Oculus CTO Carmack Downplays Consumer AR, Calls Magic Leap Overhyped

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the world of mixed reality hardware and software, few people have the expert-level credibility of Oculus CTO John Carmack, whose pioneering 3D work at id Software broke new ground on personal computers years before he turned his attention to bringing VR hardware to life. While Oculus' owner, Facebook, recently suggested that the future of its Insight and Guardian motion-tracking technologies is in all-day wearable augmented reality glasses, Carmack is underscoring that this future isn't immediately on the horizon, and that other companies in the space -- particularly Magic Leap -- have been underdelivering on their early hype.

The core issue, Carmack said on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, is that technology still hasn't advanced to the point where AR glasses can be made small enough for people to wear around all day. Right now, he says, Oculus could make a "sort of a shoebox-sized thing" that people could wear into the world, but it wouldn't be socially acceptable in most places. Even if Oculus could cut the size down by three quarters into a swim goggle-sized wearable, he doesn't believe that people would want to wear it for long periods, and "we haven't built it," he notes. Carmack also struggled to define realistic consumer applications for the technology, noting that he was "skeptical of the broad utility" of a lot of the "little demos" that initially seem interesting.

I thought Magic Leap was over hyped until I tried

[rgbe]

I donâ(TM)t fall for hype, and I always believed Magic Leap were burning through crazy amounts of money, I almost put them into the category of that juice bag squeezing startup. I didnâ(TM)t think much of them. But then I tried Magic Leap and I understood. I played the game demo created by Weta Studios, it blew my mind. The problem with VR is that it takes you out of this world, you find it hard to balance and itâ(TM)s generally just awkward. With VR you canâ(TM)t interact with others or the world around you. I see that AR removes a lot of the VR issues, you can actually move around without fear of bumping into things, balancing is not an issue and you can interact with others. Yes, the kit I used was pretty massive, massive glasses around the head and a battery pack that clipped into my pocket.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:I thought Magic Leap was over hyped until I tri

[LynnwoodRooster]

I believe GP was talking about Juicero [wikipedia.org], a startup that raised $120 million dollars so you didn't have to squeeze concentrate boxes yourself. No surprise they folded rather soon after shipping their product...

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[LynnwoodRooster]

Juicero never made a profit [bloomberg.com], their juicer was $750 just to manufacture. Selling them at $399 was a massive loss - and was the reason they closed. They couldn't raise additional funds to keep losing money.

Re: I thought Magic Leap was over hyped until I tr

[Lanthanide]

There a teardown of the machine on YouTube from a mechanical engineer who has a background in commerical product design. Basically it was massively overengineered for the task it needed to do - either the company were morons or simply believed that if they made it really robust they could reduce warranty claims in the long-term as well was potentially expand to other product offerings (whatever that could be).

Re:

[LynnwoodRooster]

They probably decided that "time to market" was most important, and went with the fastest solution they had - which is usually a way over-engineered, complex solution. Lots of CNC, make things 3-4 times as strong as they need to be (it takes time to do FEA and validation testing about actual use loads and forces), etc. They basically made a great proto - and shipped that. I have seen that too many times...

If the COGM was $750, I'd expect the COGS to be well over $1200 - making it a massive money-loser wh

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[JaredOfEuropa]

The demo is undoubtedly impressive, but what actual use case is there for AR that is practical with today's hardware? I know a few companies have messed with this and came up with some very impressive use cases... but they all found that even in cases where bulky gear isn't an issue, creating AR content of this nature is seriously expensive.

Re:

[LynnwoodRooster]

Outside of serious work considerations (medicine, assembly, etc. where having a visual overlay could be immensely helpful), I think the next best case is a constantly scrolling Facebook feed (FB - who owns Oculus) to keep you always aware of how your social standing score is doing!

Re:

[shadowrat]

Here's something that i actually made. I have come up with configurations of 3M sticky hooks to hold various things. a few of the right hooks in the right configuration makes a great wall mount for an ipad for example. i have a model of the hooks and the relative locations they need to be in, and I can display this through my phone in my ar app. it shows me essentially a hud that i can line new hooks up to on an empty wall.

It's not suitable for mm accuracy work, or anything that needs 2 hands to apply si

You can see a lot of them

[SuperKendall]

what actual use case is there for AR that is practical with today's hardware?

Look at ARKit demos for the iPhone, now imagine those on a display with the quality of MagicLeap.

The hardware is here, to paraphrase an old saying it's just not evenly distributed yet.

I feel the same way as the original poster about AR. VR is nice and all but AR is magical with a headset, you can tell that will be the future. Just a question of when, I have a feeling the hardware is closer than this article seems to think.

Interview is worth listening to

[zurmikopa]

While the media takeaway isn't the greatest, the actual interview is quite worth listening to. It's a little bit like a Carmack keynote in interview form. Though if you follow Carmack, a reasonable amount of it won't be new to you.

The actual interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]