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Comment by deelowe | Hacker News Reader

That was painful to read and the comments are even worse. I'm not sure I trust anything stated in this write-up.

I love this guys blog, he does fantastic tear downs of display technology and I just don't see anyone else doing it in the space. He called out the 85% shade when they presented the initial preview a couple months ago.

He is genuinely not impressed by much and maybe he should be in some cases, but if you look at his body of work he's not just some yahoo brigading on magic leap hate and if there's a better technical voice on display tech out there, I haven't seen it.

While true, there's just no way you can infer the opacity from those frame grabs.

On the one hand he says he says he used the whites of Shaq's eyes as a reference and on the other he states that the design of the glasses hugs the users head to block out ambient light getting in from the side.

There's a slew of issues with this derivation. To arrive at a number like 15%, without showing his homework, is as questionable as the marketing claims of Leap themselves.

I'm not saying he's wrong but it does sound like a lot of bias.

He is saying that it is an approximation (see in comments): "I looked at what I thought were comparable regions. I checked several frames of the video and the frame at 0:51 in the article is what I used. The method is admittedly very approximate as you have to guess the “gamma curve” of the video capture device to back out the linear value (I used a gamma of 2.2)."

Why? His grammar could use a bit of work, but his write ups are often in depth and quite accurate. He’s hardly an unknown in the world of optics, and his previous analysis of Magic Leap have all proven accurate.

For example

http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-house-of-cards/

http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-fiber-scanning-...

He certainly can't simply be dismissed. OTOH he was recently seen promoting the idea that Magic Leap can't get camera-based inside-out positional tracking working, which is probably quite preposterous.

I hadn’t seen that, can you link me to it?

Here you go: http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/17/magic-leap-how-rigged-was-... Then he defended it on /r/magicleap: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicleap/comments/7r267v/blog_arti...

He doesn’t seem to make any claim about what they can’t do regarding tracking, he just says that there are likely IR markers in the demo. The counter argument as usual seems to come down to awe at how much money ML raised and from whom, as well as the talent pool they bring.

None of this is to say they have perfected it, or anywhere close. That will be a long way off. We have struggled with ambient IR light and glass since the days of the Wii and Xbox Kinect, and we still struggle with it now, and will probably continue to struggle with it for quite some time. It may well rely on getting LIDAR or something along those lines in the headset to truly provide reliable tracking in all environments.

That from the op of the Reddit thread, after explaining his incredulity thst ML wouldn’t have tracking down. Meanwhile Karl doesn’t seem to appeal to anything other than released material, patents, and physics.

I’m inclined to beleieve him.

> He doesn’t seem to make any claim about what they can’t do regarding tracking, he just says that there are likely IR markers in the demo.

From Guttag's article:

> Adding markers to the frames is a crutch to make up for poor registration and SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping).

> The counter argument as usual seems to come down to awe at how much money ML raised and from whom, as well as the talent pool they bring.

Hang on: earlier you seemed to be expressing incredulity that Guttag had claimed ML didn't have acceptably-working SLAM by now. Is your position now that in fact Guttag was correct to make this claim?

IR markers would seem to hint at reliability issues of tracking. Presumably one could reply "algorithms are still being developed and fine tuned".

But if it's not reliable, then I can't see how it would be usable by the mass market.

People don't generally respond well to half of their visual world desyncing from their physical body, even if it's 1:1000 seconds.

I think some of the issues pointed out with his assessment in the comment section hold merit. His "no your wrong" response without any real evidence as to why doesn't sit well with me. That said, if he's well known for his knowledge perhaps that's enough. I personally have no idea who he is.

As with his proofreading, I’m not terribly interested in his comment section people skills. His decades in the field, his track record of tear downs and predictions, and his expertise do interest me. I’m noting a paucity of technical, rather than personal counterpoints here, or in those afformentioned comments on that level. Loads of appeals to authority, and a kind of, “well they must have something valuable!” credulity abounds.

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