are not going to work: 1. A see-through glass with Field of View as shown in the video just doesn't exist today. The model they are going to use are more like a ‘tiny TV-screen floating in your view’ and not even close to the visualization they created. 2. Real time 3D gesture recognition from point cloud data on ARM (+ overhead for applications + games all in low latency) 3. Real time 3D environment reconstruction from moving point cloud data (requires something like quad-core i7 + 32 GB RAM + desktop-class GPU processing) They want to achieve it on an ARM running from tiny batteries!!! + On top of this would come the whole application / game experience, something they seem to be concentrating on, instead of getting the basics right. 4. Then there is latency, which is just not going to be solved for the next 5 but more probably 10 years, just read Michael Abrash blog about the reality of Augmented Reality glasses (http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/ http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/). To be clear, I'm not saying that they won't be able to make what they promise, I'm saying that not even Google or anyone will nearly be able to achieve it for at least 5 years, and everyone knows this who is even a little bit into augmented reality. So personally I find the Kickstarter campaign to be a fake campaign and it is just bending the rules of Kickstarter which requires a real-world hardware prototype. So they made a glued together prototype with a fake visualization, with the whole campaign built around the video. Nonetheless, the campaign has a chance of being a massive hit, because every sci-fi fan is dreaming about it for decades and is willing to back it if he has the funds. In that case, it might have a chance of the biggest Kickstarter failures of all time. The best case for them would be a quick Google acquisition and integration into the Glass team.
shadowmint 13y ago
To be fair, they do have a real-video below the pitch video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oioSBP9XBNg http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=o...) which is much more honest and realistic look at what's being developed. This is actually pretty exciting tech, but it's going to be absolutely nothing like what they have to show in the pitch video.
aaronblohowiak 13y ago
Meta II: a revolutionary meta circular compiler, circa 1967
kybernetyk 13y ago
I'm rather skeptic. No real-life videos, only unrealistic concepts. The bold "there's nothing like this being build" statements and then they use off the shelf components. Sounds like a great recipe for disappointment. They should have at least posted a real-life video (or a realistic rendition).
dakrisht 13y ago
I like it. But they're shooting for the stars here. I'm not sure they'll be able to achieve the quality shown in the video (done with nice Hollywood VFX) in real-life. Like others mentioned, latency might be an issue, but generally the augmented 3D interaction (i.e. spreading a pool apart in an architectural setting) will be difficult to reproduce as-shown. Misleading videos. Kickstarter is like the Wild West these days.
justncase80 13y ago
Consider me skeptical. I predict the camera will not have low enough latency to ever make this device usable.
needle0 13y ago
I own an Epson Moverio, which the Meta 1 glasses appear to be based on. I have a small bit of firsthand experience with hacking on it to do ARish things. * The Moverio consists of two parts, the glasses and the control box. The two connect via a seemingly proprietary connector. The control box runs Android 2.2, archaic by today's standards. USB host mode was introduced in Android 3.1, so there would be no straightforward way to feed the depth camera's information into the control box. * Unity3D, which Meta's software stack claims to be using, does run on the control box once you output your Unity project to an Android application. For the app to run, I had to tweak the build settings to support both ARMv6 and ARMv7 (The app failed to start when built for ARMv7 only). This was doable in Unity 3.5.x. However, Unity 4 removes support for ARMv6. So I'm full of question marks: * Did the Meta team somehow obtain/reverse-engineer the specifications for the Moverio glasses' connector, plug it into a more powerful device, and ditch the control box? * Did the Meta team replace the Moverio control box's OS with a more modern version? * Is Meta 1 stuck with the older Unity 3.5.x? * Or am I doing it wrong, and is it indeed possible to run Unity 4-built apps on the Moverio control box? Also, other have mentioned but the field of view is disappointingly small with this device - just a small window in in the middle of your view. Overall, confused.
- bensandcastle 13y ago
  Thanks, the dev unit allows software to run on Windows x86. We're not building for Android. Use the latest version of Unity that you wish.
  - needle0 13y ago
    Ah, I see. If so, how did you guys manage to connect the Moverio's glasses to an x86 PC? IIRC the glasses use a proprietary connector, and no info on the specs/protocol of the connector (nor the Aux connector on the back of the control box) is publicly available. Did you guys receive the specs from Epson directly, receive dev glasses which doesn't use that connector, or reverse-engineer it yourselves? Is that information confidential or under NDA? I strongly feel that ancient control box is holding back the full potential of the glasses and would love to connect different hardware to it. The connector spec/protocol is the only thing preventing that. I'm not very hopeful but if there's any information on it I would love to know.

