How Magic Leap Is Creating an Alternate Reality
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
I blogged on Magic Leap a few weeks ago, and came to some of the same conclusions as the author of the gizmodo piece - namely that a device that can be like Google Glass and Oculus and everything in between could be a real game changer.
I chose to call the concept "Controllable Reality" (I make no claim that I've invented the concept or the term!): http://www.zappar.com/blog/google-glass-magic-leap-and-the-i...
Edit: I also talk a bit about the requirements for an AR experience, existing approaches to AR HMDs and the big problems to be tackled on the road to consumer adoption. I've got a PhD on the software side of AR but am not an expert on the hardware, but have sufficient knowledge to hopefully offer an interesting perspective.
I'm new to HN too, so let me know if I should be posting this as a separate item or not!
Simon
To me and most people who have been around AR for years it is very clear that registration of objects in 3D is a core part of a lot of AR experiences. That was the part of the video that struck me as most weird; that Magic Leap would make a lot of noise around AR and yet have a Creative Content VP seemingly so unaware of the existing AR field.
Only when he fails to heed warnings to visit his optometrist to have them adjusted does the reality come to light.
That said, Lucky Palmer is too young to have grown up with this stuff, but is apparently such a big fan of the book that he asks all new hires at Oculus to read it before their first day on the job.
That book (along with a small handful of others) made near-future scifi my favorite genre. Any other suggestions?
There's also the even-closer-future of REAMDE by Neal Stephenson.
Which others?
If you've read Daemon and Freedom (TM), maybe you've already read Kill Decision, also by Daniel Suarez. It's about autonomous, swarming drones used in the military. Daemon is a better book though IMO.
There's Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future, which is a collection of short stores in the near-future sci-fi genre. Neal Stephenson found Project Hieroglyph with the intent of advancing positive (non-dystopian) sci fi in the near future, and thus spurring on the next generation of scientists and engineers to go ahead and create it.
Peter Watt's Blindsight and Echopraxia are also good (currently still reading the latter). It has scientifically plausible zombies and vampires, so that's something.
Ramez Naam's Nexus has very interesting ideas on what happens to the world with very good brain-computer interfaces. It's set in the near-future, but I do think the tech is implausible here for so soon.
William Hertling's Avogadro Corp is about a paperclip maximizer built by mistake by a Google-like company, with a Gmail-like service that is manipulated by said paperclip maximizer.
The Martian (Andy Weir), Mind's Eye (Douglas Richards), and Wool/Shift/Dust (Hugh Howey, set quite a bit in the future, but the story started (chronologically) in with near-future sci-fi)
I haven't read Kill Decision yet, I've heard mixed reviews. The thing I loved most about Daemon and The Martian is that it's all completely plausible that these things could happen in my lifetime. Hell, they could happen right now if someone was willing to put forth the money. Nothing is particularly outlandish or impossible.
I'll have to check out your suggestions, thanks. It's my favorite genre, but I struggle to find worthwhile books in that genre.
Even Apple does pre-announcements (e.g. for the iPhone and WATCH) when it makes sense. That said, given that they have patents on some of this stuff, you'd think they'd at least show some demos when they're trying to get developers interested in the technology (see the Unite 2014 presentation).
Personally I think published demonstrations of working products should be a requirement for obtaining patents (and, where appropriate, source code should be placed in escrow and released when the patent expires).
If it was a PR piece, they'd have animations and pretty renders about how all the things work and where they're going. Instead there are patent diagrams and quotes from job listings.
This seems more like journalism.
Magic Leap seems to be keeping its silence.
What they are doing is the opposite of a PR push.
It does sound suspicious to assume that they magically solved these hard problems.
It just obviously won't happen.
Maybe opaque and depth of field really fool your eyes?
As a comparison, consider how surprising it is that animation works: line-drawn cartoons look like real objects, animals etc; secondly, that if you just change the images at a mere 24 fps, they come to life (the meaning of animation at the time).
