I think the screen resolution isn't that big of a deal for many applications (mostly games and stuff like it), and it's not like it's impossible right now, just expensive.
The bigger hurdle from where I'm sitting is getting framerates and latency in a good position. Everyone I've seen use a current gen VR headset gets horribly motion sick in a lot of cases. That NEEDS to be fixed, and I think that comes down to crazy high refresh rates, and super low latency, both of which really crank up the processing power needed.
People don't get motion sick from the fps, latency and fov of current gen (PC) VR (90 fps, ~0ms, ~100°). They get motion sick from vection and maybe from vergence accomodation conflict.
But regardless, I don't think resolution is going to be what makes or breaks VR/AR. We worked with computers just fine when they were ~500 "pixels" tall, and it's not like screen resolution technology has hit a wall that it can't get past yet, things are still improving.
People do get motion sick from FPS because a lot of popular games and applications are not optimized, or have degenerate cases that cause hitches. ASW\ATW help with this (run at half fps and interpolate basically), but don't fix really bad fps or hitches. It doesn't help that often people are running PC VR with under powered (minspec or lower) or "misconfigured" (bad drivers, software, etc.) setups.
This was actually a pretty well grounded article compared to what I was expecting.
I'm with the author, I absolutely think this kind of thing will be the next step in computing. It just seems so obvious. Get rid of screeens and wear a headset that lets you put application windows anywhere in your view.
I'm glad they questioned a lot of Magic Leap's claims and didn't just parrot back the taglines and act like it's magic.
That being said, I don't think Magic Leap is going to be the product that "wins". It seems from this article that it's going to run its own "OS", with it's own special apps, and most likely limited integration with other stuff.
I don't want a new "device", a new os, a new "platform", I want a screen that I strap to my face. One that I can eventually connect to my Linux machine, or my windows desktop, or my MacBook. Maybe in wrong, but I feel like Magic Leap is going to die if it demands that kind of integration, regardless of how technically impressive it is.
Hololens on the other hand is something I'm giving a good amount of consideration to, because they seem to be focusing on "a screen you strap to your face".
Well it seems they aren't pushing toward "serious work with text" based on this article. They are looking for devs to make apps, this means stuff like the NBA app, or games and stuff.
I think you are right about higher resolution being needed for real "work", but since this doesn't run a "real" OS either, i'm not sure how much work you could get done on it anyway.
> this kind of thing will be the next step in computing
If by computing you mean video/game consumption then yeah sure, but for pretty much every other application (programming, editing, reading, etc) this is a poor medium.
I can't disagree more. I actually think the opposite.
Games and stuff are nice, but everyone I've known that uses a vive or oculus gets tired of needing to move around in VR pretty fast.
But being able to get rid of the 3-4 screens on my desk, and replace them with a headset that I wear? That I can put windows everywhere? Behind me, far left, even throw one up above me to glance at? That's HUGE imo. And the cost can quickly make sense.
I'm in the market for a new set of screens for my machine. I want to go to 4k. I'm looking at realistically $1500 for new screens. If something like Magic Leap or hololens was only 2x more than that and could get even "1080p equivalent" resolution compared to my screens, i'd happily drop the extra cash right now.
Yes, it's still not at that point as far as I can tell, but I don't think needing to increase resolution a bit is going to be the thing that ends up making VR/AR "impossible".
So basically, you want multiple desktops a la Win 10 Virtual Desktops or KDE activities, but instead of pressing a key combo to switch between desktops, you want to rotate your head? And then in order to stay in the virtual desktop you've selected, you want to have to keep your head pointed at a particular angle?
yeah i'm sure. How is it any different than working with papers on a physical desk? Or working with a large corkboard or whiteboard where you place many items while working on something big?
Because that's the idea i'm envisioning. Being able to put papers or applications on a virtual whiteboard that completely encircles you. Move them to where you want, make them "fullscreen" (full-view?), maybe even be able to move them forward and backwards in focus and "position". Hell, with some extra work, we could even put them on surfaces around the room. Throw a monitoring program on the wall next to my window, "project" keybindings on top of my keyboard's keys when i'm pressing parts of a combo, etc...
Hell, even if you hate the idea of an "augmented reality desktop", you could just project "fake" screens and use them the same as you normally do.
I mean it's not like our current tools just go away and I'd start craning my neck to look up and to the left as far as possible for 9 hours a day... You could still have tools like "multiple desktops", and change/move them. But now I have the option of putting my task manager above me at like a 60 degree angle straight ahead and can glance up at it when needed.
What if all the screens you were using were off in your peripheral vision, but you could swipe them in front of you when needed. It would make it much easier to keep track of things.
Are you seriously using only one screen for work???
I have 8 screens at work, I would love to be able to ditch all the screens and wear an headset to achieve something even better.
I use one screen, and it's too large. I don't understand why anyone would want two screens, let alone eight. I find having anything onscreen but my code and offline documentation (i.e., not in a web browser) incredibly distracting.
What in the world do you put on those other seven screens?
My IDE has enough going on to dedicate an entire HD screen to it. Then I need more room for documentation, and showing the app for debugging. Even if I'm blocking out the rest of the world that's at least two screens full.
> offline documentation (i.e., not in a web browser)
This deeply confuses me. Why does it matter if the documentation is in a browser or not?
I wrote a simple script for a cronjob that nukes HN and a bunch of other sites via my hosts file during work hours, and removes them from the hosts file outside of work hours. Highly recommended.
Email, log files, pull requests, two instances of visual studio for different projects and one or two of IntelliJ idea for other projects.
Obviously I switch the other c# and java projects in the background unless it is needed to debug them all together.
Have you ever worked with at least one team using two different languages while looking at the production logs at the same time?
Imagine it multiplied by two and you have your answer.
I think we have the same amount and kinds of "stuff" open, but where we differ is I place things on virtual desktops (organized by a tiling window manager), of which I have between 4 and 8 at any given time. (Typically: web, coding, VMs, one or more bug logs, one or more back-burner projects.)
I can't think of a situation where I'd need to focus on all the things you list simultaneously – even just having e-mail on the screen while I'm trying to code is distracting – so I'd rather have them hidden. Sure, I'll have a couple code windows and documentation or logs open, but that fits with room to spare on a single monitor.
I’ll answer you after all the noisy comment that I thought would never start after my previous comment hours ago.
I don’t need 8 screens, I would be very happy with no screen at all and a magic leap or hololens or whatever can give me the same experience or better.
I need to be able to see at least 3-4 screens of code, preferably 165 chars long.
I would like at the same time to look at production logs in other screens.
Since I’m not living in a vacuum let’s say that I would dedicate one screen to the emails and one to the chat.
So we are at 6 screens, right?
Imagine to be able to speak with your colleague that obviously is working from home while having all these under your eyes.
I honestly can’t wait for something like this.
Probably it won’t be magic leap or hololens.
But show me something like that and I’ll buy it before it’s even on the market.
With this, you could just float individual windows around you. Quick splitting and navigating between splits in Vim is already one of the features of this editor I use the most - and if I could do that in 3d, leaving small splits all around me and moving them around, it would be an immense boost in productivity.
> If something like Magic Leap or hololens was only 2x more than that and could get even "1080p equivalent" resolution compared to my screens, i'd happily drop the extra cash right now.
Of course you would, that's like saying "if something like a Tesla could operate completely autonomously in all weather and road conditions I'd happily drop the extra cash right now!". Unfortunately, this is a "hard" problem and while I'm not saying it won't happen, we are nowhere near anything that can render 1080p VR monitors... 4k VR monitors are unlikely to be possible (in a consumer product) within the next 20 years, and you can definitely be sure that anything like that will not be wireless.
Why? Seems like a perfect medium for programming, once done well. Think where this will be in 15 years. Imagine being able to have as many "screens" of whatever size that you want. Hell, what would it even mean to have a "screen" anymore? You can just have your application windows floating in space.
Why is any of that a good thing, though? I could already have a lot more screens than I currently do, but the two I have is just fine. What advantage do windows floating in space offer me over a physical monitor (that will make it worth strapping a headset on every time I sit down at my desk)?
Less space required. Not limited by the size of your workspace. Trivially move your workspace. Get more "screenspace" at the click of a button instead of having to spend $$$. Power efficiency.
Think about where this will be in 10-20 years, not where it is now. It will be like putting a pair of glasses on, not a huge headset. Once your workspace can exist in 3 dimensions, new paradigms will emerge for arranging a "desktop" that we can't even envisage right now.
You can get a good idea of this with virtual desktop software running on Vive. After trying it myself, I was reminded that I actually love retina displays and feel like an even higher resolution would be nice. Also FOV is major. Until I can get massive FOV and retina+ resolution, I will always choose a regular desktop display.
With AR UI won’t need to be constrained to windows either. It can be much more integrated into our environment and tools. Virtual ‘screens’ are a natural but kinda dull progression to that point. Although I think we’re a lot further off from realising comfortable, everyday virtual screens in AR than fifteen years. One of the interesting facets of VR is that we can already start playing with these new ideas.
Huh? I'd love to get rid of the chunky, heavy, power-hungry screen. Read lying in bed? Check! Program on an escalator? Check! Watch a big-screen movie while eating in McDonalds? Check!
> Get rid of screeens and wear a headset that lets you put application windows anywhere in your view.
I don't think wearing headsets is a practical way to do everyday computing and it can even be bad for your eyes.
With a monitor you can look away, look out the window, etc. but with a headset the screen is always in front of your eyes, so you have to take the whole thing off if you want to give your eyes some rest from the screen.
It may be good for shorter special tasks like gaming, vr assisted surgery and such, but it doesn't seem a good match for programming, for example, which you do all day.
But don't screens only hurt our eyes because they are at a fixed focal point?
With a good AR headset, that focal point can be adjusted and moved around (possibly even in realtime if you want, move a screen to be "further away from you"). Not to mention that when you aren't looking at something that the headset is "generating", it's just basically a clear piece of plastic that you can see through. They are basically bad sunglasses.
You can look away from a "projected" screen just as easily as you can look away from a physical screen.
but with a headset the screen is always in front of your eyes
Check out a Hololens if you ever get a chance. You can choose if the object you create is always in front of you or 'stuck' in a fixed point in (virtual) space. If I place a 'screen' on a wall it will stay exactly where I put it no matter how I move around.
For widespread adoption we would need to wait another 10-15 years until semiconductors get <5nm, allowing low-power performance at the level of 1080Ti or better, unless we are fine wearing a backpack with a larger machine and battery.
Thats why I really think the first breakthrough will be with professional work. I would buy a hololens today if it meant i could place application windows anywhere in my view without a need for screens, and at a high enough resolution.
I don't care if i'm tethered to a $3000 desktop PC, because I have an office anyway and it's where i'm going to work.
