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My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

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Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#131

Post by leetrout »

acchow wrote: post #128
leetrout wrote: post #36

If you have not experienced the magic leap videos do not do it justice. Heres my video flying inside my house: https://youtu.be/Grlk03MdScQ The jaw dropping aspects: - it correctly knows when to mask for the column - it does lighting effects from the planes headlights - it does particle collisions with my furniture when it crashes - it crashes by detecting i hit the wall It really is amazing tech but it is very unpol…

"it correctly knows when to mask for the column" correctly? https://imgur.com/h3zHxDW

It doesnt look as bad in stereo when you're distracted by the motion.

Such an unusual experience for it to go behind something.

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#132

Post by Tarragon »

tjs8rj wrote: post #123
snek_case wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I'm kind of left feeling like I'd rather fly the plane in a better looking simulated environment, with a first-person perspective. It's more flexible and fun than being tied to flying it in the environment around you. I still haven't seen a compelling use case for AR.

Coolest one I’ve seen is VR workspaces. Buying a $5k setup per head where they can work from space or the Grand Canyon with unlimited monitors, sit/stand/lay down, software upgrades (only a few pieces of hardware to replace), virtual meetings, building and modeling anything they want, etc It’s still kinda clunky now, but the tech will get better. That’s a money saver (and a big improvement) with the main barriers bei…

There are hardware limits that will make this less compelling than you imagine. I'll give 3 reasons.

Note: Magic Leap specs are from a quick google search and may be out of date. Even improved they'll have the same issues to a slightly lesser degree.

First - field of view: The horizontal field of Magic Leap is 40 degrees. My primary monitor, a 16x9 32" monitor at about 3 feet from my eyes, is 42 degrees. So this can't even show me 100% of that, and definitely can't show me a second monitor in my peripheral vision.

Field of view is hard to improve as the optics are really close to your eyes and being head worn have limits of size and weight.

Second - Resolution: The magic leap resolution is apparently 1280x960, significantly less than 1080p. That's not even close to the 4K monitor I'm typing this on. That low resolution has to cover the entire area of my monitor. More if I want to stretch the field of wider.

Picture yourself programming on a 1280x960 32" monitor. Just to see I set my system that way for a minute. PIXELS EVERYWHERE! Also, now I need to reset all my carefully curated windows.

It's hard to improve resolution. The displays are very small to keep size and weight down. HMD displays are generally about the highest of DPI that can be built.

Third - Brightness: You can't draw black on a see-through HMD, all you can do is make the existing world brighter. The lenses are too close to the eye to be able to do any kind of masking or blocking of the ambient light.

So your display system won't be able to show much of an image over bright area; the text is either white over world color or background colored in a white field. It's not good for reading text and almost illegible at typical sizes in office lighting.

You can't improve brightness easily. These tiny displays make a lot of heat right near your head. Making them brighter means bigger heatsinks, taking weight and size, and more power with requires bigger batteries or shorter run time.

You can kinda cheat one a little with dark sunglass lenses to make the whole world darker. Or you can go to VR and just block the whole world and draw your interface over a video stream. The second option isn't really compelling because it for AR demos like Magic Leap shows.

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#133

Post by tsimionescu »

leetrout wrote: post #122
busterarm wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet ML had to raise almost $5B to get to around ballpark with the Hololens which I assure you Microsoft invested substantially less money into and already has tens of billions in government contracts committed to use the thing.

What they could do, if they figure out the right play, with the right hardware, is make this a really compelling active entertainment device. You already saw haw popular Pokemon Go was... I think locking eyeballs to locations has VC's interested.

Yes, but Pokemon Go was popular because it was on a phone you already had, because it was an extremely popular franchise, and because of the good luck of being a fad at the right time.

Nothing else took its place, and, while still being popular, it quickly faded from the status of global phenomenon.

It's a nice money making game, but not a hardware seller.

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#134

Post by tsimionescu »

dntrkv wrote: post #125
shmatt wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say, I've been reading these comments who love or hate ML, treating them as just another internet argument As someone who was following the public hype but never actually saw what they released. This is absolutely completely terrible. The promises they made when they raised half a billion dollars 7 years ago as a stealth company backed by tech geniuses. If this is what they have today, what were they showin…

Just reserve judgement until you experience it yourself. You can't reproduce the experience on a 2D screen. That's the whole point.

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain". If all you can show is 20 year old looking graphics that only somewhat match the scene they are in (while moving at a glacial pace), I am going to bet that the "experience" is way over hyped as well.

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#135

Post by tsimionescu »

systemvoltage wrote: post #115
shmatt wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say, I've been reading these comments who love or hate ML, treating them as just another internet argument As someone who was following the public hype but never actually saw what they released. This is absolutely completely terrible. The promises they made when they raised half a billion dollars 7 years ago as a stealth company backed by tech geniuses. If this is what they have today, what were they showin…

I saw it during an interview at Ft Lauderdale. I was interviewing for the optics metrology engineer position. It was as mind blowing as the op is stating. Absolutely stunning. This was 5 years ago. Signed a bunch of NDA papers so shouldn’t talk too much about it.

Allow us who haven't experienced it to highly doubt this. At the very best it looks like nifty tech that would be fun to play around with for a couple of hours until the novelty wears off, no more than that.

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#136

Post by ChuckMcM »

I am impressed they aren't defunct. After all they raised $3B[1] and their valuation is $2B so they are a long way away from making their investors whole. They did replace their entire top line management team it seems so maybe that helps?

A friend of mine who was approaching AR from a more theoretical point rather than a product point shared some of the physics of how many nits of brightness the display needs to produce to occlude the actual background and it is a lot. ML worked around some of that problem by shading the background think sunglasses with a 50% light reduction, which helps but then you're trying to match shading. Basically it is a really hard problem and had they not been so "out there" in their original claims I really don't think they would be so challenged in their marketing now.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-leap

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#137

Post by defen »

systemvoltage wrote: post #115
shmatt wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say, I've been reading these comments who love or hate ML, treating them as just another internet argument As someone who was following the public hype but never actually saw what they released. This is absolutely completely terrible. The promises they made when they raised half a billion dollars 7 years ago as a stealth company backed by tech geniuses. If this is what they have today, what were they showin…

I saw it during an interview at Ft Lauderdale. I was interviewing for the optics metrology engineer position. It was as mind blowing as the op is stating. Absolutely stunning. This was 5 years ago. Signed a bunch of NDA papers so shouldn’t talk too much about it.

Have you considered that the demo may have been faked (for example maybe they preprogrammed it with room geometry that was acquired some other way)?

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#138

Post by aaron695 »

> According to IDC, the AR/VR market is expected to grow to nearly $140 billion by the end of 2024.

AR has nothing at all to do with VR.

But I guess if you're talking about a technology that even science fiction writers can't show it doing anything other than sexually suggestive ads, your target audience isn't chasing a coherent narrative.

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#140

Post by lostgame »

defen wrote: post #137
systemvoltage wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw it during an interview at Ft Lauderdale. I was interviewing for the optics metrology engineer position. It was as mind blowing as the op is stating. Absolutely stunning. This was 5 years ago. Signed a bunch of NDA papers so shouldn’t talk too much about it.

Have you considered that the demo may have been faked (for example maybe they preprogrammed it with room geometry that was acquired some other way)?

From what I understand - the demo was using a completely different set of technology from that which eventually came out.
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