Just found the answer on the site:
VR places the user in another location entirely. Whether that location is computer-generated or captured by video, it entirely occludes the user’s natural surroundings.
In augmented reality—like Google Glass or the Yelp app’s Monocle feature on mobile devices—the visible natural world is overlaid with a layer of digital content.
In technologies like Magic Leap’s, virtual objects are integrated into—and responsive to—the natural world. A virtual ball under your desk, for example, would be blocked from view unless you bent down to look at it. In theory, MR could become VR in a dark room.
I've never heard augmented reality described as essentially a fancy HUD. Every other example of it I've seen on the web describes it as what these people are trying to call mixed reality. They are just trying to create a new term that they own.
There's a graphic midway through the article that makes a distinction. I don't necessarily agree, but the author (and apparently ML) see AR with additional overlays, like HUDs, and MR as virtual models and things, such as a whale flying through your living room.
"Mixed Reality
In technologies like Magic Leap’s, virtual objects are integrated into—and responsive to—the natural world. A virtual ball under your desk, for example, would be blocked from view unless you bent down to look at it. In theory, MR could become VR in a dark room."
True, though to someone completely outside this area, it doesn't seem to show any claimed benefits over hololens. To be clear, I absolutely don't think ML is anything like Theranos, but wonder what signals we, as third parties, should use during the stealth hype cycle.
The past doesn't imply future success but Rony's was formerly CTO and cofounder of MAKO Surgical (robotic surgery), which was acquired by Stryker for $1.65BN. He has relevant domain experience and a track record. I'd bet on him.
He also seems like a very genuine guy to work with based on the interviews I've seen. If you're going to invest as much money as they've raised, you better like spending time with the person putting it to work.
im not comparing Segway to Theranos but to Magic Leap which even has a very similar founder story and may find its niche much slimmer then investors thought.
I don't think there's any doubt that the game plan is to shrink these devices as much as possible, provided investor interest/market derived revenue can sustain things to that point.
It's interesting how we've seen this shrinking form factor theme play out in the "segway sector" recently with the popularity of "hover boards." I'm not sure if that's a genuine new paradigm of human machine interaction or just a confluence of trendiness, fun, and much lower price than a segway.
One difference I see is that at least the focus is on describing the technology (even without details/demo), rather than promoting the celebrity of the founder. Go back and read all the gushing exposés about Theranos:
"The founder is like a female version of Steve Jobs!!"
"Look at the founder, isn't she amazing?"
"Theranos, founded by a young woman entrepreneur who wears only black turtlenecks..."
"The company's technology is blah blah blah, but look! OMFG YOUNG FEMALE FOUNDER!"
I suppose though, the wrinkle being the "verified by a layman" means "verified by a layman in a very presenter controlled environment".
The outside observer doesn't necessarily get to see if the results have some big limitations. That could be cost, environment, etc. Maybe the whole room is rigged with hidden tech that makes it possible, but not practical in the real world. Maybe there's a zillion dollars worth of compute farm running real-time behind it.
Certainly, plenty of laymen, and even experts, bought into telekinesis when the demo was in a highly presenter controlled environment.
I'm curious what new information was contained in this article that convinced you. I might have missed it, but other than the new promo video, it was the same information on the actual technology that we've already read on magic leap, packaged in a prettier article with a nicer story around it.
I might be out of touch with the latest news regarding Magic Leap but this is the first time I've seen a "live" demo of the technology. Those demo shots were filmed through an actual, working display according to the disclaimer and everything I've seen up to this point had been a pre-rendered "artist's concept".
I have a little more faith in there being something of substance behind their technology now that I know they have working prototypes. I'd only seen a mountain of hype and investment money chasing what seemed to be nothing but a concept and set of patents prior to this.
i) they also use a goggle. Much more credible than a whale in front of kids with no apparent hardware. And the reporter demoed it and endorsed the quality.
ii) the primary use is to replace monitors.
That is both huge and a more predictable market than the promise of creating "some game or movie somehow" with it.
I agree that augmented reality tech has promise, but from the article alone, I don't think we can say much about the quality of the Magic Leap experience, no way of determining how it compared to HoloLens.
i think by the sheer amount of funding that the prototype gear has been able to raise is a testament to the quality of the experience. the article also elaborated on why the quality is much better - "an optical system that creates the illusion of depth in such a way that your eyes focus far for far things, and near for near, and will converge or diverge at the correct distances.