Why do you think it would need more power than e.g. your phone? Looks like it's "screens" are way smaller, so could/should consume less battery... If you limit the camera and "reality-processing" and just project the screen at a fixed distance in front of your eyes, it should be way more efficient than a phone.
>I don't want a new "device", a new os, a new "platform", I want a screen that I strap to my face.
Unfortunately it doesn’t matter what you (the consumer) wants. Do you want a single search engine that dominates 90+% of the market and serves shitty ads to you all over the internet? Do you want a single walled garden for your social presence online that captures/sells your data and serves you shitty ads? Do you want 2 main mobile OS’s that tightly control their platforms and the apps available to you?
I will say this though...people saying they want a screen strapped to their face, as you did, is an advertisers wet dream and these tech companies can’t wait to sell you that screen and serve you those ads.
It seems obvious to me that there's a progression. Back in Apple II, C64, DOS days computers generally ran a single app at a time.
Windowing systems were invented allowing multiple apps to share the same screen. This is what we've had for 30-40 years.
For AR though we need multiple apps to share the same 3D space all running at the same time just like I have 14 apps running on my laptop right now.
I need my mapping app drawing the path to my destination. I need my transportation app showing me the next bus/train coming. I need my virtual pet app adding my virtual pet around my feet. I need my social networking app to show me my friends info next to them in me view. I need my dating app highlighting people that are potential matches.
All of this has to happen simultaneously and at 90fps. That will require an entirely new OS and possibly new hardware (dual GPUs, ... or pre-emptable GPUs) one for compositing the 3D world at 90fps and one for apps so if app takes too long to generate it's portion of the scene the entire OS doesn't start running low. An old OS that only runs a single 3D app at a time and who's apps don't share the same 3D space will be a huge hindrance to AR being truly revolutionary.
I'm not saying Magic Leap's OS is that OS but that OS is not MacOS/iOS/Windows/Linux/Android
Sure, it might require special hardware and software (even your screen has it's own software and processing that it is doing on the signals coming from your desktop), and at the end of the day the OS would need to change and evolve to handle this new paradigm, but it's not impossible to imagine a system where the "PC" does what it does now, and just tells the "VR" sub-processor/sub-machine where to put the rendered "window".
Already there are some VR apps that basically wrap your normal "windows" desktop in almost a cylinder around you and you can move screens around on it as much as you want with current VR headsets.
Imo it's not that the traditional OSs can't be the OS of the future. It's that the future OS needs to be developed from scratch without carrying over the assumptions and obligations to older design principles. Historically, this has been very difficult. E. G. Cocoatouch (ios) has significant differences to its cocoa (osx). Bottom line is you have to go all to do it right, but its risky for those big companies that have a financial interest in squeezing out as much value as possible from their cashcow OSs
One of Andromeda's target platforms is AR (and not just HL2.) And Linux of course gets it. Android, too. Plenty of experimental builds out there, I'm not worried about pivoting.
> I'm not saying Magic Leap's OS is that OS but that OS is not MacOS/iOS/Windows/Linux/Android
One of those is not like the others: “Linux” is not a graphical environment. If you had said “X11” or “Wayland” (or even “Gnome” or “KDE”, etc.), I would have agreed with you, but “Linux” could perfectly well be the base of an entirely new 3D-based application environment.
> For AR though we need multiple apps to share the same 3D space all running at the same time
This is something that I've given some practical thought to. The approach that I considered was to treat each application process as a client to a '3D space' service through which it could add and modify defined geometry.
Failure/slowness of any given application would leave the existing application geometry in-situ within the 3D environment and avoid the most jarring extremes of user experience. I imagined that the service interface itself would mandate the availability of simplified geometries together with meta information. This would allow the service to appropriately degrade the 3D rendered environment to maintain high framerates.
I think this approach could be effective and would not require a new OS.
SteamVR basically does this - it is a very evolved implementation of a VR OS.
Apps which crash or otherwise stop rendering trigger a fade out to the white-room VR space, whereas frame-skips are handled by hard drops (so the effect is like a teleport to avoid motion sickness).
Like, Valve have really done an incredible job on the user application interface there.
I had a similar thought a few weeks ago, but for smartphone camera and mapping apps (and the intersection of the two when it comes to world-based AR). Rather than every new app out there having to implement their own camera and map view, have them provide an extension that can be called by the native camera/map apps (providing the view bounds/coordinates/etc), that returns a rendered layer that gets overlaid on the view.
Examples:
In my state we have a govt funded web/native app that provides the fuel prices at all the service stations around you. If there was a mapping extension you could turn on, it would show this directly within the mapping app, and also an indicator "cheapest fuel within X km is at Y location" when you're in navigation mode.
In camera view with an extension turned on, provide object detection similar to how QR codes are recognised.
> Failure/slowness of any given application would leave the existing application geometry in-situ within the 3D environment and avoid the most jarring extremes of user experience.
This is already true with even the oldest and most rudimentary AR/VR systems, eg, Gear VR. The interface and head tracking is 90fps all the time. If the app is slow, the viewport will not freeze. Just it will be stuck on one frame.
I think this is a war just beginning... this is a pda... smartphone/ipod hasn't been invented yet.. when we get the ipod nano of AR, I'll buy one...that's when we know we'll have arrived...
It may come from ML 4 generations and a decade from now, it could come from google, apple, microsoft, or some as-yet unknown company... but it will come and it'll change everything.
I think AR definitely has a future but it clearly isn't here yet.
Magic Leap has been under a lot of pressure to prove that they are not vapor ware. Which, is why I assume that they chose to launch this now. Unfortunately, their vision and their product are obviously still miles apart and the content is a little underwhelming right now.
Probably the best way to look at this would be as SDK for early adopters. The first version of the product that doesn't require a ton of NDAs to be signed to even be allowed in the same room with it. However, the price point is such that this is clearly not intended to be a mass market product.
For a mass market product the price could actually be fine but then the experience needs to match the price. People spend way more on fancy TVs, high end laptops, gaming hardware, etc. For that to happen there needs to be a supply of compelling content.
The UX for AR is going to have to be substantially different from whatever your current OS does. Overlaying a lot of 2D windows in your peripheral vision doesn't really make a lot of sense. Sure, it's a neat trick but probably not that practical. Similarly a lot of mobile UX is inherently 2D currently and actually optimized for tiny screens manipulated by clumsy fingers. Slapping some AR on that is not going to be very compelling.
With VR this was more straightforward since there were a lot of 3D games that with a little work can be awesome in VR. So far gaming is the killer use case for VR. People spend money on the latest VR kit so they can play all the awesome games that are out there and immerse themselves.
On the AR front the most popular thing so far has been pokemon go and a range of me too style clones of that. That was only possible because of a critical mass of cheap, camera equipped mobile phones. With AR we need new content specifically made for AR. Most VR content does not port over well to AR since the whole point of that content is full immersion and the whole point of AR is not replacing reality but enhancing it.
Clearly magic leaps strategy for this is to have their own OS, app store, devices, and platform. This sounds like a risky strategy since clearly all their marketing is about the qualities of the device and how cool the technology powering that is. It's significant how they are not talking about the rest of the ecosystem.
From what I've heard via a friend of a friend on the hololens team, MS is putting a lot of resources into building out that with a lot of cool R&D in the pipeline. MS of course has a long history of cool R&D projects that ultimately never turned into products but this looks like they are pretty serious about it.
Ironic that you think HoloLens would be the one that plays nice with every device when it’s already limited to Windows. Magic Leap on the other hand is a less than two week old device that already plays nice with iOS/Android/MacOS and Windows.
I don't think HoloLens is the one that plays nice with everything, just that they seem to be targeting the level i'm looking for. "A virtual screen you strap on your face".
MagicLeap is "An OS for VR/AR stuff that you make apps for", and that's not what I'm personally looking for regardless of how many other OSs it will integrate with.
My "perfect" AR system is one where I can run Slack, Chrome, my code editor, a few terminal windows, and more, all unchanged. And MagicLeap looks like it will never be that. HoloLens will, even if only on windows.
Now I might be wrong, and MagicLeap might knock it out of the park and become a new "category" of device like phone apps did, but I still can't use a phone OS to do real work outside of a few choice situations, and I REALLY want a VR/AR device that lets me do real work.
I wish them the best, and while I get annoyed at every article that talks about it handwaving away the tech and calling it "magic", I hope they do well, because more competition is always a good thing, but from what I've seen they aren't making a device for me.
Augmented reality standalone computers are cool, but these guys are at the same price point as the Hololens, and have three components instead of one, with less battery and a narrower field of view. Maybe they can differentiate themselves on a better development environment?
It's exactly the opposite.
Hololens is 3000$, it's heavier on your head because it has only one piece, the battery life is shorter and the field of view is much smaller (30x17.5 for hololens vs 40X30 for magic leap).
Note that both technologies are "augmented reality" - as in, the field of view listed is for the holographic augmentation, not the entire visible world, whose field of view is unchanged (but darker).
The strange thing is that most of the people that are attacking so harshly magic leap in this thread have business link with hololens that has really an abysmal FOV.
Disclosure: I’m not buying a magic leap, I have no financial interest on it, I just want some working environment that I would really really enjoy.
Magic Leap is marketed as $2500. That's $500 cheaper, or 15% of the price. Essentially meaningless for anyone planning to buy one. Claimed battery life for Magic Leap is 3 hours, claimed battery life for hololens is 5.5 hours. (I've personally gotten a bit longer but that's not objective.)
Weight concerns are valid - I wish they included actual figures for the weight of the Magic Leap for comparison.
No, it's marketed at 2295. Hololens ia a bit more than 30% more expensive, I would not say that it is not meaningless.
Doing what on hololens for 5.5 hours?
"Magic Leap One starting at $2,295. Magic Leap One is available to creators in cities across the contiguous US. And the list is growing daily. To help you take your first step into spatial computing, we’re going to hand deliver the device to your doorstep and personally get you set up."
In the wired article, it mentions that the device is closely related to your physiology, so setup can be difficult. Adding a person to help you get set up can probably make the experience a bit less frustrating.
So far, one of the more informative, balanced articles I have seen on Magic Leap.
I still remain curious what do they really mean by the lightfield. Does anyone have more information here?
The best I can infer is they don’t actually have a “screen” with pixels per say, but they somehow attenuate the light as it goes through the “rectangle”. Why I say this is different than pixels is that it almost seems like they are doing something more “analog”. By attenuating the light as it comes in, rather than adding its own light, I see how that you could get a different “type” of light that may be better from a human processing perspective. The “screen” would effectively consist of a high resolution array of “windows” that selectively attenuate the light going through them. It would also explain why they can’t take “video” of the experience.
