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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical of the analysis because it seems the author has a singular fixation on constantly criticizing ML, and apparently works for competitors.

He may be right, but whether or not ML1 is a success really won't depend on whether or not stuff like the original concept of fibre optical scanning light fields will work, the ML1 will succeed or fail based on consumer experience and content availability. And I really don't think this Kremlinology-based approach could capture it anymore than people speculating on what the Apple watch or iPhones would be like based on photos of the device and patents.

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> whether or not ML1 is a success really won't depend on whether or not stuff like the original concept of fibre optical scanning light fields will work, the ML1 will succeed or fail based on consumer experience

You can't separate "consumer experience" from the technology like that. This is a case where the technology tightly constrains how good the consumer experience can possibly be. The consumer experience absolutely depends on whether fiber scanning displays or other new technologies can work, because tha changes the possible form factor and capabilities of the device.

I worked at Intel in 2010 for a summer. I remember going to a presentation about why the iPhone was so good.

It was so good because they figured out how to do more with limited hardware. As an example, if you wanted to see an image on the iPhone, apple stored a version with just as many pixels as the screen, the windows treo pulled the full image. The difference was that one felt snappy and one felt slow.

My point is that your comment sounds like what everyone said back then... you need more or better hardware. Maybe, maybe not.

And yet this analysis from someone who hasn’t even touched the actual hardware or even has specs to base his analysis on is painting a completely different picture than the people who have reported on it since December. People are right to be skeptical of this just as they are magic leap.

I think the AR experience will be far more dependent on rock solid tracking and pose estimation, ergonomics of the headset, fashionability of the headset, ability to work in many light conditions, and killer initial apps, than display resolution or FOV.

Focusing too much on the display itself completely ignores the other aspects that inhibit adoption. An AR display that had a resolution of 100x100, could only display a green HUD, but was completely invisible inside a normal pair of sunglasses or glasses, would completely trump a super high quality fibre scanning display that was incredibly nerdly and unwieldly looking.

AR is pointless if you can't take it outdoors, if it's in-the-home only, you may as well go with VR.

FOV is pretty important. It's difficult to feel like you are in an augmented reality if you have to tilt your head just to see the full object in front of you.

Maybe you could get by with little helper things, but that's just a fancy HUD and not really AR.

Outside of entertainment, who cares if you feel like you’re in the environment vs being able to do useful things with it when you want to or need to? Using AR purely for entertainment doesn’t seem like such a revolutionary thing, really, especially when we have ok VR. I see some potential advantages for sure, but enough to make it a mass market nust-have device? I personally don’t see it.

Much of the affordances of AR will require a higher FOV - irrespective of use case.

E.g.: Tagging objects, directions and buildings with tracked information, following characters in the real world etc.

Long term a complete immersive solution - where virtual objects persist in the real world, will absolutely be more useful and compelling than both VR and limited FOV AR. Such a solution would literally be able to selectively replace and amend elements of reality as needed / desired. Although we can't fully predict it's uses, it seems self evident there would be many more than a poster sized slice of AR will allow.

I agree that the incidentals like tracking and form will matter a lot.

I think however there is no "proof of existence" of any software or capability that would compel even early adopters to use a 100x100 display, even with all the other physical issues being polished to a high sheen.

Looking down at your phone or smartwatch seems far more likely.

The "maybes" that people frequently suggest require a staggering amount of unwritten software infrastructure (sometimes up to and including sentient AI).

I suggest you spend some time reading his pretty extensive set of high quality articles on many companies and aspects of AR.

This is an industry where outsiders have a very limited understanding of the serious serious problems in front of AR.

It's also an industry that is taking advantage of the very limited understanding of just about everyone not in it to hype things far beyond their capabilities.

If you care about AR in even an offhand way you should spend some time self educating and Karl Guttag's site is a good way to get started.

It's very interesting field but there are tremendous challenges in front of it and it serves no purpose to just assume the companies involved have actual magic leaps that solve the problems.

It's also entirely possible they offer partial solutions to some problems, no solution to other problems, and still produce am experience worth paying money for.

That's a natural argument extrapolating from the phone, electronics and laptop market.

I think it is wrong in this case, however. As I understand it, the problem is "half-working" in the case of VR/AR/etc isn't something like less convenient that early adopters can simply put up with. Half-working VR has ability to sicken a person and injure the vision system.

See for example. https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/13/health/virtual-reality-vr-dan...

That is a pretty bad article about VR that might have been excusable in 2013 but is not on firm ground in 2017 much less 2018.

Broadly, almost everything in it has been either not born out (vision concerns) or less of a problem then first assumed (motion sickness) once the limitations of different users were understood.

Many people using VR find that the vestibular concerns are not an issue over time as long as the framerate of the system is high enough (90fps+). People actually do get their "sea legs" over time and many (largely gamers so far) ask for locomotion systems that were considered terrible ideas even 2 years ago.

I've read his site, but he focuses way too much on aspects of AR that have little to do with consumer needs or concerns. A "worse is better" AR display that violates pretty much every concern he has could win the market as long as it was done really well in terms of comfort and applications, the same way the limited Apple Watch pretty much dominates the market today, even though it falls far short of the kinds of magic people thought it would be capable of originally.

He certainly seems to know a lot about the optics involved. However he was also, for example, suggesting recently that Magic Leap had faked the SLAM tracking in their recent Rolling Stone demo https://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/17/magic-leap-how-rigged-was... https://www.reddit.com/r/magicleap/comments/7r267v/blog_arti... . So I would not take his overall view of Magic Leap as gospel.

Its success will depend on whether it sucks or not. At this point all evidence suggests it sucks and ML's secrecy and doctored demos do little to refute that.

That’s the opposite of what the very thorough hands on Rolling Stone article had to say about it. Why are we even speculating about the user experience at this point?

Because ML has insisted that it's amazing without any supporting evidence.

I took a look at his site, and at first was inclined to agree, but a few things have convinced me that you’re incorrect. First, he’s been on ML’s case a lot lately, but his site goes into a ton of different companies and products. Even more than that, he’s harsh on any marketing bullshit regardless of the source (loved his treatment of wristwatch projectors), so maybe the issue is that ML has an unusually high noise:signal ratio. He seems to pull no punches, but going back years he also seems to really know his stuff, and is proven right, over and over. He’s covered tons of devices and companies too, so there’s nothing singular there.

Given that I’d wonder how much of his site you looked over before you came to your conclusion about a “singular” focus, which is demonstrably untrue. I’d also like to know which ML competitor he supposedly works for, since I couldn’t find a hint of that.

We need Carmack to do an analysis.

And I really don't think this Kremlinology-based approach could capture it anymore

...eh? How is "study and analysis of the politics and policy of Russia" related to this?

“Kremlinology” has frequently been used, for study of (or, in practice, often speculation about) the inner workings of any secretive organization.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kremlinology

Which competitors are you claiming he works for?

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