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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

#71

Post by sillysaurus3 »

tedsanders wrote: post #65
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AR big problem is displaying dark. You can put bright things on the display, but not dark ones. There is actually a solution (EDIT: nope, see replies), but it's tricky: If you stack two sheets of polarizing filters on top of each other, then rotate them, you can get them to pass all light at 0 degrees rotation and block all light at 90 degrees rotation. It's like special paper that adjusts brightness depending on…

The problem with that solution is optical, I believe. It would work if you were able to put such a filter directly on your retina, but when you put it earlier in the path of the light, before images are focused, you cannot selectively block individual pixels as they appear on your retina. As a result, the dark spots will look blurry. (Also, if the pixels are dense enough I imagine you'll get diffraction.) Here's is M…

That makes sense. Thank you for the explanation.

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

#72

Post by kazagistar »

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.

Does AR explicitly exclude camera+screen? I always thought that stuff like pokemon go and any similar "paste some 3d over a camera feed in real time" stuff counted as augmented reality.

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

#73

Post by jerkstate »

flukus wrote: post #33
Analemma_ wrote: post #10

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.

Hololens has the lead but whoever get's to the consumer market first will still have a huge advantage. The only thing stopping MS from getting to that point is having a consumer friendly price.

I'm not sure that there will be a significant first mover advantage here. Everybody thought that the Oculus CV would be the only headset to get because the DK2 was pretty cool, then the Vive was released and people realized how important motion controllers were for immersion, and Oculus got creamed. I think that there will be bits of tech like this for each generation of VR/AR, one small set of features that's obviously better, which will win the generation.

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

#75

Post by RangerScience »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #60
badsock wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that be different from an LCD, which is something they've presumably looked at and not used?

I don't know. It's similar. I wonder what the problems are with using it, then? One idea that comes to mind is that a regular screen leaks light. If you adjust the brightness on your laptop as low as it will go, then display a black image, there's still a massive difference between what you see there vs when the screen is completely powered off. But if you take two sheets of polarizing filter and stick them in front…

I don't think that level of black is a good thing for AR. If you can't distinguish the augmentation from reality, I'd argue that's a bad thing.

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

#78

Post by dang »

tempestn wrote: post #32
fmihaila wrote: post #20

I don't like pointing out typos, but this one is in the title and should be fixed: it should be "than".

Or even better, change the title to that of the actual article: "Magic Leap is actually way behind, like we always suspected it was". That doesn't appear too long for a HN title.

Not too long, but it's baity, so we need to change it as per the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). We'll see what we can do.

Edit: ok, we changed it to language from the first sentence—often a source of lesser baitiness.

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

#79

Post by colemickens »

fmihaila wrote: post #20

I don't like pointing out typos, but this one is in the title and should be fixed: it should be "than".

It doesn't really sound right still, even after that correction. "Magic Leap is actually way further behind than expected" would be more correct.

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

#80

Post by gumby »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #66

Jeez this sucks. I was always behind Magic Leap with the logic that "big investors like a16z google alibaba wouldn't get suckered" but god, :( this is disappointing.

> I was always behind Magic Leap with the logic that "big investors like a16z google alibaba wouldn't get suckered"

Here's a few clarifications that might change your thinking about funding announcements.

Google Ventures passed on Magic Leap. Google Capital passed on Magic Leap. Sergey was enamored so Google's own balance sheet provided most of the B round. Word is that A16Z put only $3MM in -- basically enough to get some info rights and not piss google off.

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