Do others agree with my shot in the dark? Or is there some other way they could be realizing this technology?
I still don't quite get how Magic Leap's "Lightfield" display is different from that of other augmented reality devices. The article has a few things to say about this, but I still don't really understand:
> A Dynamic Digital Lightfield is a binocular display that can project digital objects into the world such that light enters the eye as if it were reflected from a real object. Our lightfield is biomimetic (mimics our biology/physiology). Magic Leap One creates a seamless experience where digital and analog lightfields combine into a single scene. For example, with Magic Leap One, you can render digital flowers in a physical vase so they can appear fresh every day.
Like that. How is that different from what Hololens does?
> Abovitz told me that the light can only be interpreted by a human — not a camera — so part of his problem in launching his product is that he can't film the experience.
How is a camera sufficiently different from the human eye that you physically can't film an image through the headset? Or is this just saying you can't film it in the sense that a flat image on a monitor can't really convey the experience of trying the headset on for yourself? (The latter is a well known problem with VR.) If the latter, again, how is that different from Hololens?
All-in-all the product does look promising; it appears to be less bulky than competing headsets and the devkit is less expensive too. I'm just not sure whether the display technology is a competitive advantage or not.
The Magic Leap doesn't just dangle one image in front of your eyes, like Microsoft's Hololens. Rather, the Magic Leap projects physically projects several visual layers at different focus distances. If you are looking at something near in the real world, your eye will change focus to look at it, and the "near" projection in the Magic Leap will be in focus, while the "far" projection will go blurry, right along with the "far" in the real world.
However, I think Magic Leap has reduced the number of layers down to something like three [edit: two], from the many more layers they were showing before.
It's a multifocal display? That could indeed be a significant competitive advantage. If that's the case though, I don't know why they don't just call it a multifocal display instead of using all this confusing, non-standard terminology like "Dynamic Digital Lightfield".
As for where I heard the term "multifocal display", I'd recommend checking out Douglas Lanman's talk at SID Display Week, where he goes into detail on a whole bunch of possible solutions to vergence-accommodation conflict in VR headsets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbRvkS3GDsw
i believe the light is projected onto your retina. so your eyes are still seeing light from your regular environment and then the images from the leap are superimposed. to capture what the user sees you would need to film both the light from the leap plus what the person's eye is seeing.
I have had an opportunity to see a demo by another stealth company (which may have been quietly acquired by Magic Leap since then). They used lasers to project light directly onto my retina.
It was nothing like Magic Leap, no 3d, just test 2d images - and yet, these razor-sharp, light images that I was able to see in front of the sun, were better than any computer display that I've ever seen. I don't know how would I convince anyone about the quality of the product aside from telling them to see for themselves.
So "standard" AR glasses normally use reflective lenses (think like a two way mirror) and a separate lcd screen.
This is most obvious in something like the Meta2: imagine you started with a ballcap, used double sided tape to attach a smartphone to the bottom of the rim (touching your eyebrows and screen pointed down), lastly attach a reflective piece of plastic from the forward edge of the brim angling down to around your nose.
Or just look at pictures of it here (though they are all cleverly angled to not show the eyebrow screen): https://www.metavision.com/
The resulting image is both digital (from the LCD) and the reality of what you're seeing around you, but by necessity it's dimmer and the digital screen images look more translucent.
The promise of MagicLeap and lightfield projection is that you can get a fundamentally much more solid looking image by directly projecting light into your eye (with no intermediary lenses), though it's unclear exactly how much of this is happening in the current MagicLeap developer release.
It's not a perfect analogy, but it's the difference between looking at a computer screen with and without some tinted sunglasses, or a couple of 2 way mirrors between you and your monitor.
The short answer is that the ML One is not a virtual retinal display/fiber scanning array as initially promised in 2012/3. They departed from that tech for this version some years ago.
So they basically have the same category of tech as the hololens but with a few additions, tricks and optimizations.
You're correct in that the display tech isn't the differentiator right now. They are hoping the ML One does well enough to support actually getting the FSD to market. It's iterative not revolutionary.
That's not to take anything away from them, this is an exceedingly hard problem and space so it's astonishing they are getting anything out at all.
I don't think we know quite enough about the detail of Magic Leap's technology yet - there are some analysis articles based on their patents, but it's an incomplete picture.
However, the general concept of a "light field display" is worth knowing.
Normal displays work by creating pixels that glow. Each pixel emits light in all directions. That passes through your eye if it is looking at the object, which focuses it back into one point on the retina.
In a (pure imaginary) light field display, instead individual rays of light are produced, not pixels. The individual rays can be faked so even though emitted very near your eye, they are focused by your eye and your brain thinks they are further away.
Possible advantages of this (off the top of my head based on reasoning from the physics and the way vision works and the way existing displays are used):
- Can create objects at any distance - including infinity. Your brain (it's stereoscopy tricked) will believe they really are at that distance.
- The viewer can change focus, and the objects will correctly blur and come in and out of focus.
- An individual large object could have varying distance and focus across its form as in the real world.
- Because of the improved stereo and focus, in an AR display especially, there will be less contrast between the projected objects and the real world. They will just seem "more real" in comparison to real objects.
- Vision correction. In theory a light field display could project images that correct for any vision defects you have - dynamically. (In practice the talk of special lenses for glasses whereas in the OP article shows that Magic Leap isn't at a level it can do that yet)
- Special effects. So of course you can then do other funky things - play with faking visual defects for special effects. Your character could appear to need glasses, and then get them as a powerup etc. Or you could make someone's vision blur when they're tired or about to die. Or have a boss which is always out of focus in an odd way.
Of course Magic Leap won't be that good. It is only digital. It will be granular both in normal resolution and in effective depth of field resolution. But still... It really does sound like it has some of the above benefits.
There's a really easy way to tell if something is that type of light field display and ML is clearly not. Such a display would only be visible from a single point.
From the very weak way ML is using the term light field, anytime there is light, there is a light field. An LCD monitor produces a light field.
One big difference (if claims are correct) is that when looking at an object your eyes can actually focus just like if they really exist. In VR, there is only one focus plane so eyes tried to focus but they brain realized there is no point. This is one of the big issue in VR to use headset more that hour because it will cause headechs.
MagicLeap definitely has been overhyped, but for HN readers, there are still reasons to be cautiously optimistic that this is real progress.
1. There's a neat hardware size progression for ML that was posted on Twitter: MagicLeap's gone from a device like you stare through at the optometrists office down to something comparable to a scuba mask.
2. There are a few different ways to achieve AR style displays and what Magic Leap has chosen is the hard way -> lightfields and eye tracking (two technologies that haven't really been attempted to ship at scale).
3. This is still a developers' release - and not truly a "paradigm shift" or whatever overhyped term you want to use.
Separate from all that, I still think the end game of AR (in the next 10ish years) is to be the thing that comes "next" after smartphones. The proper way to view this ML Dev kit is that it's the equivalent to a PalmPilot or other barely functional PDA that had some good ideas, but didn't quite hit the right inflection point of portability, screen, battery life, form factor, etc. but that paves the way to get there.
In HN discussions of it, it's been "over-dismissed". In my recollection, the majority of the comments viewed it as smoke and mirrors. Many were basically or even outright saying it was fraudulent.
Exactly. Take two minutes to look at the last popular posts about magic Leap here and it’s filled with patronizing criticism of anyone that thinks the product could either be real, not a scam, or actually good.
I think it's important to note a few things about your second point:
This version of Magic Leap's display has nothing to do with light fields. It is a wave guide optic, just like Epson Moverio, Hololens (the term holographic also implies nothing special in terms of optics, it's a wave guide display combined with perspective rendering), and almost all other see-through HMDs. Magic Leap made headlines when they teased their oscillating fiber display, which had potential to render light fields, but that has not been pursued with this release. That's not to say they won't pursue it in the future, it's just not relevant to this product.
Next, eye tracking actually doesn't affect what is rendered to the display. The relationship of the headset display's field of view to the user is rigidly fixed even if your eyes move; different objects should not be rendered when moving only your eyes.
Rather, eye tracking is used for contextual information and user interaction. Gaze direction could be an input to foviated rendering, or you could use your eyes to select and manipulate digital objects.
Nothing I've said is meant to detract from ML's product; it's a very exciting development and a huge accomplishment for ML and the XR industry. I just think we should keep these points in context.
Don't feel bad - it's something many many people confuse. Marketing jargon, changing production targets, and general lack of knowledge in a very technical field only exacerbate the problem.
Builtin gaze tracking could be very good for interaction. Hololens's closest thing to a "cursor" requires you to point your entire head at an object to select it, and it feels very, very clunky.
I think calling this "equivalent to a palm pilot" is a stretch. The palm pilot was an successful consumer product that was obviously useful and easily improved on. Current AR offerings like magic leap and hololens are super cool, but nothing close to useful. The fact they are labeled as "development kits" makes this pretty clear. AR/VR is going to have a much rockier road to usefulness than smartphones, which are really hard to beat.
I disagree. Hololens is used for plenty of custom applications in the construction industry. You just don't hear about them because they are pretty much inhouse projects, likely implemented on top of unity (hence low cost and simple to deploy).
No consumer killer apps yet, that is of course true. But I wouldn't see AR in any major way in consumer space - just like you don't have HUD displays in a large category of vehicles, even though they are critical to military cockpits.
How big is 'plenty' I wonder? I see videos like this that look like fancy tech demos all the time, but I'm hesitant to claim this somehow demonstrates AR has found a meaningfully sized market in an industry.
Personally, I'd put money on the number of people using HoloLens outside of dev teams in applications like this being in the low hundreds/thousands, but would love to be shown data to the contrary. Cool youtube videos unfortunately do not really indicate anything.
Concur, as a Microsoft partner we had one of the first 7 Hololens. We made exactly 3 sales with it ... Of Hololens development. Though one was for a training cave that served thousands of new hires a year, so maybe one more order of magnitude in total?
But it brought a ton of clients in the door, so mission accomplished.
it may be consumer grade but the price point is too high for a consumer product, I'd have thought (apart from a small set of pretty well off consumers)
Wow, this actually sounds amazing. Not magical in any way, nor a real leap, but still... It's like looking at the first iPod. Looking back, it looks awfully retarded, but back then, it was the first primitive iteration of a paradigm-changing technology.
Personally, the only "convincing" I need is price, weight/convenience, and software. All will come in time, I'm certain. Eventually, these have a real chance of being way better than phones/laptops, e.g. they'll likely use much less battery (as the "screen" is smaller).
I understand your aversion to political correctness, but your use of the word "retarded" is very distracting from the solid point you are trying to make.
I'd say it's more like a palm-pilot vs a modern iphone or samsung galaxy... we still have a long ways to go. It's exciting sure, it'll change everything but..we have to wait for it to get to modern smartphone levels of coolness..