128 points by bensandcastle 13y ago

Does Google Glass have stereo cameras? The specs suggest no: https://support.google.com/glass/answer/3064128?hl=en https://support.google.com/glass/answer/3064128?hl=en I have to feel v2 will, given the possibilities of applications as demoed here.

DanBC 13y ago
Google glass only outputs to one eye, so 3d vision isn't possible. 3d input is still useful, but less fun.
- devindotcom 13y ago
  Furthermore, Glass doesn't put itself 'over' the world, but out of the way - it's not about augmented reality. That's part of why I think its approach is ultimately going to be abandoned.
- Schwolop 13y ago
  Depth cameras using infra-red projection aren't going to work outside due to solar saturation, so I think Google would be foolish not to embed a second camera and enable stereo vision. It's the only light-weight and low-power way to get depth information in a glasses form factor. In principle (assuming some off-device computation), you could run SLAM and get a decent estimate of head orientation to then do AR with Google's glasses. Unlikely in the near future, but inevitable at some point.

DanBC 13y ago

Showing a pixel-art 3d bike is a good idea. It's going to appeal to the Minecraft crowd. Give me something like this that I can run through my MC worlds on and I'm paying.

orangethirty 13y ago
I would hate to fight the ender dragon like this.
pazimzadeh 13y ago
This reminds me of Minecraft Reality: http://minecraftreality.com/ http://minecraftreality.com/.

silverlight 13y ago

Is it just me, or is there very little "real software" being shown here? Everything in the video was just "artist's interpretations" of what it "could look like", no?

devindotcom 13y ago
Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of "what it could be like," in a video that probably cost thousands to produce. The big round $100K number is suspicious to me as well. They're making... a dev kit? For an environment, device, and service platform that doesn't exist (nor the technologies to enable it, just yet), and their budget to create all this is exactly $100K? If so, that's not gonna happen. If not, and this is just cherry on the cake funding, I don't think that's what Kickstarter is "for," as much as Kickstarter can be "for" one thing and not another.
- npsimons 13y ago
  Another thing that bothers me is no mention of license for software. I'm not about to fund a kickstarter for closed source software. I'd login and post a question, but I'm kind of busy with code of my own right now.
- sp332 13y ago
  This is not their only source of funding. I think the round number is fine since it's basically "hey we could do even cooler stuff if people gave us an extra $100k."
- bensandcastle 13y ago
  Hey, You're right, $100k is nowhere near enough to build all the supporting technology. Our software development is covered by investment, including YC. The Kickstarter is purely about covering hardware costs and the $100k threshold is for minium production runs. Filming stereoscopic video through the glasses is very complicated which is why we used concept visualisation to give an idea how it will feel. We're working on a rig to film through the glasses, but right now there's no way we'll be able to convey how impressive it is in person through live video.

