
Inside Magic Leap - state
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2016/06/features/magic-leap-mixed-reality
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angersock
It's really, really hard to overstate how disappointing the current batch of
AR offerings are--at least the ones I've tried to develop on.

The best, probably because it is so limited in what it's trying to accomplish,
is the Moverio BT-200. Basically, you get two translucent postage stamps that
give you the appearance of a 21" monitor at like 4 ft. Little else, and a
garbage camera, but that's actually just fine for the use case of "I need a
hud". The resolution is fine (see: simple screen at a distance), the things
actually fit properly (and even come with a convenient notch for people with
glasses!), and overall they're a good experience.

 _Developing for them_ , though, is a pain in the ass. The documentation
online is hidden for nonregistered users, and isn't that great to begin with.
They use a locked-in Android 4.0.3 installation, and thus have all the weird
shit of Android dev to deal with. The best library for them is Vuforia, but
even that is a library cluttered up with random shit that just isn't
interesting if you want a simple testbed (oh, and it really, really wants to
pipe all your data into The Cloud for analysis and feature recognition).

The Meta glasses are quite disappointing, at least partly because they come so
close and fail to deliver. The first moment when you fire up their depth
camera debugger and watch cyan points dance over your hand in front of your
face, it's really amazing--until you realize that your face hurts, the dots
are low res, the hotkey dialog is clipped badly with no way to scroll, that
you are looking through a small porthole onto the dots, and that generally
everything about them is a hint at what a better implementation would be. The
head-tracking is amazing, but even that can't save the other problems.

They are really uncomfortable because they lack an over-the-top headband: this
forces you to really clamp them down to keep them on your face, and that just
results in them squashing the everliving christ out of your nose.

The choice to do Windows-only support through Unity is basically a huge
fuckup. Even the DK1 shipped with a native SDK for the adventurous, and
forcing a developer to learn two new design paradigms (Unity's weird way of
looking at the world, and the whole AR shtick of the Meta) is rather unkind.
The website itself doesn't even have any public docs, because of reasons, and
so you can't even try to develop for them without an SDK in hand.

The Linux users? The people who are probably most able to realize the AR
workspace concept by way of Wayland or (god help us) X11? Yeah, left out in
the fucking cold. Thanks Meta!

The hardware itself isn't even without blame. The little control box gets
really upset if you plug things in incorrectly, but they didn't bother to make
the plugs shaped in such a way as to prevent that.

The view itself is not bad, but suffers from a bad coordinate system. To
elaborate: the BT-200s just put a transparent screen in front of your face as
a virtual monitor. This is very stupid, very simple, and basically perfect for
a HUD. The Metas, though, are really committed to a 3D space around the user,
and at boot time pick an orientation and stick with that. So, if you look
around, things slide out of view because they're in scenegraph misaligned with
reality. You can, in a bad moment, convince the Meta that the default
orientation of their goggles is like 45 degrees looking up and to the side,
and then have to keep recentering it.

That last problem could be mitigated but for their decision to for you to use
Unity and the whole 3D clowncar. So, for making a simple HUD, the Meta is at
once overkill and underpowered.

~

This tech will get better, but right now everyone is too stuck in cashgrab
mode to remember to actually make development possible. And thus, they're all
probably going to wither and die while Microsoft laughs all the way to the
bank.

Because Redmond, you know, actually _cares_ about developers.

Developers developers developers developers.

