
Magic Leap: When Reality Hits the Fan - gadders
http://www.kguttag.com/2016/12/06/magic-leap-when-reality-hits-the-fan/
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SirensOfTitan
The Economist published a decent look into the tech of augmented reality a
couple weeks ago. They asserted two main ideas, both of which I agree with. AR
will:

1\. Not achieve a form factor acceptable to the general consumer for a while.

2\. Be more immediately useful to companies looking to improve worker
productivity (like on assembly lines), where form factor is a lesser concern.

As a consequence of (1), we will probably start seeing more robust
applications of AR tech using the smart phone and camera (like Pokemon GO and
Snapchat filters) before we see any reasonable hardware device.

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Animats
Microsoft's HoloLens has an acceptable form factor. They crammed an incredible
amount of electronics into a reasonably lightweight self-contained headset.
Cordless, even. It's nowhere near as clunky as the HTC Vibe, Oculus Rift, or
the 1990s stuff. The field of view is too narrow, but maybe that can be fixed.

There's still no killer app for AR, but that may be a price point problem. If
the HoloLens was cheap enough for Pokemon Go, it would sell quite well.

VR may be stuck in the FPS game niche forever.

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shostack
I'm not sure most consumers would agree. Fashion-conscious people (read: a
large part of consumer society) likely still wouldn't wear it. It is too bulky
and obvious still. Even Google Glass was too much.

I increasingly feel like it will take a fashion-forward approach like Apple
and Snapchat have done in their respective areas to make these devices hip
enough to truly gain mass market acceptance.

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istorical
The HoloLens doesn't seem like a device you'd be wearing out and about on city
streets. Seems more like something you'd be wearing at home in your living
room by yourself or with friends, or at work as part of your business process,
not something you'd wear on your face going out to a bar to meet a date.

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nissimk
This generation of AR is going to be like the last generation of VR -- a cool
gimmick with great promise of things to come, but not really advanced enough
to deliver on that promise. Even the virtualboy was pretty cool at the time,
but it took 20 years to get to occulus. If someone can make these things work
like they do in the movies then everybody will get one, but the technology
doesn't seem to be there yet. I don't understand most of the words in this
article, but it sounds like even if the computation equipment is powerful
enough to render these images that the hardware to transmit them to the viewer
has a lot of limitations.

I used the HoloLens at a demo and it was amazing, but after 3 demos of 5
minutes each over the course of 30 minutes, my eyes felt tired for the next
hour. And the limited field of view did detract from the experience.

I've been wanting a heads up display in my glasses for years ever since the
first "wearable computing" wave. Eventually it will happen, but all the
hardware breakthroughs are so much slower than software.

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pvg
_virtualboy was pretty cool at the time_

The Virtualboy was objectively, empirically utterly uncool the second it came
out. There are multiple peer-reviewed papers on this. The µVb was a widely
used unit for uncoolness for a while at the time.

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M_Grey
Do you have any idea how that turkey made it through multiple levels of
management to eventually reach the market? You seem knowledgeable in this
arena.

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slantyyz
Wasn't the Virtual Boy created by Gumpei Yokoi, the guy who basically created
the Game Boy? Maybe it got through based on his reputation alone?

I recall reading (unconfirmed) stories in the gaming press that after the
Virtual Boy failed, Yokoi was basically relegated to an office where he
basically did nothing.

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leoc
Apparently
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virtual_Boy&oldid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virtual_Boy&oldid=765361493#Development)
Yokoi didn't really choose to ship the product that actually came out: like
many another long-drawn-out, ambitious project Virtual Boy ended up being
basically thrown out the door as-was once senior management lost patience with
it.

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serg_chernata
Google cache version as the blog seems to be up and down.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oh3mPHO...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oh3mPHO2NwQJ:www.kguttag.com/2016/12/06/magic-
leap-when-reality-hits-the-fan/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

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asymmetric
archive.is copy, if you don't want to hit google:
[https://archive.is/DONtE](https://archive.is/DONtE)

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grmarcil
Archive.org link while site is down:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20161221172829/http://www.kguttag...](http://web.archive.org/web/20161221172829/http://www.kguttag.com/2016/12/06/magic-
leap-when-reality-hits-the-fan/)

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erikpukinskis
Magic Leap seems like it's on the trajectory to be a patent holding company in
an emerging market.