(There are some workarounds: low-persistence, asynchronous timewarp)
In my experience 10fps is when cartoon images start to break down into "a sequence of drawings" rather than "moving images". This is right on the line for me; I'm not sure how common that is for people who haven't trained their eyes to the point where they can pick up on a single frame being shot 3x instead of 2x.
I mean, yeah, 24fps looks better, 30 or 60 fps is even better, and the maximum frame rate of the human eye seems to be anywhere between 255fps to 1kfps (I'm getting a lot of conflicting info from a quick google for that), but 12fps is pretty solidly acceptable for moving drawings.
(I'm a former animator.)
Relatedly, Carmack found some serious latency problems with Oculus Rift, but only with some particular combinations of object movement and changing viewing direction. He's thinking of fast video games with lots of movement. Just having a dragon floating in front of you is quite a lot more constrained.
Though I meant it as a general observation, i.e. animation is surprisingly effective, if you do it the right way; perhaps AR will be too, if it's done in (so
Are they so confident in the technology that they have started to heavily invest in the content? Is this a way to position themselves as an entertainment company rather than a tech company?
Trying to do everything themselves seems overly ambitious. Then again I doubt they get funding like this without something provably awesome and a solid plan to move forward.
1. An elephant on a flower isn't going to get someone to pay $500-$1000 for this hardware. You need very high quality content to get lots of consumers on board.
2. Moving from current cinema production to VR production is going to be a huge learning curve for a lot of artists. You need to create best practices and examples of how it is done by artists.
First we saw a man-made machine landing/crash-landing 500 millions KM from Earth.
Then HN discussed this [1] which is IMO one of the biggest machine-learning demo I've ever seen (other than Self-driving cars).
And now this futuristic tech which is aiming to eliminate the screens altogether. (As some of its use cases)
If Magic Leap delivers her promise within next 2-3 years, then we are already ahead than Singularity timeline [2].
1. http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/ 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...
* Translating telephones allow people to speak to each other in different languages.
* Machines designed to transcribe speech into computer text allow deaf people to understand spoken words
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzw...
The technology is there to build this kind of device, I agree not 100% accurate but still practical enough to be used in real life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IraqComm
>> Machines designed to transcribe speech into computer text allow deaf people to understand spoken words
This too, the technology is there to build a device. I would say we've much more powerful devices in form of smart phones than just doing 1 or 2 things. The talko app on iPhone is actually much more than just speech to text converter. http://www.talko.com/
I would also like to say that Singularity predictions doesn't employ that the technology will be so mainstream that every person will be using that. But even if we can build a technology in some lab, it still becomes an event on Singularity timetable. I've yet to see any off the mark prediction from Singularity timeline.
"It's the premiere of a technology that allows you to put digital images into your field of vision directly," he said. "I saw the prototype in Miami a few months ago and it's stunning."
"It is going to be transformative technology, there's no doubt about that."
The experience will "disturb" audiences and put them "off balance", he predicted. "That's what it did when I saw it demonstrated."
The article also says that a demonstration will be made as a part of the Manchester International Festival next July.
On top of all the real people walking there , you'll have virtual people as well who are all in their living rooms yet still interacting and conversing with everyone as if they were really there.
Everyones Magic Leaps would be synced to show the same composite reality.
You could have virtual assistants to show you around the city , explaining the various attractions or just to give you some company.
Ofcourse you'd need a gigantic network of overlapping 3D cameras to support such a feat but we won't let concerns like feasibility get in our way. I dreamt of this once and now I'm really excited that I might get to see this within my lifetime.
Doing some Google research, I found some lists of top VC deals:
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233632 http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/28/top-venture-capital-deals-...
Looking quickly at the numbers, it does seem that this deal was relatively large.
I suspect their strategy for finding investors is like this: 1. Potential investor is incredulous about the company's value 2. Investor gets a demo of their technology, and it's mind-blowingly amazing. 3. Investor asks them to name any price and gets out their checkbook, knowing that this has the potential to be the biggest invention of the century.