Pxtl 13y ago

What I'm not seeing is anything about positioning. I don't see the usual white balls for the camera (or colored ones as used in Sony's Move). So is it relying entirely on the 3D camera and dead reckoning with accelerometers to figure out where the user is? Because that stuff inevitably fails the moment you start walking around the room. I'm mostly thinking about ARQuake and the like, where the AR objects are walking around the room or hallways rather than being confined to a table in front of you.

devindotcom 13y ago
The white balls are a color-separation process for location, the Kinect uses an IR emitter. The Kinect is perfectly capable of creating sets of objects based on its depth map. Normally it's a "skeleton" in a whole body, but it can just as easily make a skeleton of your hand, with the fingertips automatically tracked and used as activation points.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  Yes, but the kinect camera isn't moving around a space. That's what I'm talking about. Figuring out the camera's position in an unknown environment using a depth camera is much more difficult than figuring out the position of objects moving through a static space with a depth camera.

daeken 13y ago

Totally just backed this. I haven't been so excited about a piece of tech in ages. This is truly a game-changer if it works anywhere near as well as they're showing.

timdorr 13y ago
Sorry, but it's not going to work anywhere near as well as they showed. Look at the quick "From the labs" video down the page. It's grainy, messy, and raw. There's simply too much noise for it to look good. Without a significant bump in sensor resolution (it's only 320x240! https://forum.libcinder.org/topic/future-is-here-time-of-flight-camera-for-150-from-intel-with-sdk https://forum.libcinder.org/topic/future-is-here-time-of-fli...), it's not possible to have both smooth and performant results.
- petermelias 13y ago
  I am more optimistic. While they could have done a better job disclaiming the early videos, I don't believe that they are dumb enough to make such exciting claims to an educated audience if they cannot deliver. I have also seen the Intel depth camera in action first-hand and that alone is a very promising piece of hardware.

clicks 13y ago

Interesting to note that Meta is in fact YC-funded: http://allthingsd.com/20130517/meta-wants-to-become-the-next-augmented-reality-glasses-phenom/ http://allthingsd.com/20130517/meta-wants-to-become-the-next...

modeless 13y ago

The videos there are misleading. The level of quality shown is nowhere near what that hardware can achieve. For example, in the "video from the lab", virtual objects are shown occluding someone's hands. That is not possible with the display technology they're using. Your real experience with the device will not be anything like the videos shown. The display will be more like a ghostly, low resolution overlay, with significant latency. The sad thing is that the hardware actually looks pretty neat. This device should be cool enough that a realistic demo could easily sell it without misleading people. I hope Kickstarter starts cracking down on projects using pie-in-the-sky concept videos to raise expectations that they can't possibly deliver on.

nobbis 13y ago
Not true. Looks like it's an Intel depth camera (http://goo.gl/ivrwY http://goo.gl/ivrwY) glued to some Epson glasses. With the depth map from the camera, occluding virtual objects is possible.
- modeless 13y ago
  Occluding virtual objects (real hands in front of virtual sphere) is possible. Occluding real objects (real hands behind virtual sphere) is not.
  - nobbis 13y ago
    You're right. I misread your post and didn't realize they demo hands being 100% occluded by virtual objects. Can't believe they're that brazen.
    - nsxwolf 13y ago
      Not understanding the objections. These glasses are a display, right? There's a computer in between ultimately responsible for what the eyes see. With enough clever processing of the scene, why wouldn't you be able to achieve this?

slashedzero 13y ago

Isn't the camera just Intel's 3D gesture cam? It also has an SDK that integrates very well with unity. http://software.intel.com/en-us/vcsource/tools/perceptual-computing-sdk http://software.intel.com/en-us/vcsource/tools/perceptual-co... The first screen shot from the second video shows exactly what their gesture tracking looks like. When doing the perceptual challenge, this was mainly the stuff we were thinking of as applications for the hardware, funny to see someone now taking it and simply mounting it on glasses.

bleachtree 13y ago

Seriously one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Can't wait until this vision is a reality.

ryderm 13y ago

Meron (founder) came to my computer vision class the other day to talk to us about Meta. He took the same class at my uni and has since hired some professors. Seemed like a great guy and a great product. I hope this takes off and isn't eaten by Google.

