Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside Magic Leap

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 220 posts

Re: Inside Magic Leap

#111

Post by bobsil1 »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #79
spyder wrote: post #41

I believe Magic Leap has a new kind of display technology, but the article is pretty bullshit-sounding with statements like this: "Throw out your PC, your laptop and your mobile phone, because the computing power you need will be in your glasses, and they can make a display appear anywhere, at any size you like." Yeah sure, they not only made a new display tech but integrated the computing power of desktops or laptop…

Uploadvr demystified this stuff a couple years ago: http://uploadvr.com/magic-leap-how-it-works/ Magic leap is a pair of glasses you wear on your face that displays AR imagery through a clear glass lens. There's a cable leading from these glasses to your pocket where you have a tablet-size device doing all the heavy lifting, most likely using mobile SoC's. Pretty sure you can't run a desktop CPU and GPU on a pocketab…

- Unlike VR, they don't have to render backgrounds

- FOV is apparently their big advantage, along with focus zones

- They could do hard occlusion with an LCD mask. Or they could punt til v2, and soft-occlude with blur using their stacked diffraction plates.

Re: Inside Magic Leap

#112

Post by bobsil1 »

mey wrote: post #53
votr wrote: post #46

I want to believe Magic Leap is going to deliver. With investments from tech companies AND banks AND movie studios, and with half-a-dozen R&D outposts all over the world, it's hard to believe these investors just bought into vaporware.

Having worked with VC's before, there isn't always a clear domain understanding of the problem they are investing in. Additionally, once funding snowballs, later investors can incorrectly assume due diligence has been taken care of by earlier investors. I would expect that we've seen what MagicLeap is targeting in both Google Glass and later Microsoft HoloLens. So conceptually the systems and optics are proven at som…

Probably similar to HoloLens, very different from Glass.

There are ways to hard-occlude, e.g. LCD mask, but might be punted til a later version.

Re: Inside Magic Leap

#113

Post by bobsil1 »

IanDrake wrote: post #31

These guys might just be the WebVan of AR. Building a campus before you've sold V1 of your product? That's idiotic. Don't get me wrong, this could be incredibly cool in a vacuum. But reality often has different needs. I hope I'm wrong.

I think the factory is part of the campus. And they need a factory because the parts are custom.

Re: Inside Magic Leap

#114

Post by pfranz »

sulam wrote: post #91
ubercore wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical too, but I could envision a path where this gets a lot of the work done at a tooling level. All these products will have CAD models behind them already, AutoCad and SolidWorks, et al, could introduce tooling to pump out the assets necessary for this at not-terrible levels of effort, couldn't they?

Back in the 90's when I was doing 3D on the web, we looked at this and the results weren't compelling. The models used for CAD/CAM aren't the same sort of thing you would want a GPU to try and render in a 3D scene. Just as one trivial example, none of them had normals so you'd need to do a lot of model cleanup simply to get them to render as a solid object.

CAD data is getting used more often in 3d graphics (although there's still some cleanup). It's used commonly for product shots and starting to be used for games. The most recent GDC had a McLaren pulled from CAD data running real time in Unreal Engine[1]. I honestly don't think much cleanup was done because of the timeline for projects like these (I thought I heard 6 weeks start to finish focusing on custom engine development for interaction and shading).

In my experience, the problem is more in how the model is organized; having ever screw or washer as a separate piece of geometry causes problems (3d tools have trouble with very large geometry counts even if the poly count isn't high). CAD data also doesn't work very well with non-hard materials like upholstery; stitching is likely missing, as well as things that make cloth/leather look normal like pinching or gravity pushing on things.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oZfvoG6qYQ

Re: Inside Magic Leap

#115

Post by XorNot »

spyder wrote: post #41

I believe Magic Leap has a new kind of display technology, but the article is pretty bullshit-sounding with statements like this: "Throw out your PC, your laptop and your mobile phone, because the computing power you need will be in your glasses, and they can make a display appear anywhere, at any size you like." Yeah sure, they not only made a new display tech but integrated the computing power of desktops or laptop…

I question how much resolution they have. How is the text rendering?

Re: Inside Magic Leap

#116

Post by bobsil1 »

AR headsets already exist, are not vaporware, already are selling into enterprise markets (e.g. Atheer, Lumus). They're clunky and expensive.

MLeap is the only one I know of which has raised the $ needed for consumer-level polish and price. Probably because of the mini fiber-scan display and diffraction zone plates for natural focus. The other major pieces (waveguide or holo lens, IR TOF camera, SLAM, eye tracking, voice) have been done before.