In trying out Magic Leap’s prototype, I found that it worked amazingly well close up, within arm’s reach, which was not true of many of the other mixed- and virtual-reality systems I used. I also found that the transition back to the real world while removing the Magic Leap’s optics was effortless, as comfortable as slipping off sunglasses, which I also did not experience in other systems. It felt natural."
I am not sold on hololens since people who have tested it complained about the effective 'field of vision' which the experience applies to. see http://imgur.com/uCmWnis
Look at it with a critical eye. If they've already solved those issues, why would they have any reason to restrict who they demo to? I'd suggest they still have technical issues to overcome, and the Wired piece is at least partly hyperbole.
I'm always very hesitant to gauge quality/capability by amount of funding. Remember Solyndra? Better Place? Color? The startup annals are littered with companies that raised huge money amid hype and then failed to deliver. The fact that Magic Leap is being so secretive when everyone else is plowing ahead with improvements to VR and AR hardware available to the public is troubling.
Solving the vergence-accommodation conflict, as described by Kevin Kelly, is a big leap for AR/VR/MR. If they succeed in delivering, it will be huge. Hence the bet made by the investors.
My take-away was that for all the work on the hardware and experience, it will be the people that solve the interactive tooling challenge that will open the flood-gates to mass-market MR/VR/AR.
Been trying to follow this development specifically for a while now and glad to have a long-form write-up about it. Behind the scenes is great. I just wish it didn't read like they'd spent five months guzzling the kool-aid. I mean, okay I get it, sounds exciting, you got it see it up close, we haven't yet, etc. Reads a bit much like quotes from a movie poster though..."Unleashes the potential of the Internet! Immersive! Astounding!"
>Very soon, perhaps in five years, the bounded worlds within virtual reality will begin to be networked together into distributed virtual worlds.
So, just like XBox Live, teenagers can yell obscenities at you! Half-joking here. Also relevant:
"Lenny! I don't deal black-jack clips! It's policy. I got ethics here." (Strange Days)
They either patent the product in which case cheap clones are produced before they get to market, or they keep it a secret and never release. Since the CEO is the inventor, I think they'll try to keep it secret.
Slow companies that want to do everything perfect just don't work once they lose that edge. They fail to compete.
Oculus Rift took 4 years to launch (2012->2016) and was acquired for $2 billion. Magic Leap only started working on this in 2014 and raised $1.4 billion. This stuff takes time.
If you actually read their Wikipedia page it said they started working on what Magic Leap currently is about in 2014. That's when they started hiring VR/optical people.
They did other projects before 2014 under the same name.
Speaking of highly secretive, well-funded startups... Whatever happened to that super-hyped, super-secretive startup that was going to use sound waves as a control device? I forgot the details, but it was something like that, something special done using sound
Think you mean Ultrahaptics (http://www.ultrahaptics.com/)? Supposedly there's an evaluation device + dev kit available, but I haven't seen any press about it at all.
I remember another one, something about wireless charging at a distance by focusing energy waves. Sounded physically impossible, but they got funding and it had a lot of hype. Haven't heard about that one lately.
Will be excited if they ship. The technology (AR, MR whatever you want to call it) will redefine how people collaborate.
Companies that keep things under wraps showing bits and pieces are hard to trust. Demos are easy. In a perfectly orchestrated environment, you can show whatever you want. It means very little in terms of what your final product/experience will be.
Am I the only one that has less confidence that Magic Leap will actually ship anything after reading about their CEO? The way they talk about him makes it sound like he has a million ideas all the time and isn't laser-focused on getting X, Y, or Z out the door and in the hands of customers.
Magic Leap is a secretive startup based in Florida.
The author describes his experience interacting with, among other things, an 8-inch robot drone, which seems, but is not real - it's rather a simulation made visible by a VR kit. VR overlaid on the real world is called mixed reality (MR).
He saw other things with these magical goggles, and they looked very real.
Magic Leap is not the only company creating MR technology, but it's the most advanced, as proven by several notable investors, including Google, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, which poured 1.4 billion dollars into it so far, while the company has not released a beta version of its product yet.
All major tech players have whole groups dedicated to artificial reality, as well as 230 other companies, working on hardware and content. The author has seen most of them.
The expectations of Virtual Reality are very high - the Matrix, the Metaverse, the Oasis. The author experienced VR first in 1989 with Jaron Lanier in California, exploring a virtual world with him through a special glove. He named it Virtual Reality, and all the elements were there: head-mounted display, glove tracking, multiperson social immersion.
