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Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022

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Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022

#91

Post by DonHopkins »

ABeeSea wrote: post #4

I’ve loved your posts for years on piercing through the smoke and mirrors on Magic Leap. Thanks for another great breakdown!

https://philip.greenspun.com/humor/media-lab.html

>Generation of Bits

>Tales of shame and degradation in the Big Idea Lab

>by Hunter S. Negroponte

[...]

>The Big Lie

>Media Lab critics (there have been a few) have occasionally questioned the practical application of our work. Well, have you heard about the Holographic Television? No longer a device found only in the back of comic books, we've actually made this sucker work. An honest-to-god motion-picture hologram, produced in the Media Lab basement on a 2000 pound holography table by computers, lasers and mirrors spinning at 30,000 RPM. It's real! It works! Life Magazine even came in to photograph it in action (of course, they had to fill the room with smoke so the lasers would show up on film). Practical application? Sure, it requires a 2000 pound air-suspended rock table and a Connection Machine II to run, but hell, everyone knows the price of computing power and 2000 pound rock tables is cut in half every year. My point, however, is more mundane: we have created a demo literally from smoke and mirrors, and the Corporate World bought it. Even my good friend Penn (or ``Penn,'' as I call him) Jillette would be proud.

>In fact, I'm a few points up on Penn. You may have heard of the Interactive Narrative work that is proceeding in the lab. Folks, I'll be honest with you for a moment. I know as well as you do that it's a stinking load of horseshit. Roger Ebert said ``Six thousand years ago sitting around a campfire a storyteller could have stopped at any time and asked his audience how they wanted the story to come out. But he didn't because that would have ruined the story.'' You think Hollywood would have learned this lesson from the monster ``success'' that Clue, the Movie enjoyed several years ago. But no! I've repackaged the ``Choose your own Adventure'' novels of childhood as Digital Information SuperHighway Yadda Yadda crap, and again, they bought it! Sony right this minute is building an interactive movie theater, with buttons the audience can push to amuse themselves as the story progresses. Dance for me, Corporate America! I'm SHIT-HOT!

>Why, just the other day I listened to a member of my staff explain to potential sponsors that we had spent \$US 4,000,000 of Japanese sponsor dollars to construct a widescreen version of ``I Love Lucy'' from the original source. And HE SAID IT WITH A STRAIGHT FACE! CAN YOU FUCKING BELIEVE THAT? Boy, I bet those Nips wish they had their money back now! Earthquake? No, we can't do much to rebuild your city, but we SURE AS HELL can give you a 1.66:1 cut of Lucy to fit all those busted HDTVs of yours! HA HA HA!

[...]

Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022

#92

Post by BiteCode_dev »

For years I haven't been excited by anything in the VR space. I tried them, even with the running apparatus and the slippery shoes, and it was fun. But that's it.

Nor the Leap, the Quest or the Hololens interest me very much. It doesn't bring much into my life, but promise to take a lot from it. Besides, the fact it's backed by companies with a not so good track record at respecting their users, and some of them, at making closed proprietary platforms, doesn't make me want to dive in.

But recently, 2 projects started to get me excited:

- the Tilt 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzr-IeyWj40

- the Simula: https://simulavr.com/

They are both trying to be very good at a very specific use case, which I think is a better way to approach the problem right now since we don't have VR solved. The vibes their creators give is also much more human, in an "internet from the 90" kind of way.

The Tilt 5 already works well, and people using it all report that it's the best VR experience they had to date. They also make it easy to port games from existing platforms, and actually talk to communities such as war-hammer 40k players and board game lovers, instead of staying in their ivory tower wrapped in secret to finally come down as our lord and savior. Plus I love board games.

The Simula is only a concept, and it may very well end up being vaporware like many kickstarter projects. But I want it to succeed so badly. First, it's just linux. No proprietary platform BS. It tells me it wants me to use my current apps, and works with FOSS and standards instead of trying to spoon feed me some expensive locked down metaverse crap. And I can really see the value of unlimited screen space and a full immersion work experience, especially since the device is optimized for text readability.

Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022

#93

Post by indigochill »

bajook wrote: post #59
Miraste wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a tech-community-only opinion to me, the same thinking that is currently killing Magic Leap. If you want to build a mass-market AR headset, you should have one priority: make it look like glasses. People like eye contact. People don’t like looking like alien telemetry pods are eating their eyeballs. Once you have that, then you can worry about things like resolution, fov, and color reproduction. The o…

I don't think there is a market for AR on a consumer's face except like a side display like Google Glass. I think the market for AR is in industrial operations, military, etc. where people won't care what they look like.

Besides which, the military is historically a leader in tech that sometimes makes its way back to the civilian world. Notably, the internet was originally ARPANET, funded by the DoD, and the TCP/IP protocol was designed with military considerations in mind (e.g. designing a protocol that would be resilient to failures in parts of the network).

A company that secures a steady contract delivering AR equipment to the military will then have the runway to polish the packaging until it's palatable for consumers.

Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022

#94

Post by thrwawy283 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #92

For years I haven't been excited by anything in the VR space. I tried them, even with the running apparatus and the slippery shoes, and it was fun. But that's it. Nor the Leap, the Quest or the Hololens interest me very much. It doesn't bring much into my life, but promise to take a lot from it. Besides, the fact it's backed by companies with a not so good track record at respecting their users, and some of them, at…

Just added myself for notification when their kickstarter begins (Simula). I wish they went with an AMD APU, instead of Intel Xe graphics. The youtube gameplay comparisons seem to give AMD a big edge in well... everything. I'll definitely be backing this. I want to play Tabletop Simulator on all of my walls and ceilings. :-)

(Thanks for telling me!)

Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022

#95

Post by dataviz1000 »

kguttag wrote: post #26
dataviz1000 wrote: post #7

Do you think if they focused on creating a monochrome AR display first for applications in engineering and medicine it would have been adopted creating a path for the company to later research and develop a multicolor device? Seems like they lost. Wouldn't it have been better to start simple? They never released a MVP.

I don't think the issue is color. Their original product was trying to differentiate on Vergence Accommodation Conflict (VAC) and did a poor job of it. They were also going after the consumer with a product that was always going to be way too expensive for consumers with an image quality that was going to be too poor. They also made what I think is a bad set of trade-offs in terms of ergonomics and human factors. The…

I vaguely remember Rony and friends reversing the concept of the endoscope product they developed prior to have the moving fiber optic strand project light into the side of a lens which would channel the light and reflect it into eyes instead of capturing light and projecting it onto a light sensor in the case of the endoscope. Everything they did had fiber optic strands for RGB on that original idea. Having one color would have been an easier place to start. Nonetheless, it seems like they had other more difficult unrelated problems such as Vergence Accommodation Conflict.

Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022

#96

Post by [deleted] »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #92

For years I haven't been excited by anything in the VR space. I tried them, even with the running apparatus and the slippery shoes, and it was fun. But that's it. Nor the Leap, the Quest or the Hololens interest me very much. It doesn't bring much into my life, but promise to take a lot from it. Besides, the fact it's backed by companies with a not so good track record at respecting their users, and some of them, at…

[deleted]

Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022

#97

Post by fuzzfactor »

gumby wrote: post #70
brownkonas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funded by SV, vision alignment with SV which is probably more important than where it’s made. However it is certainly impressive that they’re making a lot of progress in a tropical latitude, a feat that hasn’t been replicated by many successful tech companies.

> Funded by SV, vision alignment with SV Actually apart from Google, their investors are nontraditional: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-leap/company_f... The “usual suspects” all passed. Even google’s venture fund passed but Sergei decided to do it. I think ML is an example where not being from the valley was kind of an advantage for them on the fundraising side.

Not just any part of Florida.

Although today things are culturally much more homogenous, this particular town 50 years ago already had a long tradition of starting companies with the express intention of becoming comfortable to begin with bringing in money from investors only. The dream is that the venture could actually pay off someday and then everybody involved will really profit phenomenally when the company is sold.

Not so much pursuing product sales where value needs to be added. You're selling a dream that naturally appeals to investors more so than retail customers who would want something tangible sooner. Who has more money anyway?

"Real estate" was usually the financial vehicle but you had to be able to sell "false estate" (Everglades) as if it was really a good investment. Well it truly had no place to go but up ;)

Quite unlike nearby Miami or Palm Beach even, and nothing like Tampa or Orlando and the other places.

