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Modeling the Magic Leap One Experience

kguttag.com

41–50 of 56 posts

Re: Modeling the Magic Leap One Experience

#41

I'm skeptical of the analysis because it seems the author has a singular fixation on constantly criticizing ML, and apparently works for competitors. He may be right, but whether or not ML1 is a success really won't depend on whether or not stuff like the original concept of fibre optical scanning light fields will work, the ML1 will succeed or fail based on consumer experience and content availability. And I really…

Its success will depend on whether it sucks or not. At this point all evidence suggests it sucks and ML's secrecy and doctored demos do little to refute that.

Re: Modeling the Magic Leap One Experience

#42

I'm skeptical of the analysis because it seems the author has a singular fixation on constantly criticizing ML, and apparently works for competitors. He may be right, but whether or not ML1 is a success really won't depend on whether or not stuff like the original concept of fibre optical scanning light fields will work, the ML1 will succeed or fail based on consumer experience and content availability. And I really…

I took a look at his site, and at first was inclined to agree, but a few things have convinced me that you’re incorrect. First, he’s been on ML’s case a lot lately, but his site goes into a ton of different companies and products. Even more than that, he’s harsh on any marketing bullshit regardless of the source (loved his treatment of wristwatch projectors), so maybe the issue is that ML has an unusually high noise:signal ratio. He seems to pull no punches, but going back years he also seems to really know his stuff, and is proven right, over and over. He’s covered tons of devices and companies too, so there’s nothing singular there.

Given that I’d wonder how much of his site you looked over before you came to your conclusion about a “singular” focus, which is demonstrably untrue. I’d also like to know which ML competitor he supposedly works for, since I couldn’t find a hint of that.

Re: Modeling the Magic Leap One Experience

#43

its seem all the AR headsets have this "Small view range" problem. .... Hololens , Magic Leaps, .... Anyone know the view range of the meta 2?

Everything has tradeoffs and Hololens, MagicLeap and Meta have made different choices resulting in different ones.

The Meta2 has quite a large field of view (though a very different design compared to the Meta1, Hololens or ML). It is conceptually similar to taping a smartphone to the underside of a baseball cap lid and hanging plastic googles off the lens to reflect the light back into your eyes. Also, you need to connect a bunch of cables back to a gaming level PC to make everything work.

Hololens is very light, but is using tiny projectors to reflect back into your eye (also entirely self contained in the headset!).

MagicLeap has a different display tech, along with a bunch of other refinements and additions (eye tracking for foveated rendering, occlusion, etc.) also requires a smartphone sized battery pack/processor with a cable that goes to the glasses.

So you have on the physical UX front:

Hololens (headset) beats MagicLeap (headset + pack) beats Meta (headset + gaming PC).

And then on the FOV front:

Meta beats Hololens beats MagicLeap

And then on the "number of super promising and ambitions technologies put into a single device:

MagicLeap beats Hololens beats Meta.

ALL of these devices are still clearly being pitched as "Developer" Units, none of them are ready for even the level of (still somewhat lackluster) consumer adoption that VR has seen.

Which is not to say that they're bad or that ML has blown $2B dollars, etc. I really don't think this is Theranos situation, it's just EARLY. In cell phone terms, AR still isn't quite to the Motorola razor level of development (and everybody's expectations are at iPhone/Android level).

Re: Modeling the Magic Leap One Experience

#44

I'm skeptical of the analysis because it seems the author has a singular fixation on constantly criticizing ML, and apparently works for competitors. He may be right, but whether or not ML1 is a success really won't depend on whether or not stuff like the original concept of fibre optical scanning light fields will work, the ML1 will succeed or fail based on consumer experience and content availability. And I really…

I suggest you spend some time reading his pretty extensive set of high quality articles on many companies and aspects of AR. This is an industry where outsiders have a very limited understanding of the serious serious problems in front of AR. It's also an industry that is taking advantage of the very limited understanding of just about everyone not in it to hype things far beyond their capabilities. If you care about…

He certainly seems to know a lot about the optics involved. However he was also, for example, suggesting recently that Magic Leap had faked the SLAM tracking in their recent Rolling Stone demo https://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/17/magic-leap-how-rigged-was... https://www.reddit.com/r/magicleap/comments/7r267v/blog_arti... . So I would not take his overall view of Magic Leap as gospel.