Mass market VR was not imminent, though, mostly because of high costs. Thank to smartphones, the cost of many components - gyroscopes, screens, CPUs - has shrunk now. In fact, in 2012, Oculus Rift launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund a VR headset prototype, and was then acquired by Facebook for 2 billion dollars in 2014.
Lanier estimates that you would have needed a million dollar in 1990 to achieve what you can achieve today with a smartphone.
Virtual reality is creating the next evolution of the Internet, an internet of experiences - experiences that feel genuine, even if they are simulated, because of two things: "presence" (objects seem to be real), and (a personal feeling of living an) "experience".
This will lead to a Wikipedia of experiences, such as traveling, or terror at the edge of an erupting volcano, or shared experiences. Kent Bye, founder of the podcast "Voices of VR", says that VR talks to our subconscious mind.
The author mentions a great subconscious experience with "the Void" at the 2016 TED conference. The three co-founders have experiences with stage magic, a theme park, and a haunted house, and mixed them to create "the Void".
You wear a 12-pound vest, you roam free in a large room, and navigate an Indiana Jones-like adventure. You have the illusion of a larger space in which to move around thank to a trick called "redirected walking" and redirected touching. Stairs, as an example, can be made to feel endless if they drop down as you walk upward.
Most VR headsets today also include "dynamic binaural" - 3D audio, which is more than stereo, which is fixed in space. This also helps prevent motion sickness.
Good VR also includes touch, as Jason Jerald, author of what people call the VR book, says. Most VR kit use controllers, as gloves are not sufficiently advanced yet.
Magic Leap is the most impressive on the visual front.
Founder Rony Abovitz was a misfit enthralled by science fiction and robots, with a career in biomedical engineering. He is warm, casual, full of ideas.
In 2008 his company, Mako, went public, and sold in 2013 for 1.65 billion dollars.
He then invented a whole fictional world on another planet, called Hour Blue, and hired Weta Workshop, a special effects house, to build it, and in 2012 he did setup a company to develop this immersive world: Magic Leap.
Abovitz saw Artificial Reality as part machine, part flesh, tricking the brain to created a "chain of persuasion". He then proceeded to build a display to realize it. Displays put at 1 inch from your eyes don't offer a good illusion of focus; Magic Leap's solution creates the illusion of depth in a convincing way.
Still, competition for Magic Leap is formidable, such as Hololens by Microsoft, or Meta....
47 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadI thought it was called AR, as in augmented reality?
In augmented reality—like Google Glass or the Yelp app’s Monocle feature on mobile devices—the visible natural world is overlaid with a layer of digital content.
In technologies like Magic Leap’s, virtual objects are integrated into—and responsive to—the natural world. A virtual ball under your desk, for example, would be blocked from view unless you bent down to look at it. In theory, MR could become VR in a dark room.
Mixed reality encompasses a spectrum, including augmented reality and augmented virtuality (leap motion).
Milgram's taxonomy is considered cannon in this field so I am not sure how they messed that up.
[1] http://etclab.mie.utoronto.ca/people/paul_dir/IEICE94/ieice....
He also seems like a very genuine guy to work with based on the interviews I've seen. If you're going to invest as much money as they've raised, you better like spending time with the person putting it to work.
It's interesting how we've seen this shrinking form factor theme play out in the "segway sector" recently with the popularity of "hover boards." I'm not sure if that's a genuine new paradigm of human machine interaction or just a confluence of trendiness, fun, and much lower price than a segway.
"The founder is like a female version of Steve Jobs!!"
"Look at the founder, isn't she amazing?"
"Theranos, founded by a young woman entrepreneur who wears only black turtlenecks..."
"The company's technology is blah blah blah, but look! OMFG YOUNG FEMALE FOUNDER!"
The outside observer doesn't necessarily get to see if the results have some big limitations. That could be cost, environment, etc. Maybe the whole room is rigged with hidden tech that makes it possible, but not practical in the real world. Maybe there's a zillion dollars worth of compute farm running real-time behind it.
Certainly, plenty of laymen, and even experts, bought into telekinesis when the demo was in a highly presenter controlled environment.
I have a little more faith in there being something of substance behind their technology now that I know they have working prototypes. I'd only seen a mountain of hype and investment money chasing what seemed to be nothing but a concept and set of patents prior to this.
i) they also use a goggle. Much more credible than a whale in front of kids with no apparent hardware. And the reporter demoed it and endorsed the quality.
ii) the primary use is to replace monitors. That is both huge and a more predictable market than the promise of creating "some game or movie somehow" with it.
