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Comment by benlower | Hacker News Reader

TechCrunch had a piece on this today (http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/02/ar-startup-magic-leap-raise...)

I find it interesting that the top image (of the floating robot) has the text saying "no special effects" whereas the gif of the elephant in the hands (been available online for awhile) does not. This tells me that all the videos/gifs we've seen (the elephant, the whale splashing down thru the gym floor) are "aspirational" (AKA "bullshit").

Don't get me wrong, the floating robot is cool but this is doable on HoloLens (yet to ship but coming in Q1). Definitely seems like there's a real risk here of overhyping MagicLeap.

EDIT: Fixed the link to TechCrunch...If you saw the other link we're hiring :)

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Wow, techcrunch has gotten really bad lately. Now, they are just showing job postings instead of doing hard hitting journalism.

The floating robot is not doable on the hololens because metallic effects require black, which is not reproducible on the hololens display... Yes, I have seen the photos of hololens output that show black. I don't believe that's a reproducible effect on their wearable.

true about black so colors might look different.

You have no idea. You also have to consider the colors of real things behind your fake things.

one of your sentences is actually true.

If you don't have black you can't achieve metallic effects... If you disagree, please explain how it is possible to achieve said effect without black.

As far as I know, and I was pretty deep into this at one point, metallic requires black and without it you cannot achieve any sort of luster-like effects.

Could you provide a source for that? (not doubting you, just curious)

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-...

See the section labeled "See-through AR == additive blending only".

I meant your claim that "metallic requires black." I'm well aware that AR is only additive.

Ah, "you have no idea" as in "that is more correct than I think you realize", but maybe you do. Not meant as an argument; more as hyperbolic.

thanks for clarifying. i read it as "you have no idea what you are talking about" and missed your hyperbole completely. sorry about that :)

Disclaimer: I don't really know anything about this area, I'm just saying what I see in the floating robot. I don't think there is any black in that robot. It's more obvious if you look at the youtube video, but do you see how they have put a filter on real objects and distorted the colours? It seems to me that they are creating a black level with the background image. Then by using only bright colours in their foreground objects, the contrast makes it seem as though it is black. If you were to measure the colour (say by using a colour picker on the image), I'll pretty much guarantee that there is nothing in that image that is blacker than the background.

In the Youtube video they also seem to use a trick of defocussing the real objects in the background when their rendered foreground objects are in focus. You can see that most clearly with the planets. I think they have a macro lens on the camera to achieve this effect and I suspect that it would not be nearly so dramatic if you were to experience it with the naked eye.

That floating robot image is from this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw0-JRa9n94

Object occlusion like they do with the floating robot is also really hard. It's easy to kind-of do, but hard to do that crisply.

HL does it great

I agree.

A subtle problem is where to put things that don't just add noise and clutter.

Look around your house or office, where would you like digital things to sit? Ok how about when you move 2 feet this way, whats the new answer for where you would like it so it's easy to see/interact with?

You can always just attach things to a physical object and let the user decide where it goes.

"Shot directly through MagicLeap technology"

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