I wish more people knew this! There's a very middle-brow response to "well we've got system A, and system B, so obviously the combination will be better than A or B alone!" but this doesn't need to be the case. People think it's this way because of chess but that was apparently an anomaly.
It compared "the latest development build [of top chess engine Stocktish] compiled for OS X and running on a 3ghz 8-core Mac Pro." vs a highly ranked player and "the assistance of an older version of Rybka (about 200 points less than Stockfish's 3200+ rating), and it ran on a 2008 MacBook." I think the question is how does a top AI compare to the same top AI + (skilled?) human.
Congrats to ML on shipping! Achieving the technical challenge of seamless natural and artificial photon sources will pay dividends for many decades to come. But in the immediate term, market fit is going to be the next enormous challenge here. Their paradigm is dubbed "spatial computing". It is in a sense, "high-fidelity" augmented reality. Close range precision tolerances for delicate design work is probably the most demonstrable application. Although it has yet to be integrated into existing pipelines for microscopy, etc. However, CEO Rony Abovitz seems to be positioning the ML One Creator Edition as a consumer electronics device for casual gaming enthusiasts?
I am just unsure which demographic they are targeting with a $2500+ headset. The tagline: free your mind. With a poster that even includes a reference to a VW microbus. Obvious roots in psychedelic culture. For which, undoubtedly, the experience would be immensely hedonic and synesthetic. How large is this audience of virtual shamans?
Seems to me it is initially a 'developer release' for people to start working out what they want to do with it. That being said it sounds like it might be quite a challenge to get the price point down to something even a VR enthusiast might be interested in purchasing.
If there was a good AR app for managing medium businesses, this product could catch on quickly. The businesses could increase efficiency of their workers at very reasonable price.
I can think of good applications for this technology for example in shipyard inspection, factory management, city utilities workers, police, even farming operations.
The audience is mentioned in article - it's dev kit for content creators. It's too bulky for general consumer market and there is not enough content yet. I suspect the current processing power will also be upgraded in final product for higher fidelity of 3D graphics.
So far the gaming industry was driver behind tech, but with augmented reality being so useful for industry (navigating warehouses, for example), this might change. The prices will drop, but I don't expect ML will be priced at <$1000 anytime soon.
Psychedelic application would be very interesting. Imagine experiencing something like Waking Life or Scanner Darkly wherever you look. A gimmick, but good demonstration of tech.
What is the FoV compared to the HoloLens? The article reads like it has the same FoV issue but didn't go over specifics. Though we have to keep in mind that HoloLens is now an older device and a new version is coming out soon. So then the question becomes, did they ship this 2 years too late, or does it even matter?
I also find it interesting that instead of making it stand alone, they require a belt/pocket clip computer unlike Hololens. The headset seems much more compact, makes me wonder what Microsoft will be able to squeeze out in v2 of Hololens. Either way, competition is good.
> Tracking was generally good, but objects occasionally shifted or jittered. A few times, animated objects seized up altogether, which might have been an issue with tracking, Lightpack performance, or something else.
I tried a HoloLens last year[0] and, whatever its other fauls, the tracking was perfect and objects moved smoothly like they were actually real. If Magic Leap is behind Microsoft's two-year-old tech, that's a bad sign, especially when they've pitched themselves as being categorically better than all other AR.
Microsoft's software prowess may well turn out to be the deciding factor if it ever comes to a showdown between hololens and magicleap. I don't see a great big difference in hardware quality or tech. Software's going to be the differentiator, just like in the smartphone wars where iphone won everything in spite of the early hardware being lacklustre compared to competitors.
As always with Magic Leap, I'm still not seeing a single compelling use case. Sea turtles swimming around the air, or a T-rex on the desk is fun for a few minutes, but it's not worth the price of entry. At this point, I've lost all faith in their vision. After years of following their posts, they haven't demonstrated a single thing of value.
What are they expecting now? They honestly think developers are going to flock to this device with no audience for $2,250 and produce groundbreaking applications and games that will sell millions of Magic Leaps to consumers to recover their investment?
Why don't they take that 2.5 billion dollars, and prove a single application or game can be developed for this product that people will line up to buy? If they can't do it with unlimited money, almost a decade of time, and the future of their business depending on it, then why do they expect some random developers are going to pay money to do it for them?
I know this post sounds negative, but I'm 100% convinced this product will be dead on arrival and nothing more than a 2.5 billion dollar mistake to show a few hundred people floating jellyfish in their living room.
AR applications already provide concrete added value in construction where you can overlay the digital model with the site for inspections and such.
I would see Magic Leap falls to same category as hololens - which is used for real work in the construction industry - but only on a more affordable price point.
The key question is how easy it is to develop applications for it. Hololens basically consumes unity apps which makes it a pretty easy for development and deployment.
AR applications already provide concrete added value in construction where you can overlay the digital model with the site for inspections and such
You say that, but we built the leading product for this in 2014 (Visidraft) and AEC still isn't ready in 2018 for this for a host of reasons.
Forgetting for a moment that 99% of these applications are on tablets and phones - which is still too difficult to manage for most AEC firms - the problems inherent in the lack of infrastructure to solve the 3D content management, object localization, user collaboration and markup management are still unsolved. Not technically mind you, but in business processes and workflow.
Add HMD to that and you cut the market deployment by 1/1000th. So a demo here or there from DAQRI or Hololens does not prove the value of it being a serious and concrete product.
Beyond that though, the biggest problem was that it ends up providing the most value as a sales/collab tool between clients and developers, and we constantly heard that architects didn't want to use it because it put too much power into the client's hand. Imagine that.
So I'm not sure where you're getting the "provide concrete added value." Show me the successful product - not a demo, or a pilot product, but one that is generating profit at scale and is integrated into an entire business process at a firm like Gensler (one of our clients previously).
It's a theoretically great use case, but in practice, it requires too much from the user to make it work as a stable product.
That's an interesting POV and I do actually see business popping up whose core competency is managing 3d models. Particularly for retail products like furniture. No one has a really smooth process and costs are high, but there is definitely activity going on and progress is being made.
I can name probably a dozen companies trying to win the 3D object CRM game, but nobody is in the lead currently. It's still too early for standards to emerge and most content creators are duplicating effort across product lines eg. Target, Houzz, Wayfair are all modeling the same object in different ways (photogrammetry, hand modeling etc...).
3D content creation is one of, if not the biggest bottleneck for AR.
This is an area where Amazon/AWS/Sumerian are going to shine.
I can see a world where retailers on Amazon.com are incentivized or forced to submit 3D models of their products along when creating a for sale posting.
Consumers will put on their AR glasses, or use WebVR to to visualize the item before they purchase.
Amazon will have the gatekeeping power to force vendors to use a certain standard 3D modeling process, or have an in-house team receive the products and use photogrammetry/CAD modeling.
How much value/productivity will this generate - separate question but one worth asking.
However Amazon (et al) have trouble just getting good 2D images from Vendors and is not making much of a push at all to get vendors to build 3D content.
This is a long standing problem: Should retailers do the modeling or vendors? It's expensive and hard on infrastructure to do it, and CAD standards aren't consistent enough to use that avenue. Vendors aren't tech savvy and have questionable practices for investing in marketing/sales materials, including photography because it doesn't scale.
I could go all day on this, but I won't. Bottom line is, none of the major platforms are stepping up and being leaders in AR on the content side. It's pretty marginal efforts so the results are marginal. I think everyone is waiting around for the Apple glasses now.
Photogrammery software has become pretty remarkable. A single camera and a turntable will turn out fairly good 3d models/meshes as long as there aren't a lot of reflective surfaces.
Does Amazon have a history of forcing digital content to be input for certain items?
I've been really annoyed that all food sellers aren't required to provide a list of ingredients and nutritional info to Amazon when selling on the platform (the US government also doesn't make them available via the FDA). That data would let Amazon build a food graph so people could really search for products that fit them.
For example: I want a cookie that is like an Oreo, but has less sugar.
Today, they just can't answer these questions without making some big assumptions, and can't expose the ingredients via an API so we can build cool products with the data.
That's actually a really interesting idea. Big food co's would fight it like hell, and I don't think a large volume of food moves through Amazon.com at the moment, but the API possibilities here would be very fun to play around with.
You are quite right of the challenges but the technical competence of the largest engineering companies is quite sufficient to implement new solutions if they actually provide value and fit into their pipeline (err... that means most of the time that they can display dwg and revit models).
Salespeople will (often) say anything that - with some explanation and wordsmithing - is a true (albeit typically unverifiable) statement.
I feel like this is the start of explaining the why: "...architects didn't want to use it because it put too much power into the client's hand."
That's likely true for many more traditional Architectural professionals considering early AEC success case studies with AR/VR. I have to imagine the average Architect in a leadership role is battle-hardened by the changes that have displaced much of their fee, influence and involvement in the existing building construction framework. Giving up more of any of those likely feels like a loss for those individuals. Just as early IT professionals felt the loss of their wizard powers as computers and mobile became consumerized, Architects are feeling the loss of their wizard powers as clients become more informed and engaged.
AR remains from what I can see, the fodder of AE start-ups and larger firms placing their bets on the technology to address project design and coordination challenges. VR has already inundated every firm I work with - big and small - on most projects they undertake.
"the biggest problem was that it ends up providing the most value as a sales/collab tool between clients and developers"
That's not really a problem, rather it proves there is a valuable use case for it.
Depending on the process architects have varying power over the overall project process. This can vary a lot between regions, companies and domains (i.e residential, offshore, bridges, etc etc)
That's my thinking as well. There are probably a ton of industry applications in design, engineering and architecture. Folks who are used to wearing goggles and hardhats aren't worried about looking funny. And if you can prove real ROI for businesses, you can charge $5-10K for a sturdy headset and businesses will pay it. Trying to go mass market out of the gate seems like overreach.
Already existed for years at Daqri with pretty robust support, implementation capabilities and proof points in industry. Uptake is lackluster and sales cycles are long.
I'd be really curious to hear if you have more insights on why uptake is lackluster? Do you suspect AR glasses just aren't actually that useful for most industries? Or is it more that current technologies have specific limitations that prevent these kinds of products from living up to their potential?
More Simply: It's not solving user problems better/faster/cheaper than current solutions.
It's an order of magnitude harder to create 3D content than it is 2D content. Tying 3D content to the real world in a way that is useful and persistent is incredibly difficult. The AR form factor (phone or HMD) is still wonky and nonstandard. Too many other factors to consider still.
Isn't construction/architecture nowadays moving more and more to BMI software?
