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Magic Leap Finally Demoed Its Headset And It Is 'Disappointing' (digg.com) 107

Posted by msmash from the chaff-from-wheat dept.
From a story on Digg, via DaringFireball: Magic Leap, the secretive augmented reality company that has raised $2.3 billion, finally demoed its long-rumored, much-vaunted headset on Wednesday (and announced that the headset will ship this summer). It was disappointing. Magic Leap has promised big things -- remember the tiny elephant in your hands? Remember that whale jumping out of the gym floor? But the animations demonstrated on Wednesday fall short of those promises. Waaaay short. An executive with Magic Leap, which has long remained tight lipped on its roadmap and commercial availability of its products, said on a Twitch livestream this week that the Magic Leap One, a developer-geared headset, will ship this season. (Summer ends September 22, so the company has 10 weeks to meet its self-imposed deadline.)
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Magic Leap Finally Demoed Its Headset And It Is 'Disappointing' More

Magic Leap Finally Demoed Its Headset And It Is 'Disappointing'

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  • I'm shocked! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    How could something so mysterious not work the way they lied to us!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      But but but 3D printers and technology gets better!

  • Looks like Knack to me!

  • Digg? (Score:5, Funny)

    by sproketboy ( 608031 ) on Thursday July 12, 2018 @07:36AM (#56933544)

    What is this, 2006?

  • Unfortunate (Score:3)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Thursday July 12, 2018 @07:38AM (#56933552) Journal
    That is unfortunate, but expected. It would b e really great if we had something that looked even remotely close to their demo.

    • It'd be really great if they offered a product that could make people who were wearing look like they weren't. Because I'm not walking around in that.

    • Re:Unfortunate (Score:4, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday July 12, 2018 @11:37AM (#56934682) Homepage Journal

      AR is very difficult because of lag. You need a sensor that accurately measures head movement or position. Measurements take time, transmitting the measurement takes time. Then you have to incorporate that into your 3D model, render it and send the rendered image to the screen.

      Unlike VR where the rendered image is all you can see, by now the background you are rendering over has already moved.

      Add on sensor error and jitter that needs smoothing out and AR is always gonna look pretty janky until we get those latencies down by an order of magnitude or more.

  • Shipped in Summer (Score:4, Funny)

    by orlanz ( 882574 ) on Thursday July 12, 2018 @07:42AM (#56933566)

    Remember those three devices at the demo? Yup we shipped those. One went to our CEO. Another went to the traveling sales guy. And the engineers demanded their prototypes so we gave one back.

    All shipped. And guess which season that was in? Yup, Summer. Goal met, booya!

  • The headline might as well read "Magic Leap Finally Demoed Its Headset And It Is 'Disappointing' [to the Surprise of Absolutely Nobody]"
    • There were quite a few deluded individuals on here and elsewhere defending their claims.

      • I'm one of those people who don't see a good use case for AR stuff, unless it completes 75 points from the following Killer App options.

        50 points Porn
        25 Points Business
        15 Points Gaming
        10 Points Education/Training
        25 Points (Unknown Use Case 1)
        15 Points (Unknown Use Case 2)
        10 Points (Unknown Use Case 3)
        50 + Points (Technological Breakthrough making it much much cheaper and significantly better than current tech)

        The killer would be Porn and just about any other combination, and probably wouldn't require a Kill

      • It never ceases to amaze me just what bloody suckers these famous VC investors can be.
  • Actually to me those short demos were impressive. They demonstrate the AR interacting with the physical world (walls, hands, etc). I never saw the original marketing demos like the "whale" or "elephant" or anything though.

    • Re:Impressive to me (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Thursday July 12, 2018 @08:09AM (#56933644) Journal

      When he blocked the rock with his hand the rock was rendered over top of his hand, not behind it. That totally breaks the immersiveness of the AR.

      • From what I saw the rock had passed the hand already, so the rock shouldn't have been broken at all. That is kind of lame, but it looks to me like the "hitbox" was too big for the rock. I am not expecting much beyond the Hololens though, because there is no magic here - just programming.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by grumbel ( 592662 )

      It's not very impressive because Microsoft has done all the same with Hololens already two years ago and Microsoft had far more polished content to show. For the billions that MagicLeap had in funding, everything they had to show for so far as been really underwhelming. It's not like people expected the elephant/whale stuff to be real, but what MagicLeap has shown doesn't even remotely get anywhere near that, it doesn't even try.

