A demo that Magic Leap was going to show at TED

Yes.

Let's not forget this is the same company whose patent draft diagrams were found to be basically wholly ripped-off copies of other public works. [1]

I'm impressed with the thoroughness of HNers screenshotting and looking at motion blur, but nothing I've seen says we should give this company the benefit of doubt. This reeks of "concept video" all around.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/30/7954611/magic-leap-augment...

Of all the skepticism, the two most reasonable ones are - quality of the headmounted transparent display. This doesn't even seem to be Magic Leap's core competency and the tech required for a HMD to reach this level of quality is far beyond anything we've seen before. - real-time computation power on a battery powered wearable. It would run incredibly hot and drain so much power unless the guy was wearing a giant battery/CPU backpack covered in exhaust fans.

For the other things, 1. The room geometry could have been prescanned and coded in 2. hand-tracking could have used an additional wearable sensor on the hand 3. the AR systems could have been optimized for recognizing the gun (I have worked with systems capable of that) for highly accurate and fast real-time tracking of a non-malleable object 4. and the interactive 3D graphics given knowledge of the room (surface geometry and lighting) is not a big deal at all.

The acting (such as recoil on the gun) is a bit overdone and obviously has nothing to do with the technology itself, and I find it weird that the AR actually seems to assume you'd recoil that much and animates the shots as such.

And I agree with you! Edit to make the point clearer.

> The room geometry could have been prescanned and coded

There's an Oculus Rift forum post that has a link to hand tracking with the Structure Sensor.

The depth sensing portable Structure Sensor is 95 grams and $380 (Kickstarter).

There's noticeable latency in the hand tracking, but a post talks about possible low latency for static objects by using a previous map.

Assuming you stay within a certain space, would premapping with something like the Structure Sensor or Project Tango contribute the most to the stability of virtual objects that Hololens testers experienced? (objects stick to their intended position as you move):

>Daily Tech News Show DTNS 2414 - Jan. 23, 2015

that objects stayed stable when you move your head 17:43

well hold on a sec it is excellent 17:47

at keeping orientation for sure I looked around and something with an absurd and 17:51

Spa 17:52

I looked around the same thing was there again I if they're mob rock on the 17:55

surface of mars 17:56

or a table covered with you know i i 17:59

toy castle at minecraft made all these tiny little minecraft building blocks 18:03

it would always be exactly where I thought it would be but I had to turn my 18:07

head all over the place cuz the field if the US 18:10

tiny it's like this little I somebody's described it as a sixteen by nine TP 18:15

floating maybe seven to eight feet and Franny 18:18

you're looking through this little narrow slice ever went out about this 18:22

big around in my view 18:24

trying to see mars this much at a time 18:27

and wherever you look is like oh that's exactly where I thought it would be 18:30

but its tunnel vision it's like you're looking through a pair of binoculars or

watch?v=uGYksMRmUwA

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>Through it all, the 3D effect was thoroughly convincing.

>The system felt very low latency; as I moved my head and walked around, the objects retained their positioning in the real world, with the castle, for example, never becoming detached from or wobbling around on the table.

arstechnica

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Or is good real-time tracking necessary for the virtual objects to stay attached to their positions.

(> If you can figure out these numbers for your system, the addition of 38 ms from the Structure Sensor will give you and idea of the total latency in your system. kickstarter

> 20 ms minimum latency (AKA lag, compared to 102 ms minimum latency for Kinect 1 and 50 ms minimum latency for joypads in 60 fps games.) 123kinect)