I'd assume that with a BMI model and AR capabilities (even from a phone) where you set a square (or some other shape) with known dimensions on the ground to calibrate and use GPS (or other positioning systems) for determining position/heading, doesn't seem like software for visualisation of models in-site should be that hard. Even on a current phone it should be doable.
What am I missing? Because it feels like there is some complexity I'm not considering.
It would be too much to really go into, but what I will say is that almost all of your assumptions are misguided.
I don't mean that in a mean way, but for example using GPS for AR anchoring is not viable and will never be. So we have to build computer vision systems for localizing content, and those are complex and expensive and have hardware, bandwidth and other constraints.
BIM is ubiquitous, but not easily integrated with other hardware, and the hardware best suited for it (HMD) are expensive and not yet everywhere - or even widely adopted.
"GPS for AR anchoring is not viable and will never be"
You can get centimeter level accuracy from GNSS with off the shelf custom antennae and software, see e.g. Trimble Catalyst https://catalyst.trimble.com
You can combine that with AR devices to get good enough positioning onsite for review purposes.
It's not precise enough for attaching nails and such, for which there are other location based solutions.
We actually have most of the pieces for a 'smart construction site' in existence as off the shelf components. But the construction industry is such that startups are not very well positioned to lead the change - hence I understand you disenchanted tone.
No, GNSS is not ready to go. Look at the submeter coverage area for GNSS, it's TINY. Go look at work that Todd Humphreys has been doing at UAustin for over a decade trying to do cm specific GNSS localiztion with wider area deployments. It's just not tractable, scalable or anything near ready for a mass market. Like there is no reason for GNSS to grow at all when we're now building cloud vision based localization systems.
You keep referencing Trimble, I get it, they are doing good work in a handful of these areas. But the reality is that the uptake of hardware by firms to support AR at a scale that would support a company, is nowhere close to ready.
I'm telling you, I've skinned this cat from every conceivable angle.
"But the reality is that the uptake of hardware by firms to support AR at a scale that would support a company, is nowhere close to ready.
I'm telling you, I've skinned this cat from every conceivable angle."
Ok, that angle I can agree on. I don't think there is any way a small company can provide an AR component and hit it big.
However, if an AR solution is bundled next to other computing infrastucture, with the import of files etc. handled, I've not seen anyone dismissing this concept.
The problem is that you need the entire infrastucture for project management and engineering to be digitized, and then you can add up the AR component to that.
Then AR is just one more "check box" in the feature lists of application suites offered by the incumbents. I think it will become an important checkbox, but like you said, there won't be an "Uber of AR" like there is no "Uber of DWG import".
Proving ROI is however a real problem. First you need software for your specific need and that itself can easily consume half a million dollar budget even for small team. Then you need to distribute these expensive devices. And then everything needs to actually work and improve the bottom line. Someone in company needs to approve those massive POs. May be there are few cases where these pays off overwhelmingly over traditional methods.
Whilst the Hololens is currently more expensive than this version of MagicLeap, I'll be interested to see what MS produce next year when the next version is scheduled to come out.
One thing that I think MagicLeap have got wrong for a business market is not working over glasses (it seems like you need to fit prescription lenses to the device)
That means you can't easily share the device with others, which I would think would be a common use case in business (i.e. most places won't buy one device per user, but a number of devices for a department)
> Whilst the Hololens is currently more expensive than this version of MagicLeap, I'll be interested to see what MS produce next year when the next version is scheduled to come out.
Microsoft can also sell the Hololens at cost to get people building on their cloud platform for that sweet, sweet, reoccurring revenue.
In comparison, MagicLeap has a lot of investors they need to make happy.
Absolutely. Similarly AR overlays of services under roads, in buildings and big refinaries and such. I think architects and engineers are an excellent target audience. As with Google Glass, ARs use case is going to be niche professions before consumer.
Totally disagree. AR will be the future of modern businesses in 10 years. Every employee will be equipped with this technology having a virtual keyboard, email inbox, avatar chat... all within one device.
You may be surprised to learn that the vast majority of white collar employees are already equipped with one device that has a keyboard, email inbox, and chat.
I got to try a laser keyboard[1] and it hurts to use it pretty quickly and isn't that accurate. I suppose we could just have a double-wide version of a wrist-wrest for the haptic feedback, but that doesn't necessarily help the accuracy issues.
You can pry my keyboard from my cold dead hands. No way I'd want to use a virtual keyboard with no tactile feedback. I try to avoid typing my phone whenever possible as it is already.
Why? What does a virtual keyboard give you that a real one doesn't? What does avatar chat give you that a Slack channel doesn't? I don't see any reason why these are compelling enough to change how you currently do work.
Your points are valid, but you should know that they have a few partnerships (that we already know about...) to produce AAA quality launch apps. So their investment in content might be bigger than you think.
One major application that we know about is in the comic book space. That's not a huge market, but there are definitely some hardcore fans that would be willing to pay the premium in order to wallpaper their homes in their favorite giant sized comic books.
For me, if the quality is high enough that I can read comics without serious eye strain, than I will be buying it.
My first thought was tabletop gaming: imagine real-time visuals for a D&D session à la the chessboard on the Millenium Falcon. Price point is too high for that at present though.
My reaction to most d&d players I know, is "cool, but no thanks". We are developers and play d&d to get AWAY from technology. We use it where it makes sense (I use a digital 2d map).. but the fun of d&d is in the mind, and having 3d monsters isn't helping the core game.
Honest question, do you play boardgames? I play tons of boardgames, and to me it always seems like the developers who rage on about “using apps to digitize boardgames” completely miss everything that I and my friends love about the games. I want to throw the dice myself, not press a button on my phone. When I play tricky economy games the fact that I need to do the math myself is a feature of the game not a bug. And when I play dungeons and dragons I want it to be all imagination. If I wanted to fight 3D fire breathing dragons in an immersive visual experiance I would be playing Skyrim not D&D.
Magic Leaps AR is like amazon was ten years ago. Its hemorrhaging money left, right and center, and it offers something no other is offering right now.
The chance, to be there, have a foot in the door, when this thing explodes and wraps the whole world in a new layer of devices.
And these devices have the chance to replace everything- you can see and must not touch to function. Want a comprehensive list - look around you.
PC-Screens, TV-Screens, Room-Decorations, Pets, Inflated-Ego-Expression - and all of this, in just one room. This can reform public spaces, city's will have themes on a daily basis- yesterday was Venetian carnival, today its inception town.
And the best of it all- none of these goods will require a environmental footprint to manufacture- trade will have a huge chunk taken out- and moved into a steam-like ecosystem. Who's entrance fee- will look like peanuts to the revenue gained.
The technology isn't there yet, of course, but the ultimate use case is replacing every computing/entertainment device you currently own that has a screen (plus all the other hypothetical use cases of AR)
Whether they can find compelling enough use cases to sustain them in the meantime is the real question (and I suppose that's what you're asking)
Oh.. I must have missed your rage comments against hololens that had a comparable influx of money, only internal in MS, for a much worse product.
Hololens is asking 3000$ for their product.
With a single focal plane instead of a double one like magic leap.
The vergence accommodation in magic leap apparently is so well done that even the most negative article against it, from the verge, couldn’t see any difference.
Honestly I would ask the “journalist” that wrote such a bad review if maybe was really that the objective???
For me if I can choose between looking at AR for less than one hour with a big headache because my eyes are playing pinball with my mind and looking for more than one hour to AR or mixed reality and “not notice anything because the resolution is too low” I would obviously choose the second option.
Not noticing anything means that magic leap reached their objective.
Your experience is seamless, you won’t even notice the different focal planes.
I'm glad to see a ML release a product but people who are overoptimistic about AR need to understand that this doesn't work in very low or bright light-- like being outdoors. So the idea that you are going to walk around a construction site, or get directions from it, are unrealistic. You are not going to wear it for long periods of time unless you are in a very controlled environment. Also, there is a long way to go in terms of field of view, so the idea that the display will annotate everything you see is a long ways off.
I believe this technology will advance, but I think some of the unrealistic expectations do not help.
Can Lightfield be done without glasses eventually? Every popular depiction of AR in sci-fi is glasses-free, because wearing glasses everytime you want to do AR is a nuisance and impractical. For example, the interactive and holographic models in The Expanse series. If Magic Leap is paving the way for that technology, then I hope they stay on their course despite the criticisms toward their first product.
One thing I feel nobody talks about with regards to AR is that it introduces a new paradigm, a new behavior that is "not normal". It asks you to wear something and walk around all day with information being displayed. That's not a muscle memory we have today. If you think about the most successful companies today, what they have done is that they have taken an existing behavior and make it better. We already shopped at stores and Amazon just made it easier to do it online. We already had friends and Facebook simply made it easier to interact with them. Google helped us search information faster that we were already looking for. Very few companies have introduced a completely new behavior to humans that we weren't already doing. In that sense, I am struggling to think about a behavior that AR and consequently Magic Leap will replace. I can think of B2B applications with oil industry and perhaps surgery. But that' niche. Beyond that, what exactly is it solving for ?
As someone who has owned every major VR HMD since Oculus DK1 and spent thousands of hours developing in VR I will not be buying this. We have soooo far to go yet in terms of hardware for VR/AR to truly catch on. I don't see anything here that is any more impressive than what Microsoft has been doing with Hololens for over 2 years now.
Even worse, are their pricing tiers [0] - you have to pay an extra $500 for "Early access to beta software and developer tools", which is just the height of absurdity. You then have to pay ANOTHER $500 for a "Priority Service Plan" and a "shoulder strap". I figured the company was shady but this is just hilarious.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadAR glasses won't be a thing until they stop trying to put a tiny TV screen in front of your face. It needs to fill your visual field.
They also won't be a mass adopted thing until they don't make you look like an 80s cartoon character.
The question remains whether VR will still have it's time before AR becomes reasonable.
Until that is answered, VC money will continue to be sacrificed in a giant fire on the alter of getting there first.
The problem at the moment is we are technologically well behind where we need to be to make practical AR in terms of screen resolutions.
I think the screen resolution isn't that big of a deal for many applications (mostly games and stuff like it), and it's not like it's impossible right now, just expensive.
The bigger hurdle from where I'm sitting is getting framerates and latency in a good position. Everyone I've seen use a current gen VR headset gets horribly motion sick in a lot of cases. That NEEDS to be fixed, and I think that comes down to crazy high refresh rates, and super low latency, both of which really crank up the processing power needed.
But regardless, I don't think resolution is going to be what makes or breaks VR/AR. We worked with computers just fine when they were ~500 "pixels" tall, and it's not like screen resolution technology has hit a wall that it can't get past yet, things are still improving.
I'm with the author, I absolutely think this kind of thing will be the next step in computing. It just seems so obvious. Get rid of screeens and wear a headset that lets you put application windows anywhere in your view.
