What we just learned about the Magic Leap One's hardware
cnet.com
cnet.com
I had high hopes for Magic Leap when it was first announced. I though this was going to be a device that had opaque overlay LCD or laser-retina projection so that it worked outside in daylight. I thought it would have a full on FOV. Now it seems really like a kind of Hololens 1.5.
At this point, I think we may have to wait for Apple to solve workable AR glasses.
In fact, Apple may have already won this space unless they seriously drop the ball or someone releases something amazing. I mean the hololens is shipping today and is really cool but few people seem to care because it’s so expensive and it’s not clear why you need AR. To make AR more than a novelty requires developers. Developers will go where the users are because that’s where the money is, and users go where the apps are and where their friends go. Apple is using smartphone based AR to work around this catch 22
That's waaaay worse than just silence in my opinion.
The most worrisome aspect of the presentation for me was that it's not designed to work outdoors. They said explicitly that the initial product is aimed at indoor use. Which makes me wonder what it has that my Vive doesn't, since the field of view is apparently limited. (One of their presentations in July is titled "FOV mitigation.")
Still, Magic Leap has proven time and again that they have a plan, and mixed reality is coming one way or the other. ML won't be the last player in the space.
As happened with the "hoverboards" that are basically just cheap clones of the SegWay concept.
I don't have sales numbers but there are any number of articles suggesting that they came and went. [1] Certainly, one doesn't hear or see much about them these days.
Outdoor environments get a huge amount of NIR light which can swamp cameras without an IR cut filter. It's possible that the Leap is using infrared imagery for motion/depth tracking. Similarly devices which project structured light for 3D reconstruction usually use NIR projection. These devices fail in sunlight.
The other issue is depth. Depth sensing on a device like the Leap is going to be done using either time of flight, structured light or stereo [1]. Time of flight is unlikely due to the amount of power you need to dissipate on the LEDs (see the Kinect V2) - which are mounted next to your face. This approach would also preclude outdoor use, see above. If they're using stereo alone, then the depth accuracy will only be good at close range. For a typical baseline of say 20 cm, you're going to get reasonable results up to 5 metres [2]. More robustness if you use structured light to assist.
[1] There appear to be multiple cameras, so why would you not exploit the geometry?
[2] Back of the envelope calculation: stereo error at 10m using a 20cm baseline, 2.2um pixels, 5mm focal length and 0.5px accuracy is about 5cm. Accuracy at 5m is about 3cm.
Loads of processing power required... solvable.
Now the real problem is the display of sufficient brightness and colours. Some sort of future translucent LED screen could do it, maybe. DLP can do it at big cost and with bulky projectors. Current picoprojectors are not very bright...
And then three is a focal length problem to solve to have sharp image and good depth range while not messing with accommodation.
Part of me genuinely hopes I'm wrong and wishes we'll have cool AR soon... but right now it just feels like nothing good will come out of the work at Magic Leap.
The twitch clip has a home shopping esque feel to it. That seems ...appropriate. All this from a company with a ~$6B valuation. Imo, that was the real magic leap.
I predict that in a few years, AR vendors will focus on AR for industrial purposes, and then it will be useful.
Off topic: When I was a kid we once augmented it with bottle rockets. A little stupid, but really fun.
Interesting that she called the controller a "totem". Is that a common term? A Montreal VR startup called Vrvana was developing a headset called Totem.
For better or worse, Magic Leap PR is apt to invent Words.
All they learned is irrelevant details, sadly they did NOT say anything about the color of the top or the exact haptic feel of the third knob from the right.
Nothing about the vapourware tech to learn.
Skip and keep watching from your safe distance.
I disagree. Perhaps you mean that they didn't learn anything positive.
I learned that it doesn't work with glasses, that it can't work outside, that the required processing puck will run so hot that it needs ventilation, and that only months before release they still have no content, specs or anything functional except a green LED.
I think those things are very interesting and important.
The fact that they are all very damning of the company and its product is the story.
Just get a HoloLens. That at least has shipping hardware and a real company behind it. Even if Magic Leap eventually does most of the same thing, it's not going to be so much better that it was worth all the bluster.
No specs, no demos, no video or images of what is seen through the glasses.
The only functionality demonstrated live was a green LED on the glasses.
Even in a world where the glasses work 100% as advertised, I’m still skeptical that goggle-vision AR will be a multi-billion dollar industry. Who wants to run around playing AR video games in their house or office? Who’d want to wear goggles and buckle a gaming PC to their belt just to check e-mail and watch YouTube? Where is the market for Magic Leap’s ideal, everything-works AR headset?
Some might say industry, architecture, or medicine, but that doesn’t appear to be their focus right now, and it’s hard for me to see those niche applications justifying their billions in investment so far.
But that's asking a lot. I'd probably be willing to stipulate it will happen at some point, for at least some use cases (e.g. industrial). But Not sure that 5-ish years will do it.
From my perspective AR applications in the future will be huge in all areas as it means a new way to interface with 3d editing on real time.
But having said that, I do not believe Magic Leap will be the one who bring this to the table. I see magic Leap as the Altavista or pets.com of the Internet, burning investor money like crazy and trowing things to the wall expecting something to stick.
I'm not sure it's fair to lump Altavista with pets.com.
The latter burned through something like 300 megabucks in just over 2 years.
The former was the first full-text search engine for the web and generated tens of megabucks of revenue, though they couldn't come up with a business model to keep it going (and eventualy lost out to Google on search quality [1], IIRC). I'm not sure we'll ever know how much it cost DEC to build and run it, but it seems credible that they at least came close to breaking even.
[1] Though I still miss their richer query language, incuding the NEAR keyword.
- Take a tour of the Colosseum during its peak years.
- Architects might find that they can save money on design by building bland looking buildings with facades that enable easy AR projection onto them.
- AR could potentially replace smartphones if they can provide a better user experience.
But in practice it probably isn't a problem. All that matters is that they deliver killer apps. What you can do with mixed reality vs the PC is what counts.
Remember how lifechanging the original iPhone's google maps integration felt? I used to get lost. No one ever gets lost anymore.
We need something like that for the mixed reality space. It's too early to know precisely what that could be, but we'd be betting on the wrong side of technology to dismiss it out of hand.
Ever is a bit strong, but yeah. GPS plus maps is such a great example of how quickly and pervasively tech can embed itself until it's almost hard to remember a world before it. Tropes like refusing to stop at a gas station to ask for directions? Gone. I have a bag of maps in the back of my car. Haven't opened in years.
Just for historical perspective, Google Maps Navigation for Android predated the iOS version by three years ( 2009 vs 2012 ).
'technology ... is “not really what we’re ultimately going to be shipping,” but that his company’s prototypes were good for showing investors and others'
Unlike Theranos, Magic Leap has received investment from people with knowledge in the industry, so I think it is less smoke and mirrors than Theranos, but similar in that they are doing a big promotion on technology that is not ready yet. I'm not going to call it vaporware, and I don't think Tharanos was vaporware either, but they were selling to investors and their customers a product that didn't exist as they had sold it.