They have some very serious talent on their payroll.
I noticed Yann LeCun (inventor of convolutional neural networks and head of Facebook's new AI lab) congratulated Gary Bradski on the funding.
If you're not familiar with him, here's his LinkedIn profile.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/garybradski
Google May Lead $500M Round in Magic Leap Virtual Reality Tech
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Re: Google May Lead $500M Round in Magic Leap Virtual Reality Tech
#52Best article I've seen so far talking about the technology: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/science/taking-real-life-s...
Yeah definitely, combined with reading/watching the Nvidia info it starts to make sense - the technology is incredible on many levels but the problem is it means you've only got 1/5th -> 1/6th the resolution. if they're truly solved (and patented) that with some stroke of genius, they could completely win the VR wars. Also interesting to wonder whether the solution could be applicable to a light field camera.
In the Nvidia video they are using OLED screens from another HMD. It looks like it has a bunch of microlenses on top of it, maybe 200 or so. So it seems like resolution would be a big issue since small form factor OLEDs only go up to 2560 x 1440 in current devices available to consumers.
Re: Google May Lead $500M Round in Magic Leap Virtual Reality Tech
#53From the looks of the website this may in fact be a next-generation hallucinogenic drug :). Seriously though, the technology looks interesting but I would be careful getting too excited about this. When lots of credible people put tons of money and hype into things....we get stuff like Clinkle and Segway and Color.
Re: Google May Lead $500M Round in Magic Leap Virtual Reality Tech
#54A whole lot of money for a whole lot of buzzword but no information in sight... Magic Leap's own website has even less information. "On Oculus Rift and pretty much every other virtual and augmented reality experience, what the viewer sees is flat and floating in space at a set distance." I was under the impression that the Oculus Rift had full stereoscopic 3d? Either I'm wrong or this article is wrong.
In a way, stereoscopic 3D is seeing something "flat and floating in space at a set distance". The focus distance is the same for both your eyes, and the same for anything you look at. In the real world, your eyes refocus for objects at different distances. It's not just a "stereoscopic effect". The actual focus distance - what's blurry and what's not blurry - changes. This doesn't happen with devices like the Rift or…
I think John Carmack on one of the Oculus panels was pondering, if infinite focus isn't actually an improvement over having to converge all the times. From any other mouth I'd take that as trying to rationalize a flaw of the display tech that Oculus is currently using, but Carmack isn't really known to do that.
I'd like to compare regular infinite focus tech with something like light fields, and see if it improves presence. If it doesn't improve on presence or immersion significantly, then I'd rather have relaxing infinite focus I think.
Re: Google May Lead $500M Round in Magic Leap Virtual Reality Tech
#55They got awarded $150k from DOD for: Ultra-High Resolution Scanning Fiber Display for HMDs http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/415788 ...Magic Leap is working to commercialize low cost, compact, high field of view, high resolution consumer wearable display systems. A quick search for "Fiber Scanned Display" explains the technology: http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/mfabfiber/ If they are building a new kind o…
I wonder if, instead of the micro lens array mentioned in other links, they have a fiber with a tip acting as a lens, such that the larger scene is transmitted to each "pixel" in the raster. Each raster point would get a slightly different scene rendered to it, be displayed by the fiber tip, and thus produce the array of images necessary for multi focal viewing. I don't know enough about optics to know if this is pos…
A sort of "fly's eye" in reverse? - That would be incredibly expensive to render I would have thought, but maybe I'm missing something.
Re: Google May Lead $500M Round in Magic Leap Virtual Reality Tech
#56To have realistic 3D technology you need to have 3 things:
1. Stereopsis - different image for both eyes.
2. Accommodation - ability of eye lense to focus on different distances.
3. vergence - eyes rotate slightly inward or outward so that the projection of an image is always in the center of both retinas
Modern 3d technology (movies, VR) provides only sereopsis without accommodation or vergence and vergence-accommodation conflict can cause headaches. You also notice that if you look at different part of the screen from where the movie camera is focused on, the image is blurry.
Conventional lens-screen technology (like Olucus Rift) can't solve these problems. You need something new like light field technology or hologram technology. This is why hundreds of millions if not several billions are needed to develop this technology.
Re: Google May Lead $500M Round in Magic Leap Virtual Reality Tech
#57Disappointed Google is going into AR (ok, ok - "cinematic reality") rather than VR. AR is much more limiting than VR. With VR you can be "anywhere". With AR, you're in the same place - just with some stuff added on top. I'm sure AR will find its own killer apps, but I think VR has much more potential.
Re: Google May Lead $500M Round in Magic Leap Virtual Reality Tech
#58Seems like the next evolution step in VR. But developers are already struggling to constantly hit 70FPS for the Oculus, where they have to render two scenes. Rendering 35×35 different images per eye (albeit not the whole scene) will increase computation power significantly - so I guess it will take some time until this becomes possible with consumer hardware. In their paper they mention rendering the video with FPS ranging between 15-70, using a NVIDIA Quadro K5000 graphics card (which is a beast, selling for about 1'900$).
Re: Google May Lead $500M Round in Magic Leap Virtual Reality Tech
#59To have realistic 3D technology you need to have 3 things: 1. Stereopsis - different image for both eyes. 2. Accommodation - ability of eye lense to focus on different distances. 3. vergence - eyes rotate slightly inward or outward so that the projection of an image is always in the center of both retinas Modern 3d technology (movies, VR) provides only sereopsis without accommodation or vergence and vergence-accommod…
Minor correction: conventional 3d displays provide stereopsis AND vergence, but without accommodation (and the corresponding focal blur). Hence why there is a vergence-accommodation conflict, because one is provided without the other, while normally they are linked.
Re: Google May Lead $500M Round in Magic Leap Virtual Reality Tech
#60I read the article and watched the videos at the end. Is this just one elaborate troll?