For notifications and wearables glasses was an idea that has proven to be a bad choice for social as well as practical reasons.
Augmented reality is well adding to our reality and I believe what people really want and NOT virtual reality. I can image Amazon Echo with a butler image would be a HUGE hit as opposed to the audio only option.
Unless there is some aspect of vision that somebody here would like to chime in on [locality on the retinal sensor allowing to perceive darkness by lightening up other areas?], color me deeply skeptical. It seems like "fullscreen" Google Glass, at best.
I've yet to study the linked patent so can't say if that solves it but it's not as simple as just a layer of LCD pixels, as they would not be in focus.
It's sort of the same as the light-field generation problem - to generate images at arbitrary depths you need to control both the colour and direction of light rays. To generate sharp occlusions at arbitrary depths using a single 2D "masking" layer will require the layer selectively passing or blocking rays depending on their direction.
The patent mentions variable diffraction gratings, which I suspect might be part of the solution to controllable opacity based on ray directions, but I don't know enough about optics really to say for sure.
This patent describes the "occlusion mask device" which is supposed to do exactly this - darken light coming from certain angles to grant the perception of blackness.
If such a device exists and is 100% transparent when not in use then there are reasons why you might want to wear it all the time - think notifications like Google Glass but that can be embiggened and responded to on demand in a much larger portion of your field of view.
Early hardware is probably not quite going to be there in terms of portability, battery life, fashion, etc. So perhaps it makes sense to focus on in-home use cases first. However in the home-use scenario the value of AR is less clear; an Oculus planetarium may well be better than an AR one in my living room - I don't really want to limit the awesomeness of the size of the universe by the small size of my flat.
A lot of cases where AR adds value is in small experiences but deeply context-relevent ones. The consumer value equation for those experiences only really makes sense if the device is always-on. That's the future I think we're heading towards.
Unfortunately, because eyes saccade (twitch) extremely fast, latency must be ridiculously low or it would send you insane (figuratively).
Pretty sure my laptop does this :P
There's also an interesting health & wellness aspect to this -- could this be a way to free people working digitally from sitting at desks in front of screens all day?
This is, in my opinion, the most exciting technology in the popular press right now.
Might be quite tricky to learn though!
Edit: I see that Magic Leap are working on sensor gloves.
Probably to the extent technology has freed people from commuting to the office every day. This is more a matter of culture than of technology alone. If we don't make a push to fix broken habits and change detrimental work culture these things will never really change.
I dreamed of a future where I could have magic leap contact lenses while hiking in the mountains. My brain being quite active when walking or running, that would be an awesome way to do productive and/or creative work.
Pretty things cost huge amounts of money to create. Making them 3d and interact with your environment just adds to the cost.
Combining that with tracking depth cameras and sharing the map of the environment over the network would let multiple co-located users see and interact with the same 3D object (much like with a volumetric display) but the actual rendering of each user's view is decoupled.
Combining this with eye-tracking, as \hyp0 mentions, takes this to the limit - you don't need to construct a "holographic display" that renders super high resolution light fields of rays in controllable directions to all the infinite possible viewpoints around the display. Instead just stick it on your head, locate the users in a shared depth map, and just render the slice of that their eye needs to see right now. In terms of CPU/GPU/bandwidth issues it's much more plausible with today's technologies. The display side is still challenging!
if it is real, will there be a law to tag 'virtual' things so i don't accidentally kill a real person when I thought that was part of my game? You know how congress or the senate would design that one ;)
I'd love to be proven wrong but don't see this for many years.
It does however really annoy me the amount of press Magic Leap have managed to get without saying anything public at all. For me it's an opportunity to think and talk about the properties of an ideal AR HMD and why it might be an interesting device. I have no idea how close Magic Leap are going to get to that ideal.
Day N+1: the first pr0n application using it appears.