The viewer (camera) is wearing the hardware. The kids and whale are placed in that scene by the ML hardware.
https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us
In trying out Magic Leap’s prototype, I found that it worked amazingly well close up, within arm’s reach, which was not true of many of the other mixed- and virtual-reality systems I used. I also found that the transition back to the real world while removing the Magic Leap’s optics was effortless, as comfortable as slipping off sunglasses, which I also did not experience in other systems. It felt natural."
I am not sold on hololens since people who have tested it complained about the effective 'field of vision' which the experience applies to. see http://imgur.com/uCmWnis
The Hololens demo videos seem amazing until you find out users are not actually seeing all that's portrayed in them.
>Very soon, perhaps in five years, the bounded worlds within virtual reality will begin to be networked together into distributed virtual worlds.
So, just like XBox Live, teenagers can yell obscenities at you! Half-joking here. Also relevant:
"Lenny! I don't deal black-jack clips! It's policy. I got ethics here." (Strange Days)
They either patent the product in which case cheap clones are produced before they get to market, or they keep it a secret and never release. Since the CEO is the inventor, I think they'll try to keep it secret.
Slow companies that want to do everything perfect just don't work once they lose that edge. They fail to compete.
They are probably about 5 years from shipping
They did other projects before 2014 under the same name.
There was some controversy about whether it would actually work.
Magic Leap is a secretive startup based in Florida.
The author describes his experience interacting with, among other things, an 8-inch robot drone, which seems, but is not real - it's rather a simulation made visible by a VR kit. VR overlaid on the real world is called mixed reality (MR).
He saw other things with these magical goggles, and they looked very real.
Magic Leap is not the only company creating MR technology, but it's the most advanced, as proven by several notable investors, including Google, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, which poured 1.4 billion dollars into it so far, while the company has not released a beta version of its product yet.
All major tech players have whole groups dedicated to artificial reality, as well as 230 other companies, working on hardware and content. The author has seen most of them.
The expectations of Virtual Reality are very high - the Matrix, the Metaverse, the Oasis. The author experienced VR first in 1989 with Jaron Lanier in California, exploring a virtual world with him through a special glove. He named it Virtual Reality, and all the elements were there: head-mounted display, glove tracking, multiperson social immersion.
Mass market VR was not imminent, though, mostly because of high costs. Thank to smartphones, the cost of many components - gyroscopes, screens, CPUs - has shrunk now. In fact, in 2012, Oculus Rift launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund a VR headset prototype, and was then acquired by Facebook for 2 billion dollars in 2014.
Lanier estimates that you would have needed a million dollar in 1990 to achieve what you can achieve today with a smartphone.
Virtual reality is creating the next evolution of the Internet, an internet of experiences - experiences that feel genuine, even if they are simulated, because of two things: "presence" (objects seem to be real), and (a personal feeling of living an) "experience".
This will lead to a Wikipedia of experiences, such as traveling, or terror at the edge of an erupting volcano, or shared experiences. Kent Bye, founder of the podcast "Voices of VR", says that VR talks to our subconscious mind.
The author mentions a great subconscious experience with "the Void" at the 2016 TED conference. The three co-founders have experiences with stage magic, a theme park, and a haunted house, and mixed them to create "the Void".
You wear a 12-pound vest, you roam free in a large room, and navigate an Indiana Jones-like adventure. You have the illusion of a larger space in which to move around thank to a trick called "redirected walking" and redirected touching. Stairs, as an example, can be made to feel endless if they drop down as you walk upward.
Most VR headsets today also include "dynamic binaural" - 3D audio, which is more than stereo, which is fixed in space. This also helps prevent motion sickness.
Good VR also includes touch, as Jason Jerald, author of what people call the VR book, says. Most VR kit use controllers, as gloves are not sufficiently advanced yet.
Magic Leap is the most impressive on the visual front.
Founder Rony Abovitz was a misfit enthralled by science fiction and robots, with a career in biomedical engineering. He is warm, casual, full of ideas.
In 2008 his company, Mako, went public, and sold in 2013 for 1.65 billion dollars.
He then invented a whole fictional world on another planet, called Hour Blue, and hired Weta Workshop, a special effects house, to build it, and in 2012 he did setup a company to develop this immersive world: Magic Leap.
Abovitz saw Artificial Reality as part machine, part flesh, tricking the brain to created a "chain of persuasion". He then proceeded to build a display to realize it. Displays put at 1 inch from your eyes don't offer a good illusion of focus; Magic Leap's solution creates the illusion of depth in a convincing way.
Still, competition for Magic Leap is formidable, such as Hololens by Microsoft, or Meta....