      • That's why nobody is surprised that this demo is disappointing. The whale and other demos they gave in the past were supposed to have been done with their system. What the company has said that they have been doing in the time since them in shrinking the system down to something a person could wear. With this demonstration of a cowardly, rock-throwing creature that we've seen done before (and seen better on our phones) it is disappointing and one has to wonder where $2.3B of investment money has gone. It su

  • Hype and bullshit fantastical claims rarely translate into viable real world products.

  • AT&T Partnership/Investment (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ebonum ( 830686 ) on Thursday July 12, 2018 @08:05AM (#56933618)

    All other VR companies will have to pay oppressive fees for "fast lanes".

    Magic Leap doesn't have to work well. It has work well enough and be the only choice.

  • And! And! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It can test for 99% of all life-threatening diseases from only one drop of blood! And best of all, ANYONE'S BLOOD! Doesn't even have to be yours! This is technology, people. TECHNOLOGY! PEOPLE!

  • Eh.... (Score:2)

    by Junta ( 36770 )

    Two disappointments from the video: latency (the rock reacts to the hand well after the hand was there) and the translucency (everything is 'ghosty', a persistent problem for AR to present 'real' seeming things).

    However, it did seem to do a serviceable job with fixed hard surfaces (floor and wall) and would probably be good enough to do the 'whale out of the floor' animation.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hodr ( 219920 )

      And I seem to remember a couple of articles that indicated that MagicLeaps innovation wasn't so much the AR as the optics. Being able to project light into the eye, vs just putting up a see-through overlay.

      The advantage being solid looking virtual models, not ghostly. If they are ghostly, then might as well use a hololense or any of the other myriad crap AR glasses (and yes, they are crap. I have two hololense kits in my office that I can't even get the interns to play with).

      • Smear peanut butter on them. Interns love peanut butter.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        I'm with you there. Some things the camera wouldn't be able to capture that was being bragged about (different planes of focus, though this is something I personally haven't been bothered by in my VR experience).

        Either way, being *way* later to market and seemingly no better than the 'lame' AR already there does not seem like it was worth the investment..

      • I don't see the appeal until the projection scheme is unobtrusive; aside from some specialty applications, nobody is going to want to hold up a phone or ipad either.

        No problem pouring one out for the early adopters funding things, but nobody wants to wear stupid shit on their head while they're interacting with the real world. Figure out how to do this with a contact lens? Yeah, now you're talking.

        More anxious to see 4K VR, and that doesn't need materials advances to happen.

        • The fastest video cards in the world don't render fast enough for 4K VR. Two 1080Tis SLIed together wouldn't get you 60fps on anything but very simple scenes.

          Moore's law is on it though. Give it a few years.

          • Moore's law is on it though. Give it a few years.

            By then everybody will be demanding 16K VR.

  • More vaporware. That happens all the time. $2.3B? The idiocy of some is vast.

  • Obviously, there is at least some demand because people are making them; but I really can't see VR being all that popular (beyond a fad hype at first). It feels to me like one of those things, that, whereas "cool tech", not something with a lot of sticking power.

    Remember the Wii, the Kinect for Xbox. Those were really cool at the time- and for a while incredibly popular... but people went back to a keypad and a screen. VR will be cool and aweinspiring at first- and maybe for 5 years will be popular and a

    • The problem with Kinect is similar to the VR problem: Expensive, difficult to make it work and inaccurate.

    • go the way of the Wii and the Kinect.

      I used to live in a suburb (and city) with a very high level of crime. I got broken into 5 times and they always left the Wii, took the XBox, the playstation any screens etc. but they never took the Wii. I don't think it's going away, unless I throw it away, and I wouldn't do that. It's so easy to crack and you can download almost any game made for it online. I may not use it much myself anymore, but I find it invaluable to keep kids occupied. Netflix also used to

  • Are soon parted. All you need is a good story and a slick prototype.

  • The demos sensor-wise don't look like anything better than what the hololens could achieve (and maybe not as good, though it's hard to say if that's hardware or demo programming). The field of view of the AR looks way better than the last Hololens I tried (the Hololens just had an AR overlay over a fairly small portion of what you could see in front of you and the ML demos displayed an edge-to-edge red line overlay).

    However I always thought the point of Magic Leap was a much better DISPLAY, which not of us

  • Wake me up in 10 years. I want a holodeck or nothing!

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