I'm glad they questioned a lot of Magic Leap's claims and didn't just parrot back the taglines and act like it's magic.
That being said, I don't think Magic Leap is going to be the product that "wins". It seems from this article that it's going to run its own "OS", with it's own special apps, and most likely limited integration with other stuff.
I don't want a new "device", a new os, a new "platform", I want a screen that I strap to my face. One that I can eventually connect to my Linux machine, or my windows desktop, or my MacBook. Maybe in wrong, but I feel like Magic Leap is going to die if it demands that kind of integration, regardless of how technically impressive it is.
Hololens on the other hand is something I'm giving a good amount of consideration to, because they seem to be focusing on "a screen you strap to your face".
Anyone who's tried VR knows what that means - 1920x1080 is not enough useful lines for serious work with text, it's just barely enough for gaming.
I think you are right about higher resolution being needed for real "work", but since this doesn't run a "real" OS either, i'm not sure how much work you could get done on it anyway.
If by computing you mean video/game consumption then yeah sure, but for pretty much every other application (programming, editing, reading, etc) this is a poor medium.
Games and stuff are nice, but everyone I've known that uses a vive or oculus gets tired of needing to move around in VR pretty fast.
But being able to get rid of the 3-4 screens on my desk, and replace them with a headset that I wear? That I can put windows everywhere? Behind me, far left, even throw one up above me to glance at? That's HUGE imo. And the cost can quickly make sense.
I'm in the market for a new set of screens for my machine. I want to go to 4k. I'm looking at realistically $1500 for new screens. If something like Magic Leap or hololens was only 2x more than that and could get even "1080p equivalent" resolution compared to my screens, i'd happily drop the extra cash right now.
Yes, it's still not at that point as far as I can tell, but I don't think needing to increase resolution a bit is going to be the thing that ends up making VR/AR "impossible".
Are you sure about this?
Because that's the idea i'm envisioning. Being able to put papers or applications on a virtual whiteboard that completely encircles you. Move them to where you want, make them "fullscreen" (full-view?), maybe even be able to move them forward and backwards in focus and "position". Hell, with some extra work, we could even put them on surfaces around the room. Throw a monitoring program on the wall next to my window, "project" keybindings on top of my keyboard's keys when i'm pressing parts of a combo, etc...
Hell, even if you hate the idea of an "augmented reality desktop", you could just project "fake" screens and use them the same as you normally do.
I mean it's not like our current tools just go away and I'd start craning my neck to look up and to the left as far as possible for 9 hours a day... You could still have tools like "multiple desktops", and change/move them. But now I have the option of putting my task manager above me at like a 60 degree angle straight ahead and can glance up at it when needed.
(And before you ask: Yes, I use one laptop screen for all my work.)
What in the world do you put on those other seven screens?
> offline documentation (i.e., not in a web browser)
This deeply confuses me. Why does it matter if the documentation is in a browser or not?
man and info come distraction-free out of the box.
I can't think of a situation where I'd need to focus on all the things you list simultaneously – even just having e-mail on the screen while I'm trying to code is distracting – so I'd rather have them hidden. Sure, I'll have a couple code windows and documentation or logs open, but that fits with room to spare on a single monitor.
The only people I know using 4+ screens are monitoring Satellites or industrial processing equipment.
With this, you could just float individual windows around you. Quick splitting and navigating between splits in Vim is already one of the features of this editor I use the most - and if I could do that in 3d, leaving small splits all around me and moving them around, it would be an immense boost in productivity.
Of course you would, that's like saying "if something like a Tesla could operate completely autonomously in all weather and road conditions I'd happily drop the extra cash right now!". Unfortunately, this is a "hard" problem and while I'm not saying it won't happen, we are nowhere near anything that can render 1080p VR monitors... 4k VR monitors are unlikely to be possible (in a consumer product) within the next 20 years, and you can definitely be sure that anything like that will not be wireless.
Think about where this will be in 10-20 years, not where it is now. It will be like putting a pair of glasses on, not a huge headset. Once your workspace can exist in 3 dimensions, new paradigms will emerge for arranging a "desktop" that we can't even envisage right now.
Huh? I'd love to get rid of the chunky, heavy, power-hungry screen. Read lying in bed? Check! Program on an escalator? Check! Watch a big-screen movie while eating in McDonalds? Check!
I don't think wearing headsets is a practical way to do everyday computing and it can even be bad for your eyes.
With a monitor you can look away, look out the window, etc. but with a headset the screen is always in front of your eyes, so you have to take the whole thing off if you want to give your eyes some rest from the screen.
It may be good for shorter special tasks like gaming, vr assisted surgery and such, but it doesn't seem a good match for programming, for example, which you do all day.
With a good AR headset, that focal point can be adjusted and moved around (possibly even in realtime if you want, move a screen to be "further away from you"). Not to mention that when you aren't looking at something that the headset is "generating", it's just basically a clear piece of plastic that you can see through. They are basically bad sunglasses.
You can look away from a "projected" screen just as easily as you can look away from a physical screen.
Check out a Hololens if you ever get a chance. You can choose if the object you create is always in front of you or 'stuck' in a fixed point in (virtual) space. If I place a 'screen' on a wall it will stay exactly where I put it no matter how I move around.
I don't care if i'm tethered to a $3000 desktop PC, because I have an office anyway and it's where i'm going to work.
Presumably you're still going to need a keyboard.
Unfortunately it doesn’t matter what you (the consumer) wants. Do you want a single search engine that dominates 90+% of the market and serves shitty ads to you all over the internet? Do you want a single walled garden for your social presence online that captures/sells your data and serves you shitty ads? Do you want 2 main mobile OS’s that tightly control their platforms and the apps available to you?
I will say this though...people saying they want a screen strapped to their face, as you did, is an advertisers wet dream and these tech companies can’t wait to sell you that screen and serve you those ads.
It seems obvious to me that there's a progression. Back in Apple II, C64, DOS days computers generally ran a single app at a time.
Windowing systems were invented allowing multiple apps to share the same screen. This is what we've had for 30-40 years.
For AR though we need multiple apps to share the same 3D space all running at the same time just like I have 14 apps running on my laptop right now.
I need my mapping app drawing the path to my destination. I need my transportation app showing me the next bus/train coming. I need my virtual pet app adding my virtual pet around my feet. I need my social networking app to show me my friends info next to them in me view. I need my dating app highlighting people that are potential matches.
All of this has to happen simultaneously and at 90fps. That will require an entirely new OS and possibly new hardware (dual GPUs, ... or pre-emptable GPUs) one for compositing the 3D world at 90fps and one for apps so if app takes too long to generate it's portion of the scene the entire OS doesn't start running low. An old OS that only runs a single 3D app at a time and who's apps don't share the same 3D space will be a huge hindrance to AR being truly revolutionary.
I'm not saying Magic Leap's OS is that OS but that OS is not MacOS/iOS/Windows/Linux/Android
Sure, it might require special hardware and software (even your screen has it's own software and processing that it is doing on the signals coming from your desktop), and at the end of the day the OS would need to change and evolve to handle this new paradigm, but it's not impossible to imagine a system where the "PC" does what it does now, and just tells the "VR" sub-processor/sub-machine where to put the rendered "window".
Already there are some VR apps that basically wrap your normal "windows" desktop in almost a cylinder around you and you can move screens around on it as much as you want with current VR headsets.
One of those is not like the others: “Linux” is not a graphical environment. If you had said “X11” or “Wayland” (or even “Gnome” or “KDE”, etc.), I would have agreed with you, but “Linux” could perfectly well be the base of an entirely new 3D-based application environment.
This is something that I've given some practical thought to. The approach that I considered was to treat each application process as a client to a '3D space' service through which it could add and modify defined geometry.
Failure/slowness of any given application would leave the existing application geometry in-situ within the 3D environment and avoid the most jarring extremes of user experience. I imagined that the service interface itself would mandate the availability of simplified geometries together with meta information. This would allow the service to appropriately degrade the 3D rendered environment to maintain high framerates.
I think this approach could be effective and would not require a new OS.
Apps which crash or otherwise stop rendering trigger a fade out to the white-room VR space, whereas frame-skips are handled by hard drops (so the effect is like a teleport to avoid motion sickness).
Like, Valve have really done an incredible job on the user application interface there.
Examples:
In my state we have a govt funded web/native app that provides the fuel prices at all the service stations around you. If there was a mapping extension you could turn on, it would show this directly within the mapping app, and also an indicator "cheapest fuel within X km is at Y location" when you're in navigation mode.
In camera view with an extension turned on, provide object detection similar to how QR codes are recognised.
This is already true with even the oldest and most rudimentary AR/VR systems, eg, Gear VR. The interface and head tracking is 90fps all the time. If the app is slow, the viewport will not freeze. Just it will be stuck on one frame.
It may come from ML 4 generations and a decade from now, it could come from google, apple, microsoft, or some as-yet unknown company... but it will come and it'll change everything.
Magic Leap has been under a lot of pressure to prove that they are not vapor ware. Which, is why I assume that they chose to launch this now. Unfortunately, their vision and their product are obviously still miles apart and the content is a little underwhelming right now.
Probably the best way to look at this would be as SDK for early adopters. The first version of the product that doesn't require a ton of NDAs to be signed to even be allowed in the same room with it. However, the price point is such that this is clearly not intended to be a mass market product.
For a mass market product the price could actually be fine but then the experience needs to match the price. People spend way more on fancy TVs, high end laptops, gaming hardware, etc. For that to happen there needs to be a supply of compelling content.
The UX for AR is going to have to be substantially different from whatever your current OS does. Overlaying a lot of 2D windows in your peripheral vision doesn't really make a lot of sense. Sure, it's a neat trick but probably not that practical. Similarly a lot of mobile UX is inherently 2D currently and actually optimized for tiny screens manipulated by clumsy fingers. Slapping some AR on that is not going to be very compelling.
With VR this was more straightforward since there were a lot of 3D games that with a little work can be awesome in VR. So far gaming is the killer use case for VR. People spend money on the latest VR kit so they can play all the awesome games that are out there and immerse themselves.
On the AR front the most popular thing so far has been pokemon go and a range of me too style clones of that. That was only possible because of a critical mass of cheap, camera equipped mobile phones. With AR we need new content specifically made for AR. Most VR content does not port over well to AR since the whole point of that content is full immersion and the whole point of AR is not replacing reality but enhancing it.
Clearly magic leaps strategy for this is to have their own OS, app store, devices, and platform. This sounds like a risky strategy since clearly all their marketing is about the qualities of the device and how cool the technology powering that is. It's significant how they are not talking about the rest of the ecosystem.
From what I've heard via a friend of a friend on the hololens team, MS is putting a lot of resources into building out that with a lot of cool R&D in the pipeline. MS of course has a long history of cool R&D projects that ultimately never turned into products but this looks like they are pretty serious about it.
