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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

#131

Post by jobigoud »

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.

> or whatever the Sony Playstation VR product is called

It is, in fact, called the Playstation VR.

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

#132

Post by jobigoud »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #2

Hmm interesting. So the article makes it sound like one of their faked videos was used to bring in software developers but if they come in and it's simply not working anywhere near the level shown, wouldn't that seem suspicious? I don't think this necessarily means the company is a scam or anything like that but it seems a little...suspect at least to me if I was interviewing with them. Curious if the community has a…

Nah, an engineer working in VR/AR/Computer vision would know the video was not a truthful representation of the actual thing, but more something they were "aiming at", or a presentation of a vision.

I don't think it really fooled anyone into working for them. Not so sure about investors.

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

#134

Post by renox »

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.

>It's the Oculus that does this.

And the PS no? I think that all the VR system will (optionally) do this to reduce the processing power needed.

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

#135

Post by hrnnnnnn »

simcop2387 wrote: post #25
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.

The technique is called asynchronous timewarp

https://developer3.oculus.com/blog/asynchronous-timewarp-exa...

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

#136

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

pj_mukh wrote: post #36
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.

"Magic Leap is vaporware" Where are you getting that? The article seems to imply that feature to feature they are matching the Hololens and that is the worst case scenario. Edit: On second thought you maybe meeting the exact definition of Vaporware in that they are not manufacturing it yet[1]. No indication that they won't be able to though. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware

Well it hasn't shipped for a long time, and as it stands now it's worse than its competition, not to mention they have way less resources than their competition. And probably the main reason they didn't ship until now is exactly because of all these reasons. Which means the more time they spend not shipping, the harder it will become for them to ship.

I think it's fair to speculate that they will end up as vaporware. Only alternative I can see is them pivoting to a more niche field so that they don't directly compete with hololens.

People started saying Duke Nukem Forever was a vaporware long before the parent company actually admitted it.

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

#137

Post by frik »

relfor wrote: post #104

What is troubling about AR/MR which I feel a lot of people overlook is the limited FOV. From the demo videos shown by Magic Leap (and Hololens) on YouTube it feels as if the entire FOV is available, which is barely the case - the Hololens has an FOV of 120x120 and Magic Leap is said to have a lower angle than that. Verge covered Hololens and they mention [1] the FOV as a limitation. 1: https://youtu.be/4p0BDw4VHNo?t=…

Yes, that's the ugly truth. And their PR departments do their best to hide this almost deal-breaking fact. The current experience is underwhelming (limited FOV) in comparision to the faked PR demonstration videos.

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

#138

Post by RangerScience »

RangerScience wrote: post #75
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let me be clearer: Being able to show black is super important for AR. For one thing, it's a pain in the ass to read text on a transparent HMD , because you never know what colors will be behind the letters. You can make some educated guesses, and put up your own background colors for the text, but since everything has opacity, it'll always matter what's physically behind the "hologram".

Yes, yes, it's still not a hologram, but the popularized version of holograms (from things like star wars) is still the best way to think about AR display.

If you can show SOME black, text legibility becomes a lot easier. Everything can look way better, even if the world always shines through enough to see it.

If you can show PURE black, enough to ACTUALLY obscure the world, now you can erase stuff. Like indicator lights, panopticon optics, and people.

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

#139

Post by rsp1984 »

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 problem is even worse. In VR you're competing on latency with human muscle feedback and what your vestibular system is telling you.

In AR, you're competing with on latency with the human visual system that you're trying to augment, which is a race you can't win.

The only thing you can do is try to be very fast (everything in your vision path optimized for latency. Fun R&D project but enormously time- and capital intensive with no guarantees for success.

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

#140

Post by DonHopkins »

gumby wrote: post #112
DonHopkins wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what chemicals fueled this moon shot? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY

Don, you're an expert in that technology!

I don't kn2ow what you're talking about.
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