Re: Inside Magic Leap

#117

Post by Bartweiss »

IshKebab wrote: post #107
Bartweiss wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from mis-valuing Magic Leap, these examples are completely implausible. Ask Pixar how much time goes into draping a single VR garment on a single body. It's hard work, regardless of how good your imaging tech is. The ongoing hurdles are about modeling, based on cloth properties and personal anatomy. The margins on "try on at home" absolutely don't justify modeling every singly piece of clothing into a technical…

Yeah completely implausible... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaWeWtG0tJQ

Very cool, and better than I knew existed. Thanks.

And yet... Check out the bodies displayed at 2:08. A good range, but nowhere near the range in effect for real people - and at least half of them look noticeably wrong to me.

The cloth displays aggressive horizontal wrinkling, in a way that makes no sense. Check out the center-most figure, whose shirt curves in below the stomach with extensive wrinkles that gravity should remove. All of the figures display confusingly broken folding on the horizontal plane - the leftmost model stretches the cloth across the chest, then displays bizarre smooth-to-wavy patterns at stomach height as you move from front to side. And as far as I can see, all of this is weak to multi-layered, stiff, or tailored cloth.

So yeah, I appreciate this, but I think it's woefully inadequate to modeling even cheap, popular clothing. That's going to take a few more breakthrough as large as this one at least, so Magic Leap's VR abilities aren't nearly enough to justify this business model.

Re: Inside Magic Leap

#118

Post by kbenson »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #95
neuronexmachina wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many years will it be until Pascal-like performance is available in a tablet form-factor?

Maybe never. Pascal is 16nm process and the mid-range gaming card, the 1070, uses up to 150 watts. A "powerful" mobile chipset uses a tiny fraction of that even at its highest settings. 100 watts for the CPU and another 150watts for the GPU is a staggering 250watts of continuous power no pocket-able lithium-ion battery can handle. If we want current gen graphics we're more than likely looking at a PC backpack solutio…

Part of me says just distribute the battery all around, thighs, legs, torso and you'll at least have good power. Another part of me says this is ludicrous, and is akin to strapping thermite and a bunch of loose strike anywhere matches into pouches all around your body.

Re: Inside Magic Leap

#119

Post by [deleted] »

6stringmerc wrote: post #10

So clearly the author is sympathetic to the aura that Magic Leap is cultivating through secrecy and selective media engagements: > When it arrives–best guess is within the next 18 months–it could usher in a new era of computing, a next-generation interface we’ll use for decades to come. ...which may be a pretty valid statement or sentiment overall, but later in the article, we get to the crux of the "potential" futur…

[deleted]

Re: Inside Magic Leap

#120

Post by mojomark »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #79
spyder wrote: post #41

I believe Magic Leap has a new kind of display technology, but the article is pretty bullshit-sounding with statements like this: "Throw out your PC, your laptop and your mobile phone, because the computing power you need will be in your glasses, and they can make a display appear anywhere, at any size you like." Yeah sure, they not only made a new display tech but integrated the computing power of desktops or laptop…

Uploadvr demystified this stuff a couple years ago: http://uploadvr.com/magic-leap-how-it-works/ Magic leap is a pair of glasses you wear on your face that displays AR imagery through a clear glass lens. There's a cable leading from these glasses to your pocket where you have a tablet-size device doing all the heavy lifting, most likely using mobile SoC's. Pretty sure you can't run a desktop CPU and GPU on a pocketab…

> There's a cable leading from these glasses to your pocket where you have a tablet-size device doing all the heavy lifting, most likely using mobile SoC's. Pretty sure you can't run a desktop CPU and GPU on a pocketable device.

> You don't get 1080gtx performance or anything remotely close to that with a setup like this. Its mobile-level graphics.

A.) the pocket device is the light source array that feed the scanning fibers. A processor drives each light source linearly. Neither the light source nor the driving processor are likely to be head mounted for quite some time, but I don't see that being an issue given the dramatic improvement over existing interfaces (i.e. I'd rather have a pair of glasses with a tether than a helmet any day of the week);

B.) In light field VRDs, resolution is not limited by active matrix array addressing as it is to a degree in LCD displays of mobile devices. Instead, resolution primarily depends on how quickly you can resonate the tip of a scanning fiber and concurrently how quickly you can pulse that fiber's light source in a synchronized manner (each pulse matching the bit color/intensity of the intended pixel);

C.) Multiple fibers form a composite image;

D.) Maximum resolution is only needed in the foveal region (i.e. a few deg about the center of user's eye gaze at any given time), so eye tracking can be utilized to minimize processing. The remainder of displayed content is low resolution, albeit still critical, peripheral imagery.

My team & I have been batting around with a slightly different approach to the light field VRD, which we're thinking about simply releasing as a FOSH project.

Post reply on HN