MagicLeap is "An OS for VR/AR stuff that you make apps for", and that's not what I'm personally looking for regardless of how many other OSs it will integrate with.
My "perfect" AR system is one where I can run Slack, Chrome, my code editor, a few terminal windows, and more, all unchanged. And MagicLeap looks like it will never be that. HoloLens will, even if only on windows.
Now I might be wrong, and MagicLeap might knock it out of the park and become a new "category" of device like phone apps did, but I still can't use a phone OS to do real work outside of a few choice situations, and I REALLY want a VR/AR device that lets me do real work.
I wish them the best, and while I get annoyed at every article that talks about it handwaving away the tech and calling it "magic", I hope they do well, because more competition is always a good thing, but from what I've seen they aren't making a device for me.
Disclosure: I’m not buying a magic leap, I have no financial interest on it, I just want some working environment that I would really really enjoy.
Weight concerns are valid - I wish they included actual figures for the weight of the Magic Leap for comparison.
What will be very interesting is to see what Microsoft have come up with when they release their next version (which is looking like Q1 2019).
If Magicleap is still well ahead at that point, then it shoudl go well for them, but if MS can leapfrog them, that's going to dampen their prospects.
Interesting deployment strategy.
I still remain curious what do they really mean by the lightfield. Does anyone have more information here?
The best I can infer is they don’t actually have a “screen” with pixels per say, but they somehow attenuate the light as it goes through the “rectangle”. Why I say this is different than pixels is that it almost seems like they are doing something more “analog”. By attenuating the light as it comes in, rather than adding its own light, I see how that you could get a different “type” of light that may be better from a human processing perspective. The “screen” would effectively consist of a high resolution array of “windows” that selectively attenuate the light going through them. It would also explain why they can’t take “video” of the experience.
Do others agree with my shot in the dark? Or is there some other way they could be realizing this technology?
> A Dynamic Digital Lightfield is a binocular display that can project digital objects into the world such that light enters the eye as if it were reflected from a real object. Our lightfield is biomimetic (mimics our biology/physiology). Magic Leap One creates a seamless experience where digital and analog lightfields combine into a single scene. For example, with Magic Leap One, you can render digital flowers in a physical vase so they can appear fresh every day.
Like that. How is that different from what Hololens does?
> Abovitz told me that the light can only be interpreted by a human — not a camera — so part of his problem in launching his product is that he can't film the experience.
How is a camera sufficiently different from the human eye that you physically can't film an image through the headset? Or is this just saying you can't film it in the sense that a flat image on a monitor can't really convey the experience of trying the headset on for yourself? (The latter is a well known problem with VR.) If the latter, again, how is that different from Hololens?
All-in-all the product does look promising; it appears to be less bulky than competing headsets and the devkit is less expensive too. I'm just not sure whether the display technology is a competitive advantage or not.
However, I think Magic Leap has reduced the number of layers down to something like three [edit: two], from the many more layers they were showing before.
I call it a "Light field display" - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_field See also the reverse "Light field camera" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-field_camera
The "dynamic" part I don't understand yet - something to do with eye tracking allowing a higher resolution than otherwise would be available?
Where's "multifocal display" from as terminology?
As for where I heard the term "multifocal display", I'd recommend checking out Douglas Lanman's talk at SID Display Week, where he goes into detail on a whole bunch of possible solutions to vergence-accommodation conflict in VR headsets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbRvkS3GDsw
It was nothing like Magic Leap, no 3d, just test 2d images - and yet, these razor-sharp, light images that I was able to see in front of the sun, were better than any computer display that I've ever seen. I don't know how would I convince anyone about the quality of the product aside from telling them to see for themselves.
This is most obvious in something like the Meta2: imagine you started with a ballcap, used double sided tape to attach a smartphone to the bottom of the rim (touching your eyebrows and screen pointed down), lastly attach a reflective piece of plastic from the forward edge of the brim angling down to around your nose.
Or just look at pictures of it here (though they are all cleverly angled to not show the eyebrow screen): https://www.metavision.com/
The resulting image is both digital (from the LCD) and the reality of what you're seeing around you, but by necessity it's dimmer and the digital screen images look more translucent.
The promise of MagicLeap and lightfield projection is that you can get a fundamentally much more solid looking image by directly projecting light into your eye (with no intermediary lenses), though it's unclear exactly how much of this is happening in the current MagicLeap developer release.
It's not a perfect analogy, but it's the difference between looking at a computer screen with and without some tinted sunglasses, or a couple of 2 way mirrors between you and your monitor.
So they basically have the same category of tech as the hololens but with a few additions, tricks and optimizations.
You're correct in that the display tech isn't the differentiator right now. They are hoping the ML One does well enough to support actually getting the FSD to market. It's iterative not revolutionary.
That's not to take anything away from them, this is an exceedingly hard problem and space so it's astonishing they are getting anything out at all.
However, the general concept of a "light field display" is worth knowing.
Normal displays work by creating pixels that glow. Each pixel emits light in all directions. That passes through your eye if it is looking at the object, which focuses it back into one point on the retina.
In a (pure imaginary) light field display, instead individual rays of light are produced, not pixels. The individual rays can be faked so even though emitted very near your eye, they are focused by your eye and your brain thinks they are further away.
Possible advantages of this (off the top of my head based on reasoning from the physics and the way vision works and the way existing displays are used):
- Can create objects at any distance - including infinity. Your brain (it's stereoscopy tricked) will believe they really are at that distance.
- The viewer can change focus, and the objects will correctly blur and come in and out of focus.
- An individual large object could have varying distance and focus across its form as in the real world.
- Because of the improved stereo and focus, in an AR display especially, there will be less contrast between the projected objects and the real world. They will just seem "more real" in comparison to real objects.
- Vision correction. In theory a light field display could project images that correct for any vision defects you have - dynamically. (In practice the talk of special lenses for glasses whereas in the OP article shows that Magic Leap isn't at a level it can do that yet)
- Special effects. So of course you can then do other funky things - play with faking visual defects for special effects. Your character could appear to need glasses, and then get them as a powerup etc. Or you could make someone's vision blur when they're tired or about to die. Or have a boss which is always out of focus in an odd way.
Of course Magic Leap won't be that good. It is only digital. It will be granular both in normal resolution and in effective depth of field resolution. But still... It really does sound like it has some of the above benefits.
From the very weak way ML is using the term light field, anytime there is light, there is a light field. An LCD monitor produces a light field.
1. There's a neat hardware size progression for ML that was posted on Twitter: MagicLeap's gone from a device like you stare through at the optometrists office down to something comparable to a scuba mask.
https://twitter.com/karanganesan/status/1024970520205307904?...
2. There are a few different ways to achieve AR style displays and what Magic Leap has chosen is the hard way -> lightfields and eye tracking (two technologies that haven't really been attempted to ship at scale).
3. This is still a developers' release - and not truly a "paradigm shift" or whatever overhyped term you want to use.
Separate from all that, I still think the end game of AR (in the next 10ish years) is to be the thing that comes "next" after smartphones. The proper way to view this ML Dev kit is that it's the equivalent to a PalmPilot or other barely functional PDA that had some good ideas, but didn't quite hit the right inflection point of portability, screen, battery life, form factor, etc. but that paves the way to get there.
In HN discussions of it, it's been "over-dismissed". In my recollection, the majority of the comments viewed it as smoke and mirrors. Many were basically or even outright saying it was fraudulent.
See for yourself: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=magic%20leap&sort=byPopularity...
This version of Magic Leap's display has nothing to do with light fields. It is a wave guide optic, just like Epson Moverio, Hololens (the term holographic also implies nothing special in terms of optics, it's a wave guide display combined with perspective rendering), and almost all other see-through HMDs. Magic Leap made headlines when they teased their oscillating fiber display, which had potential to render light fields, but that has not been pursued with this release. That's not to say they won't pursue it in the future, it's just not relevant to this product.
Next, eye tracking actually doesn't affect what is rendered to the display. The relationship of the headset display's field of view to the user is rigidly fixed even if your eyes move; different objects should not be rendered when moving only your eyes.
Rather, eye tracking is used for contextual information and user interaction. Gaze direction could be an input to foviated rendering, or you could use your eyes to select and manipulate digital objects.
Nothing I've said is meant to detract from ML's product; it's a very exciting development and a huge accomplishment for ML and the XR industry. I just think we should keep these points in context.
I disagree. Hololens is used for plenty of custom applications in the construction industry. You just don't hear about them because they are pretty much inhouse projects, likely implemented on top of unity (hence low cost and simple to deploy).
Here is an example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF8H_GAm8mM
No consumer killer apps yet, that is of course true. But I wouldn't see AR in any major way in consumer space - just like you don't have HUD displays in a large category of vehicles, even though they are critical to military cockpits.
Personally, I'd put money on the number of people using HoloLens outside of dev teams in applications like this being in the low hundreds/thousands, but would love to be shown data to the contrary. Cool youtube videos unfortunately do not really indicate anything.
But it brought a ton of clients in the door, so mission accomplished.
According to the article in The Verge [0], CEO Rony Abovitz says it is a “full-blown, working consumer-grade product.”
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/8/17662040/magic-leap-one-cr...
Personally, the only "convincing" I need is price, weight/convenience, and software. All will come in time, I'm certain. Eventually, these have a real chance of being way better than phones/laptops, e.g. they'll likely use much less battery (as the "screen" is smaller).
This isn't always the case. The best Centaur Chess players (Human + AI) still lose to the best AI: https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfish-outlasts-nakamura-...
I am just unsure which demographic they are targeting with a $2500+ headset. The tagline: free your mind. With a poster that even includes a reference to a VW microbus. Obvious roots in psychedelic culture. For which, undoubtedly, the experience would be immensely hedonic and synesthetic. How large is this audience of virtual shamans?
I can think of good applications for this technology for example in shipyard inspection, factory management, city utilities workers, police, even farming operations.
So far the gaming industry was driver behind tech, but with augmented reality being so useful for industry (navigating warehouses, for example), this might change. The prices will drop, but I don't expect ML will be priced at <$1000 anytime soon.
Psychedelic application would be very interesting. Imagine experiencing something like Waking Life or Scanner Darkly wherever you look. A gimmick, but good demonstration of tech.
They haven't done that.
[1] https://www.kguttag.com/2018/06/10/magic-leap-livestream-02-...
I also find it interesting that instead of making it stand alone, they require a belt/pocket clip computer unlike Hololens. The headset seems much more compact, makes me wonder what Microsoft will be able to squeeze out in v2 of Hololens. Either way, competition is good.