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AstralStorm
Unfortunately for them, other big players already have similar related
patents.

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nxmehta
And "patent holding company" is not what their investors spent over a billion
dollars on.

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sebringj
I was one of the people dooped into believing this was going to happen because
I assumed a huge investment from Google meant something and they were so
secretive because it was that good, like Steve Jobs was so secretive. At least
we can look at tangible VR at this point but those sales are lagging as well.
Overall, I'm bummed out but I still hold onto the hope we'll have 3d holograms
coming out of phones or contact lenses that overlay huge arrows on the road
for driving directions.

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edblarney
It's true.

But one 'killer app' could change it all.

VR needs it's 'Halo' :)

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camus2
Resident Evil 7? The gaming press say it's a great experience in VR.

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Lio
It is. It's not perfect with a few odd black outs. Eg when you start climbing
a ladder bit otherwise PSVR is a great way to play the game.

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Dangeranger
Looks like the site is getting so much traffic that it's no longer available.

Here is an alternative cached view:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.kguttag.com/2016/12/06/magic-
leap-when-reality-hits-the-fan/)

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coldcode
"Error establishing a database connection" \- also reality I guess.

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theoh
The article references a weird quote from Fortune:

"Abovitz says that Magic Leap's "light-field" technology essentially mimics
the brain's visual-perception mechanisms to create objects and even people who
look and behave just the way they would in the real world, and interact with
that world seamlessly."

If Magic Leap's use of the term light-field is anything like its meaning in
the literature, and it does sound like it, from one other source that I
googled, then it is very much not to do with "the brain's [...] mechanisms",
it's a totally geometric/optical concept that any optically equipped
device/creature could enjoy. It could be tailored for the typically horizontal
human eye arrangement, like some previous autostereo displays have been. That
is an anatomical/geometrical shortcut, though. If there's real neuroscience-
style brain science here I'd be interested to hear more about it.

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adam12
If you are getting the database error:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oh3mPHO...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oh3mPHO2NwQJ:www.kguttag.com/2016/12/06/magic-
leap-when-reality-hits-the-fan/&num=1&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

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kguttag
Sorry Guys, there was a problem with the website running on my host. I think
it has been fixed

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bobsil1
Use free Cloudflare caching maybe?

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asimpletune
I really don't understand a lot of the terms in the article, but one thing
that I always found very attractive about magic leap is the amount of people
they have staffed that are "story tellers" \- professional movie types. I can
imagine that magic leap will be the next Pixar. They would combine technology
that they develop in house with content also made in house. No one knows why
google gave them so much money. Maybe this half of the equation, which you
can't really ascertain from patents and technical sources, is what is missing
for people to crack the code.

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devons
Google (and others) gave them so much money because ML is aiming to build a
platform that is not only the thing after smartphones, it's the thing after
the Web: spatialized information seamlessly interleaved with reality,
everywhere.

At that time (>2 years ago), Magic Leap seemed to have achieved the holy grail
of Mixed Reality: optics that selectively block out light in real-time.
Combined with demos, mockups, and sketches of real-world applications, this
tech provided compelling evidence that ML was going to unlock true Mixed
Reality real soon.

As erikpukinskis commented, even if Magic Leap fails to deliver, it will
likely end up with an extremely valuable IP in an emerging space. Magic Leap
did not invent Mixed Reality, but they filed patents on many first-order
applications of the tech (there are countless others).

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cududa
Just a quick note, not to debate the whole premise of this post or it's parent
- but I don't believe Magic Leap (or anyone else) has developed the ability to
selectively block out light.

The most I've seen done in this space is using very very bulky
electrochromatic glass of which the 'pixels' are ~32x the size of actual
pixels on the AR display, and have extremely "fuzzy" borders

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man5quid
We hugged it a bit hard, anyone got a link to text?

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rm_dash_rf
The microsoft hololens is a great piece of tech. Works great, no cords. Its
development only though. It's cool that I can tinker with it, but at the end
of the day I cannot sell a product with it.

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aroman
Should have a "2016" appended to the title, as this is from December of 2016.

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jsgo
(removed due to wrong company, thanks josephpmay)

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josephpmay
You're confusing Magic Leap with Leap Motion. Two totally different companies

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jsgo
you're right, my bad.

