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Magic Leap’s technology may be years away from completion

theverge.com

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

#21

Post by monk_e_boy »

kevinburke wrote: post #8

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…

I could never really figure out how the variable focus lightfield worked.

I sort of assumed it was like a stack of images in the Z plane. So not only are they doing everything you mentioned, they are also rendering the 3D scene in slices?

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

#22

Post by jonathankoren »

The video of the AR game embedded in the article looks very suspicious. It's hard to believe that's a game that actually exists, or at least exists anywhere except that specific room. We've got depth and occlusion of objects when the aliens come out from down the hallway, and the laser guns look like their physical props.

I'd like it to be true, but it looks too good to be true.

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

#24

Post by sillysaurus3 »

kevinburke wrote: post #8

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…

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.

A bit of a tangent, but: for some people, it's impossible for VR to avoid making them feel sick. It's fundamental to them wearing a VR headset rather than a technical challenge to be overcome. It's related to the fact that VR headsets can't project photons from arbitrary positions with arbitrary angles towards your eyes (i.e. a screen is planar, but the real world is a 3D volume). Turns out, evolution has ensured our bodies are very good at determining the difference between a screen's projection and the real world, resulting in a sick feeling when there's a mismatch.

I think that when people accept it's inevitable some subset of users will get sick, the VR ecosystem will grow at a faster rate.

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

#25

Post by simcop2387 »

kevinburke wrote: post #8

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…

A trick i've heard at least one of the VR devices is doing isn't re-rendering the entire scene but since most of the movement is just head tracking, it renders a larger buffer and scrolls around in that buffer between frames to get a quicker response.

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

#27

Post by monk_e_boy »

evv wrote: post #5

Not surprising, given that the hype train was billowing at full steam. A friend of a friend interviewed there and eventually walked away saying "Wow. That is a lot of cool-aid" Meanwhile, teams like Oculus are reportedly trying to sidestep AR by investing in "mixed reality", which will bring live camera feeds in to VR, with screens still covering both eyes.

Interesting for sure, but from what I've hear from people using the Rift it's the fixed focus that gives them headaches.

I know of a company that make cut scenes for A games, most of their people can't wear the Oculus for more than a few minutes. Big headaches, motion sickness, etc...

Before you jump on me, this could be due to the stuff they are trying to show on the Rift -- would content make a difference? Sudden shifts in scene from close to far off?

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

#28

Post by highd »

kevinburke wrote: post #8

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…

The latency / motion sickness issues probably aren't as bad, since you still see the surrounding environment to get a stable bearing. The display tech sounds very hard, though.
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