> Tracking was generally good, but objects occasionally shifted or jittered. A few times, animated objects seized up altogether, which might have been an issue with tracking, Lightpack performance, or something else.
I tried a HoloLens last year[0] and, whatever its other fauls, the tracking was perfect and objects moved smoothly like they were actually real. If Magic Leap is behind Microsoft's two-year-old tech, that's a bad sign, especially when they've pitched themselves as being categorically better than all other AR.
[0] My thoughts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14106028#14107939
What are they expecting now? They honestly think developers are going to flock to this device with no audience for $2,250 and produce groundbreaking applications and games that will sell millions of Magic Leaps to consumers to recover their investment?
Why don't they take that 2.5 billion dollars, and prove a single application or game can be developed for this product that people will line up to buy? If they can't do it with unlimited money, almost a decade of time, and the future of their business depending on it, then why do they expect some random developers are going to pay money to do it for them?
I know this post sounds negative, but I'm 100% convinced this product will be dead on arrival and nothing more than a 2.5 billion dollar mistake to show a few hundred people floating jellyfish in their living room.
I would see Magic Leap falls to same category as hololens - which is used for real work in the construction industry - but only on a more affordable price point.
The key question is how easy it is to develop applications for it. Hololens basically consumes unity apps which makes it a pretty easy for development and deployment.
You say that, but we built the leading product for this in 2014 (Visidraft) and AEC still isn't ready in 2018 for this for a host of reasons.
Forgetting for a moment that 99% of these applications are on tablets and phones - which is still too difficult to manage for most AEC firms - the problems inherent in the lack of infrastructure to solve the 3D content management, object localization, user collaboration and markup management are still unsolved. Not technically mind you, but in business processes and workflow.
Add HMD to that and you cut the market deployment by 1/1000th. So a demo here or there from DAQRI or Hololens does not prove the value of it being a serious and concrete product.
Beyond that though, the biggest problem was that it ends up providing the most value as a sales/collab tool between clients and developers, and we constantly heard that architects didn't want to use it because it put too much power into the client's hand. Imagine that.
So I'm not sure where you're getting the "provide concrete added value." Show me the successful product - not a demo, or a pilot product, but one that is generating profit at scale and is integrated into an entire business process at a firm like Gensler (one of our clients previously).
It's a theoretically great use case, but in practice, it requires too much from the user to make it work as a stable product.
[1] https://www.architectmagazine.com/videos/visidraft-augmented...
3D content creation is one of, if not the biggest bottleneck for AR.
I can see a world where retailers on Amazon.com are incentivized or forced to submit 3D models of their products along when creating a for sale posting.
Consumers will put on their AR glasses, or use WebVR to to visualize the item before they purchase.
Amazon will have the gatekeeping power to force vendors to use a certain standard 3D modeling process, or have an in-house team receive the products and use photogrammetry/CAD modeling.
How much value/productivity will this generate - separate question but one worth asking.
However Amazon (et al) have trouble just getting good 2D images from Vendors and is not making much of a push at all to get vendors to build 3D content.
This is a long standing problem: Should retailers do the modeling or vendors? It's expensive and hard on infrastructure to do it, and CAD standards aren't consistent enough to use that avenue. Vendors aren't tech savvy and have questionable practices for investing in marketing/sales materials, including photography because it doesn't scale.
I could go all day on this, but I won't. Bottom line is, none of the major platforms are stepping up and being leaders in AR on the content side. It's pretty marginal efforts so the results are marginal. I think everyone is waiting around for the Apple glasses now.
https://www.recode.net/2017/11/16/16666662/williams-sonoma-o...
I've been really annoyed that all food sellers aren't required to provide a list of ingredients and nutritional info to Amazon when selling on the platform (the US government also doesn't make them available via the FDA). That data would let Amazon build a food graph so people could really search for products that fit them.
For example: I want a cookie that is like an Oreo, but has less sugar.
Today, they just can't answer these questions without making some big assumptions, and can't expose the ingredients via an API so we can build cool products with the data.
http://mixedreality.trimble.com
You are quite right of the challenges but the technical competence of the largest engineering companies is quite sufficient to implement new solutions if they actually provide value and fit into their pipeline (err... that means most of the time that they can display dwg and revit models).
Hololens 2 and Trimble (and Andromeda) ... If they get it right ...
I feel like this is the start of explaining the why: "...architects didn't want to use it because it put too much power into the client's hand."
That's likely true for many more traditional Architectural professionals considering early AEC success case studies with AR/VR. I have to imagine the average Architect in a leadership role is battle-hardened by the changes that have displaced much of their fee, influence and involvement in the existing building construction framework. Giving up more of any of those likely feels like a loss for those individuals. Just as early IT professionals felt the loss of their wizard powers as computers and mobile became consumerized, Architects are feeling the loss of their wizard powers as clients become more informed and engaged.
AR remains from what I can see, the fodder of AE start-ups and larger firms placing their bets on the technology to address project design and coordination challenges. VR has already inundated every firm I work with - big and small - on most projects they undertake.
That's not really a problem, rather it proves there is a valuable use case for it.
Depending on the process architects have varying power over the overall project process. This can vary a lot between regions, companies and domains (i.e residential, offshore, bridges, etc etc)
https://daqri.com/
https://shop.daqri.com/
More Simply: It's not solving user problems better/faster/cheaper than current solutions.
It's an order of magnitude harder to create 3D content than it is 2D content. Tying 3D content to the real world in a way that is useful and persistent is incredibly difficult. The AR form factor (phone or HMD) is still wonky and nonstandard. Too many other factors to consider still.
I'd assume that with a BMI model and AR capabilities (even from a phone) where you set a square (or some other shape) with known dimensions on the ground to calibrate and use GPS (or other positioning systems) for determining position/heading, doesn't seem like software for visualisation of models in-site should be that hard. Even on a current phone it should be doable.
What am I missing? Because it feels like there is some complexity I'm not considering.
I don't mean that in a mean way, but for example using GPS for AR anchoring is not viable and will never be. So we have to build computer vision systems for localizing content, and those are complex and expensive and have hardware, bandwidth and other constraints.
BIM is ubiquitous, but not easily integrated with other hardware, and the hardware best suited for it (HMD) are expensive and not yet everywhere - or even widely adopted.
You can get centimeter level accuracy from GNSS with off the shelf custom antennae and software, see e.g. Trimble Catalyst https://catalyst.trimble.com
You can combine that with AR devices to get good enough positioning onsite for review purposes.
It's not precise enough for attaching nails and such, for which there are other location based solutions.
We actually have most of the pieces for a 'smart construction site' in existence as off the shelf components. But the construction industry is such that startups are not very well positioned to lead the change - hence I understand you disenchanted tone.
No, GNSS is not ready to go. Look at the submeter coverage area for GNSS, it's TINY. Go look at work that Todd Humphreys has been doing at UAustin for over a decade trying to do cm specific GNSS localiztion with wider area deployments. It's just not tractable, scalable or anything near ready for a mass market. Like there is no reason for GNSS to grow at all when we're now building cloud vision based localization systems.
You keep referencing Trimble, I get it, they are doing good work in a handful of these areas. But the reality is that the uptake of hardware by firms to support AR at a scale that would support a company, is nowhere close to ready.
I'm telling you, I've skinned this cat from every conceivable angle.
I'm telling you, I've skinned this cat from every conceivable angle."
Ok, that angle I can agree on. I don't think there is any way a small company can provide an AR component and hit it big.
However, if an AR solution is bundled next to other computing infrastucture, with the import of files etc. handled, I've not seen anyone dismissing this concept.
The problem is that you need the entire infrastucture for project management and engineering to be digitized, and then you can add up the AR component to that.
Then AR is just one more "check box" in the feature lists of application suites offered by the incumbents. I think it will become an important checkbox, but like you said, there won't be an "Uber of AR" like there is no "Uber of DWG import".
One thing that I think MagicLeap have got wrong for a business market is not working over glasses (it seems like you need to fit prescription lenses to the device)
That means you can't easily share the device with others, which I would think would be a common use case in business (i.e. most places won't buy one device per user, but a number of devices for a department)
Microsoft can also sell the Hololens at cost to get people building on their cloud platform for that sweet, sweet, reoccurring revenue.
In comparison, MagicLeap has a lot of investors they need to make happy.
Agreed. 10 years from now, AR will still be the future of modern business.
I'd be cautious about that.
I got to try a laser keyboard[1] and it hurts to use it pretty quickly and isn't that accurate. I suppose we could just have a double-wide version of a wrist-wrest for the haptic feedback, but that doesn't necessarily help the accuracy issues.
1 - https://www.amazon.com/Brookstone-FBA_mp-796246-Projection-V...
The most awful thing ever.
One major application that we know about is in the comic book space. That's not a huge market, but there are definitely some hardcore fans that would be willing to pay the premium in order to wallpaper their homes in their favorite giant sized comic books.
For me, if the quality is high enough that I can read comics without serious eye strain, than I will be buying it.
My reaction to most d&d players I know, is "cool, but no thanks". We are developers and play d&d to get AWAY from technology. We use it where it makes sense (I use a digital 2d map).. but the fun of d&d is in the mind, and having 3d monsters isn't helping the core game.
The chance, to be there, have a foot in the door, when this thing explodes and wraps the whole world in a new layer of devices.
And these devices have the chance to replace everything- you can see and must not touch to function. Want a comprehensive list - look around you.
PC-Screens, TV-Screens, Room-Decorations, Pets, Inflated-Ego-Expression - and all of this, in just one room. This can reform public spaces, city's will have themes on a daily basis- yesterday was Venetian carnival, today its inception town.
And the best of it all- none of these goods will require a environmental footprint to manufacture- trade will have a huge chunk taken out- and moved into a steam-like ecosystem. Who's entrance fee- will look like peanuts to the revenue gained.
What about HoloLens, maybe Google Glass 2, and a few other less well funded competitors like Meta 2?
Whether they can find compelling enough use cases to sustain them in the meantime is the real question (and I suppose that's what you're asking)
For me if I can choose between looking at AR for less than one hour with a big headache because my eyes are playing pinball with my mind and looking for more than one hour to AR or mixed reality and “not notice anything because the resolution is too low” I would obviously choose the second option. Not noticing anything means that magic leap reached their objective. Your experience is seamless, you won’t even notice the different focal planes.
I believe this technology will advance, but I think some of the unrealistic expectations do not help.
So, have they really accomplished anything other than creating a new HMD, one with less of an ecosystem than existing products?
Even worse, are their pricing tiers [0] - you have to pay an extra $500 for "Early access to beta software and developer tools", which is just the height of absurdity. You then have to pay ANOTHER $500 for a "Priority Service Plan" and a "shoulder strap". I figured the company was shady but this is just hilarious.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/eqxiEjT.png