Live data from Hacker News

Magic Leap’s technology may be years away from completion

theverge.com

111–120 of 176 posts

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

#111

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 chall…

Isn't it more likely to be lag and inner ear related, not related to light angles? Why do you think it's light angles?

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

#112
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Don, you're an expert in that technology!

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

#113
post #107
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any particular reason you stopped working on it?

He probably moved to another secretive project in the hardware division. Thats what my friend did.

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

#114
post #85
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the big unsolved problem with augmented reality. Those are all problems VR systems can already solve with enough money and transistors behind them. The AR big problem is displaying dark. You can put bright things on the display, but not dark ones. Microsoft demos their VR systems only in environments with carefully controlled dim lighting. The same is true of Meta. Laster just puts a dimming filter in fron…

Why can't you "just" use a camera and project the light with "standard" vr technology?

That's one approach - just add a camera, mix the camera image with the graphics, and feed it to a VR headset. Works, but it's more intrusive for the user than the AR enthusiasts want.

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

#115

>>The company has raked in $1.4 billion in funding Let that sink in. Is it a record for startup funding with no product or service released? I don't recall how far along Uber was when they passed that mark. And what exit number do they need to be considered a success for the VCs?

They hold the record for largest series C round, if that helps put things into perspective

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

#116
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is very interesting. Do you have a source on this? I can't find anything online.

Nobody I will quote in a forum(!) but I live in silicon valley where secrecy is poor.

If you want to look on the web it's not hard to verify if you're willing to do more than just a google query. For example you can easily tell from the web sites of GV and GC that ML is not in either of their portfolios. I can't find any Form D for magic leap but you can see what some of their investors put in if you dredge some of those non-googleable-but-public databases.

They're a Theranos if you ask me.

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

#117
post #107
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any particular reason you stopped working on it?

It was a contract position.

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

#118
post #76

I thought they had given up a couple of years ago on the gimbal-mounted fiber with the piezo collar. They raised the last round to buy a MEMS fab which I assumed was to do a DLP-like thing down a fibre laminate.

And in fact the Guttag piece linked in this comment page also suggests this (says the DLP demo was the most impressive). I doubt they could use actual DLP (because the TI DLP group is a pain to work with) but it would make sense that their MEMS chip would be also a micro mirror array.

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

#119

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.

Check out http://castar.com launching 2017. I backed their Kickstarter so I'm excited to get one :-)

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

#120

The whole thing sounds rather similar to everyone's favourite black turtleneck wearing entrepreneur.

Sounds like the opposite. All of Apple's most successful products were developed mainly rumour-free (and certainly hype-free) behind closed doors, popping suddenly into the world at WWDC or similar.

I wasn't referring to Steve, but the CEO of a far more recent fallen unicorn.
Post reply on HN