Much more prominent dream-selling element in company founders (among the smaller number) by far than SV at the time. You've got to really be persuasive. SV sure has come a long way in this regard now.

This time it's not real estate but technology, crafted to appeal to SV investors.

A number of years before Magic Leap got attention, there had been a very embarassing "Digital "Dream" up the coast in Martin or St. Lucie where they were going to make it like a little SV. The idea was to create a ground-up "ecosystem" where young people can have the kind of opportunities in software & game development they could only dream about.

There was a real estate component in that one so they broke ground, started developing a campus and everything, but once the investments quit coming in they were done. Plus real estate had become uncertian in ways that had never occurred there. Some respected investors did lose a lot plus I think even some quasi-government development agency went down. After the details came out the general consensus was they were taken for a ride the whole time.

Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022

#98

Post by dale_glass »

wpietri wrote: post #23

Back in October, when Facebook made a lot of "metaverse" noise, I wrote a thread looking at the history of stereoscopic 3D from the 1850s to the present as a way of explaining why I think facehugger VR is going nowhere. Somebody turned up to complain that going back to the Civil War era wasn't sufficiently big picture for him: "You need a long view. All the serious players are still in the Mercury phase. The Gemini a…

Read your thread, but I don't think you have quite the right idea.

There's certainly a long history of static 3D imaging with photography and then movies. But that's not all that related to the modern tech started by the Oculus Rift. Yeah, 3D doesn't make photography or movies fundamentally different for the most part, because with some rare exceptions we already can fill in the blanks.

Consumer VR itself is a pretty new development and does introduce new things to the table that weren't there during the civil war and whatnot. Eg, things like Robo Recall and Beatsaber have gameplay that just doesn't work without VR. You could sort of try with something like the Kinect or the Wii I guess, but it'd be much more awkward and clunkier.

And some tech indeed takes a while to develop. Mobile telephony is a tech more than a a century old, if you could the very oldest prototypes. Analog, consumer mobile phones first appeared in the 80s, 42 years ago. The first smartphone is from 1993, and the first iPhone was released in 2007. I'd say at this point a smartphone morphed into something completely different, to the point that it's really a very portable computer that sometimes happens to make calls.

The Rift CV1 is from 2015, so that's pretty recent. And it takes an amazing amount of high end tech to make a headset work, so I do expect there's still lots and lots of room for development.

Now on the Magic Leap, I don't know if that's going to go anywhere or not. The company itself, probably not. But unless there's no way whatsoever to make it usable, I think somebody will eventually come up with an affordable and useful version.

Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022

#99

Post by doomlaser »

binarynate wrote: post #3

Thanks for the article! It's very interesting to see what Magic Leap is up to. Any rumblings about how Microsoft is progressing on Hololens 3? Also, a side note—I develop [Unity libraries for displaying web browsers in 3D][1], including a package for Hololens because I received many customer requests for it. In contrast, I've received relatively few requests to support Magic Leap, which leads me think that the adopti…

This looks like a really great tool! Is it possible to control the contents of the WebView through script and turn off the interactivity / keyboard?

Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022

#100

Post by kguttag »

Miraste wrote: post #50
kguttag wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the market is "hot" in terms of awareness, it is still a very small market facing major technical challenges. I think AR while useful in enterprise markets (measured in the 100's of thousands a year) is a long way from being ready for the mass consumer market. I am seeing a lot of progress in some areas and will be publishing an article later this week on them. In particular both Dispelix and Digilens have made…

Did you get to try the Avegant prototype? It sounds quite promising.

Yes, I took the picture of Avegant used in the article. The Avegant and Dispelix waveguide combination looks pretty good. It is only a prototype without any tracking/slam. It is a display only demonstration by a component company.

I was impressed by the size of the Avegant engine and the transparency and lack of forward projection by the Dispelix prototype. They are claiming they will get 2,000 nits to the eye out of the design which should be good enough for outdoor use IF they have some form of clip-on sunglasses (2,000 nits is not enough for outdoors in full sunlight without some help).

The current Avegant engine has an optical component in that was depolarizing the light from the LCOS display and losing contrast so they wanted me to wait to take through the lens pictures. The image from the current prototype looked sharp but did lack contrast.

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