Re: Modeling the Magic Leap One Experience

#45
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, VR headsets look ridiculous as well. So, use them in the same settings and it'd be fine.

But how much does it really buy over VR if you only use it in the same setting?

It would buy a lot more if it wouldn't only be in the same setting, but I think pretty much all current day AR headsets are too dorky to wear on the subway anyway. But it would still help a lot with office work, being able to continue working and doing small chores is still a big pro that VR can't fulfill.

Re: Modeling the Magic Leap One Experience

#46
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is that some people think that $2,000,000,000 USD and 8 years should be able to produce a better first product.

2b is a drop in the bucket compared to other companies like Microsoft and Apple. They’re not just building a headset, but the software to run it and funding both 1st and 3rd party content.

$2.3 billion dollars is an almost incomprehensible amount of money.

Amazon raised total of $108 million before its IPO.

Google raised less than $50 million before its IPO.

Facebook raised $2.3 billion before the IPO, and most of it was after it became a world-wide phenomena.

Re: Modeling the Magic Leap One Experience

#47
post #39
post #37

The title implies (and some commenters seem to believe) that this is about an actual magic leap product, not a speculative recreation thereof. Can we get a title change to something like "Recreating a Magic Leap device" or "The view through a magic leap recreation"

Sure. I put "model" in the title because that's the word the article uses for this.

Thanks. I feel like a good 5-10% of my comments are me curmudgeonly grumbling about titles. I hope it's not a bother.

Re: Modeling the Magic Leap One Experience

#48
post #47
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I put "model" in the title because that's the word the article uses for this.

Thanks. I feel like a good 5-10% of my comments are me curmudgeonly grumbling about titles. I hope it's not a bother.

I see it as a collaborative effort by the community to have at least one place on the internet that isn't driven by baitiness and spin. That seems worth doing and we're happy to help.

Re: Modeling the Magic Leap One Experience

#49
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FOV is pretty important. It's difficult to feel like you are in an augmented reality if you have to tilt your head just to see the full object in front of you. Maybe you could get by with little helper things, but that's just a fancy HUD and not really AR.

Outside of entertainment, who cares if you feel like you’re in the environment vs being able to do useful things with it when you want to or need to? Using AR purely for entertainment doesn’t seem like such a revolutionary thing, really, especially when we have ok VR. I see some potential advantages for sure, but enough to make it a mass market nust-have device? I personally don’t see it.

Much of the affordances of AR will require a higher FOV - irrespective of use case.

E.g.: Tagging objects, directions and buildings with tracked information, following characters in the real world etc.

Long term a complete immersive solution - where virtual objects persist in the real world, will absolutely be more useful and compelling than both VR and limited FOV AR. Such a solution would literally be able to selectively replace and amend elements of reality as needed / desired. Although we can't fully predict it's uses, it seems self evident there would be many more than a poster sized slice of AR will allow.

Re: Modeling the Magic Leap One Experience

#50
post #41

I'm skeptical of the analysis because it seems the author has a singular fixation on constantly criticizing ML, and apparently works for competitors. He may be right, but whether or not ML1 is a success really won't depend on whether or not stuff like the original concept of fibre optical scanning light fields will work, the ML1 will succeed or fail based on consumer experience and content availability. And I really…

Its success will depend on whether it sucks or not. At this point all evidence suggests it sucks and ML's secrecy and doctored demos do little to refute that.

That’s the opposite of what the very thorough hands on Rolling Stone article had to say about it. Why are we even speculating about the user experience at this point?
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