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Magic Leap’s technology may be years away from completion

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

#91

Post by flukus »

jerkstate wrote: post #73
flukus wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obviou…

I think it could apply, a significant part of the advantage is that they already have the OS and they're building the app eco system.

But then again, first mover advantage has been more of the exception than the rule for quite a while in tech.

Edit - Androids "auto add to dictionary" creates a lot of stupid capitalizations.

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

#92

Post by pmoriarty »

dang wrote: post #82
pmoriarty wrote: post #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.

You'd be fine to post some :) These things often come in clusters, though we usually penalize posts that are from a string of copycat or follow-up posts that don't add new information. I have the impression that this one does, though, albeit cribbed from a better source.

I'm not complaining. I just found it curious.

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

#93

Post by simcop2387 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #55
simcop2387 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would only work if the scene was a single flat surface and you were only moving in parallel to it. If you were doing that you may as well not use VR and just look at a normal monitor. Otherwise it wouldn't match your motion, which is the problem you're trying to solve in the first place!

Actually moving parallel to it would make the artifacts worse as it'd distort the projection based on distance (i.e. parallax). With a rotation if you're rendering it onto a sphere, doing that rotation will have a very little amount of distortion from it comparatively. It still needs to be rerendered to be correct but this can allow for better intra-frame changes (say game runs at 60 hz, and you need 120hz) with less computation. As a sibling (to you) commenter pointed out, this will make the image slightly "fuzzy" or softer because you end up moving the image on a fractional amount of pixels. As I understand it though, that extra intra-frame can mean the difference between some people getting a VR migraine or not.

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

#94

Post by simcop2387 »

pfranz wrote: post #38
simcop2387 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That only works for very, very minimal differences. It's the Oculus that does this. It guesses where your head will be, renders the scene at that location, and distorts the image slightly to match its guess vs reality. It also introduces a bit of softness, but seems to work pretty well. But it does re-render the whole image each frame.

I wonder if it does it to create intra-frame changes from rotation and/or motion of the head. If it does then that could help a lot with the experience

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

#95

Post by psyc »

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 worked on Hololens stuff at Microsoft. It does everything you describe, and IMO does it really well. It's fairly light and is wireless. The tracking is excellent. A lot of the scene parsing is done in special hardware, with low latency. It updates a persistent model of the environment, so it isn't rebuilding everything every frame.

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

#96

Post by gech »

ryanSrich wrote: post #84
Ph0X wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part that's surprising to me is how instantly popular of a startup it became with so little information. Was this "demo" they gave so damn good that all the investors (some really reputable ones such as Google) started throwing money at it, without doing their research to see how real it was? Sounds very suspicious to me.

Especially considering the nightmare of a funding climate we have. Those demos must have been truly life altering to warrant the $500m in investment. Profitable startups with hockey stick like growth can't even raise a couple million...damn.

Why is this post greyed out? Did people downvote it? Is not a reasonable question to ask why capital is wasted?

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

#97

Post by frozenport »

soneca wrote: post #26

Wow, people are quick to upvote news when it is something that everyone likes do agree. Kind of like facebook. Personally, I found this article with as much little substance as the ones hyping ML. Sites hunting clicks on both sides and we are providing it.

Indeed, but one of the issues is that HN has grown a lot. Five years ago an article with 100 votes was noteworthy, not so much today.

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

#98

Post by DonHopkins »

gumby wrote: post #74
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.

and castAR

When will castAR support dogs and cats? Will dogs or cats be first? Will dogs and cats be able to use it together?

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

#99

Post by DonHopkins »

gumby wrote: post #80
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 ge…

Do you know what chemicals fueled this moon shot?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY

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

#100

Post by JacobKyle »

lazerwalker wrote: post #67
gkoberger wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does Snapchat actually have any AR? I wasn't under the impression the goggles actually had any UI, just the "active" LED and camera input.

Their current gen glasses do not do any AR - but they've been acquiring / hiring very aggressively in space for a couple of years now. It's pretty transparent what their long term goal is with their glasses.

I think it's actually a really smart approach. MS spent ~2 billion and multiple years of R+D to get the Hololens built. Snapchat's coming at it from another angle, start simple and build up with each successive generation. The fact that they already have people clamoring for something this basic is telling...

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