BasDirks 13y ago

Wow, what completely uninspiring consumerist bullshit. "Hacker's, this one's for you". Right.

ryderm 13y ago
It's an SDK, not for the general public, so what's wrong with saying that?

blhack 13y ago

I think this stuff is cool, but I think it is going to be held back by a romantic attachment to "real". Why not use something like the occulus rift? Instead of projecting new objects over the top of existing ones; replace the users field of vision completely. I'd love that. One of the guys in our hackerspace (plug: heatsync labs, Phoenix AZ) got an occulus, and we've been talking about how cool it would be to build a "virtual office" of sorts. Sit down with an occulus and some noise cancelling headphones, and have an infinitely large workspace. 2 monitors? or 1000 monitors; it doesn't matter because your entire field of vision (or your entire environment) is being rendered for you. -- I think people are very attached to the idea of your eyes seeing the "real" world instead of a re-displayed one. I understand that, but I think that ideology is going to hold AR back for a while.

kronholm 13y ago
I do believe the retail version of the Oculus Rift will come with two cameras on the front, and I've heard rumors of a depth camera as well. We'll see. Exciting times we live in, that's for sure.
jlgreco 13y ago
I think the reason is that people like to consider being able to move around environments that you don't have memorized without tripping on things. Do I have to step out of my virtual office to go get a beer from the fridge, or can I get the real-life obstacles that are in the way projected into my virtual office? Imagine a virtual office with a thousand monitors that is your apartment that has been plopped down in the middle of a forest with the walls knocked out.
npsimons 13y ago
Why not use something like the occulus rift? While the occulus rift is cool, I think you're missing the point. VR has been around for quite some time, and while it has it's applications, AR, IMHO, is more immediately applicable today. Even if you are selectively reproducing pieces of reality in your VR, that's going to take extra processing power and not going to be quite realistic (or real-time) for a long time. AR, on the other hand, is just rife with applications that we can use now. The classic one I always think of is helping someone with Alzheimer's get home by "painting" a path of footsteps on the ground. Try that with an occulus rift, or any other VR setup. Almost guaranteed to be cumbersome and dangerous, if it can even be used outside of a lab at all.

DanBC 13y ago

I'd love a 3D interface to HN. Upvoted, busy, threads float nearer me. Flame-fests shrink back from me.

cracker_jacks 13y ago

I'm a little bit skeptical of some of the artist renderings here. Being a researcher in the computer vision field, rendering accurately onto arbitrary surfaces simply is nowhere near this precise. It requires an extraordinary amount of scene understanding. Factors like shape, surface normals, illumination, reflectance, etc. all need to be separated. These properties are extremely entangled together and state of the art methods require a great deal of computational power to do significantly worse than what's being shown here.

L0j1k 13y ago

Yeah, okay. Yet another hardware Kickstarter with egregious claims? No, thanks.

petermelias 13y ago

Backed. If they can deliver on this the value of the application potential is completely worth the relatively low up front risk.

muyuu 13y ago
Backed as well. Even the prototype shown in the video below, rough as it may be, is good enough to try a lot of things. Looks really promising and they are not asking for much. First thing I ever back in Kickstarter, too.

namelesstrash01 13y ago

Okay. Yet another hardware Kickstarter with egregious claims? No, thanks.

namelesstrash01 13y ago
Because there's so much technical information about this project on the campaign page... There's just no way you are probably throwing your money into a hole by backing it.

z-e-r-o 13y ago

This technique, as it is shown, is not going to be possible for at least the next 5 years. They either know it and are making a huge fake marketing campaign (for a possible Google acquisition) or haven't realized it yet will have a really hard moment when they realize it. Couple of components which are not going to work: 1. A see-through glass with Field of View as shown in the video just doesn't exist today. The model they are going to use are more like a ‘tiny TV-screen floating in your view’ and not even close to the visualization they created. 2. Real time 3D gesture recognition from point cloud data on ARM (+ overhead for applications + games all in low latency) 3. Real time 3D environment reconstruction from moving point cloud data (requires something like quad-core i7 + 32 GB RAM + desktop-class GPU processing) They want to achieve it on an ARM running from tiny batteries!!! + On top of this would come the whole application / game experience, something they seem to be concentrating on, instead of getting the basics right. 4. Then there is latency, which is just not going to be solved for the next 5 but more probably 10 years, just read Michael Abrash blog about the reality of Augmented Reality glasses (http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/ http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/). To be clear, I'm not saying that they won't be able to make what they promise, I'm saying that not even Google or anyone will nearly be able to achieve it for at least 5 years, and everyone knows this who is even a little bit into augmented reality. So personally I find the Kickstarter campaign to be a fake campaign and it is just bending the rules of Kickstarter which requires a real-world hardware prototype. So they made a glued together prototype with a fake visualization, with the whole campaign built around the video. Nonetheless, the campaign has a chance of being a massive hit, because every sci-fi fan is dreaming about it for decades and is willing to back it if he has the funds. In that case, it might have a chance of the biggest Kickstarter failures of all time. The best case for them would be a quick Google acquisition and integration into the Glass team.

