Live data from Hacker News

Magic Leap’s technology may be years away from completion

theverge.com

11–20 of 176 posts

Re: Magic Leap’s technology may be years away from completion

#11
It's interesting just how many Magic Leap stories get posted to HN. In the last month or so I must have seen at least 3 stories about Magic Leap, but no other VR/AR technologies.

I don't even remember the last time I saw a story on HN about Oculus, or Vive, or whatever the Sony Playstation VR product is called, nor about the Hololens. But the Magic Leap stories are popping up like mushrooms.

Re: Magic Leap’s technology may be years away from completion

#14

So VR is hard enough - to avoid jitter that makes users feel sick you have to respond to a user's head movement, render a new frame with the new information the user should see, respond to any button presses, then draw the frame, in under 14-20ms. Magic Leap was always a much more difficult problem... they have to respond to a user's head movement, parse the scene the user is looking at (which could be anything), fig…

You don't need to parse the environment from scratch 60 times every second. As long as you get head tracking right you can just focus on what's moving and assume it will keep moving the same way. Further the demos all seem to be around a fairly static environmenment. Remeber you don't need to render the background so a simplified internal model works fine with AR.

If it works near a closeline blowing in the wind that's really hard and impressive.

Re: Magic Leap’s technology may be years away from completion

#16
Further behind than expected. I have always suspected that this is a giant money pit with zero chance of success. Another decade or two and maybe technology will catch up to the desire to understand the world around you in real time, but today it's not possible. It's not magic, it's dreaming.

Re: Magic Leap’s technology may be years away from completion

#17

Wow. So if Magic Leap is vaporware, does that leave Microsoft as the only ones publicly making progress in AR? Plenty of companies are shipping VR, but AR ends up being the future, HoloLens is building up quite a lead.

Seems like SnapChat isn't doing too bad. Sure, maybe their tech isn't as advanced... but they've begun solving the equally hard problem of getting it into people's hands naturally and getting them to use it and even pay for it.

Re: Magic Leap’s technology may be years away from completion

#19

So VR is hard enough - to avoid jitter that makes users feel sick you have to respond to a user's head movement, render a new frame with the new information the user should see, respond to any button presses, then draw the frame, in under 14-20ms. Magic Leap was always a much more difficult problem... they have to respond to a user's head movement, parse the scene the user is looking at (which could be anything), fig…

Isn't the head-tracking separate from the graphics rendering? I mean, you could just render onto an area that's somewhat larger than your fov, and select some area every couple of ms based on the head movement.
Post reply on HN