shadowmint 13y ago

To be fair, they do have a real-video below the pitch video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oioSBP9XBNg http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=o...) which is much more honest and realistic look at what's being developed. This is actually pretty exciting tech, but it's going to be absolutely nothing like what they have to show in the pitch video.

aaronblohowiak 13y ago

Meta II: a revolutionary meta circular compiler, circa 1967

kybernetyk 13y ago

I'm rather skeptic. No real-life videos, only unrealistic concepts. The bold "there's nothing like this being build" statements and then they use off the shelf components. Sounds like a great recipe for disappointment. They should have at least posted a real-life video (or a realistic rendition).

dakrisht 13y ago

I like it. But they're shooting for the stars here. I'm not sure they'll be able to achieve the quality shown in the video (done with nice Hollywood VFX) in real-life. Like others mentioned, latency might be an issue, but generally the augmented 3D interaction (i.e. spreading a pool apart in an architectural setting) will be difficult to reproduce as-shown. Misleading videos. Kickstarter is like the Wild West these days.

justncase80 13y ago

Consider me skeptical. I predict the camera will not have low enough latency to ever make this device usable.

needle0 13y ago

I own an Epson Moverio, which the Meta 1 glasses appear to be based on. I have a small bit of firsthand experience with hacking on it to do ARish things. * The Moverio consists of two parts, the glasses and the control box. The two connect via a seemingly proprietary connector. The control box runs Android 2.2, archaic by today's standards. USB host mode was introduced in Android 3.1, so there would be no straightforward way to feed the depth camera's information into the control box. * Unity3D, which Meta's software stack claims to be using, does run on the control box once you output your Unity project to an Android application. For the app to run, I had to tweak the build settings to support both ARMv6 and ARMv7 (The app failed to start when built for ARMv7 only). This was doable in Unity 3.5.x. However, Unity 4 removes support for ARMv6. So I'm full of question marks: * Did the Meta team somehow obtain/reverse-engineer the specifications for the Moverio glasses' connector, plug it into a more powerful device, and ditch the control box? * Did the Meta team replace the Moverio control box's OS with a more modern version? * Is Meta 1 stuck with the older Unity 3.5.x? * Or am I doing it wrong, and is it indeed possible to run Unity 4-built apps on the Moverio control box? Also, other have mentioned but the field of view is disappointingly small with this device - just a small window in in the middle of your view. Overall, confused.

bensandcastle 13y ago
Thanks, the dev unit allows software to run on Windows x86. We're not building for Android. Use the latest version of Unity that you wish.
- needle0 13y ago
  Ah, I see. If so, how did you guys manage to connect the Moverio's glasses to an x86 PC? IIRC the glasses use a proprietary connector, and no info on the specs/protocol of the connector (nor the Aux connector on the back of the control box) is publicly available. Did you guys receive the specs from Epson directly, receive dev glasses which doesn't use that connector, or reverse-engineer it yourselves? Is that information confidential or under NDA? I strongly feel that ancient control box is holding back the full potential of the glasses and would love to connect different hardware to it. The connector spec/protocol is the only thing preventing that. I'm not very hopeful but if there's any information on it I would love to know.