Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap, Says Oculus Cofounder (palmerluckey.com) 151
Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus, has something to say about the competing Magic Leap gear. He writes: The title of this review was carefully chosen, not glibly. I want what is best for VR and all other technologies on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum, Magic Leap included. Unfortunately, their current offering is a tragedy in the classical sense, even more so when you consider how their massive funding and carefully crafted hype sucked all the air out of the room in the AR space. It is less of a functional developer kit and more of a flashy hype vehicle that almost nobody can actually use in a meaningful way, and many of their design decisions seem to be driven by that reality. It does not deliver on almost any of the promises that allowed them to monopolize funding in the AR investment community.
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I think the word your looking for is blinders.
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I think the word your looking for is blinders.
Humanity!!! Why are there so many people who don't bother to learn what they are talking about before leaping to 'correct' people who are already correct?
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The main thing Oculus has going for it compared to, say, a high-end Android phone in a head bracket, is heat-removal. Even phones that technically have the horsepower to do reasonable VR just can't "take the heat". Case in point: a Nexus 6p. On paper, it has impressive specs... but if you ignore Google's cautions and try running Daydream on it, you'll hit the 6p's heat limit within minutes, thermal-management throttling kicks in, and the whole use experience rapidly goes down the toilet. An Oculus Rift isn'
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The main thing Oculus has going for it compared to, say, a high-end Android phone in a head bracket
1. VR just doesn't work with frame rates 90. The majority of people are going to get headaches or worse.
2. When you put your phone in a headset you are essentially looking at the screen through a pair of magnifying glasses. Even a 1440p phone exhibits a severe screen door effect.
Re: nothing new here. (Score:2)
I don't disagree about the inadequacy of 90hz, I was mainly pointing out that even with hardware specs nominally comparable to a top-shelf Android phone, Oculus does still have value due to its superior heat-removal vs a phone.
Translation (Score:5, Funny)
Dammit, I wanted that VC money!
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Eh, Oculus had plenty of VC money and plenty of money in general. I doubt he has much room to *personally* be jealous of investment in them.
However, VR has been a very uncertain endeavor, and whatever chances it has had/will have of succeeding can be seriously harmed by a company getting a lot of attention, setting themselves up as a *huge* part of the perception of the industry, and then botching it to turn people off of dealing with that industry.
For example, little of this sort of thing was said by Oculus folk about SteamVR, Windows Mixed Reality, or Google Daydream because all of those seemed to be doing the right sort of thing and setting the right sort of expectations. Substantive improvements without going crazy overboard with the hype. The general philosophy has been to support the tide to rise all ships rather than to be overly critical of each other..
If the industry rolled with Magic Leap's claims however, then any blow back Magic Leap receives would carry over to the industry at large. There is very good reason to distance Magic Leap's efforts from the industry at large.
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If it makes people more cautious, maybe that's a good thing? Maybe that's what they should have been doing the entire time?
If the industry truly has something to offer, then it's really just a matter of time before it comes to fruition. If not, then the caution will save people headache.
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The thing is that they *were* funded. Same thing is going to hold true for Magic Leap, funded by VCs doing lottery-ticket type investment, going to be left out to dry in the reality of the market.
At least Oculus has *some* funding to keep lurching along, I see Magic Leap as having to fold up shop sooner.
The VR market has seemingly plateaued (at about 10m units/year), so I don't anticipate a whole lot of enthusiastic investment, but on the flip side there seems to be enough there to maintain the state of th
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VR technology is pretty close to "ready for primetime", I'd say. Tracking technology is there, funny enough, the problem is display quality and actual content that isn't just trying to use VR as a gimmick.
But I'd guess that's a development process. When you look at movies, you'll notice that the first few also resemble mostly theater productions that make little use of the features film adds that could simply not be done in theater, early cinema mostly resembles theater productions, and you have the same wi
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I don't think it's quite there yet. True mass market appeal needs to be wireless and standalone, which nothing currently on the market achieves. Oculus's Santa Cruz will get a heck of a lot closer, being a standalone (no PC required) headset with 6DOF tracking of both the headset and controllers. I'm not sure that the performance or displays are good enough for true broad market appeal, but I think it represents the minimum bar for VR to be mainstream.
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I don't get the standalone angle, since you'll most likely have to use it in a static environment anyway, so why the standalone requirement? I can easily see it as a PC accessory, that angle doesn't bother much. People already have a PC and most people interested in (and financially able to afford) VR will also already have powerful enough hardware. The level of hardware power required is pretty much on par with last-gen technology, so it's going to be a long time before you'll see that anywhere near afford
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Right now, you need to have a moderately powerful computer, you need to do setup on your computer, you need to plug a bunch of things in, you need to find places to mount cameras, you need to run wires. This is all a barrier to entry for the mainstream. Non-technically savvy people who don't know much about VR aren't going to go out of their way to upgrade their computers and make sure that they buy a video card with a VR link connector. They just want to buy something that they can put on and it works. Kee
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Video games had some rather humble beginnings as well. Gaming wasn't mainstream until well into the 1990s and "adult gaming" certainly wasn't a real thing until the 2000s. In the 1980s, you'd probably already consider selling more than 50k copies a success.
VR is in the same boat today. Yes, the sales numbers are dwarfed by "normal" games, because adaption is certainly slow. First, the effort and space required to play in VR is some magnitudes higher. It's more of a time and space investment to get VR set up
Re: The aborted fetus of technology (Score:2)
VR needs MUCH higher framerates & close to zero latency for any application that involves immersive "look around by turning your head" navigation. 60hz just doesn't cut it. Even if you read your sensors & render frame {n+1} while displaying frame {n}, you're looking at ~17ms of latency *anyway*. Anything longer than 10ms feels sloppy (like sloshing around in water), and anything longer than 5ms is perceptible. At 90-100hz (used by most official VR platforms), you're on the bare outer edge of tolerab
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VR was usable, with the right content, on a VFX-1 in 1998 at 30Hz. It was almost certainly usable before that, but that was the first I used it.
Higher frame rates are better, but won't fix puke inducing content.
Re: The aborted fetus of technology (Score:2)
With high latency, you can't even stand in place & look around a fully-immersive VR environment without vertigo becoming a problem. So no, higher framerates aren't a cure-all, but at LEAST they enable nausea-free "look around while standing still" immersive VR.
Simply put, your brain can deal with small objects in a large scene that have wonky motion, but draws the line when seemingly EVERYTHING, including your larger surroundings, is in sensory conflict.
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Sitting is preferred. There were a few VFX-1 games there were real playable. Flight Unlimited 2. Comanche 3. At 30fps display, driven by a computer 2 or 3 x as fast as those games were designed for.
With just 3 axis tracking, standing was _impossible_. Having a solid controller/wheel in your hands is still a good thing for VR.
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AFAIK, the VFX-1 was REALLY the equivalent of wearing 3D glasses in a darkened movie theater with a perfectly-positioned seat, and Comanche didn't do head tracking at all. 30fps for any application where you're expected to be able to turn your head & have the screen immersively track the motion in realtime would be completely INTOLERABLE after ~5 minutes. Hell, I could barely endure the gen1 Oculus Rift demo (the one where you're seated in front of a virtual desk looking around) without getting queasy
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What, yes Comanche (3) did head tracking. It just didn't show a helicopter in head tracking mode.
It was not 'intolerable'...though Descent 2 was unbelievably pukey, that was intolerable. (I can blow the dust off of the VFX1, install in new CMOS battery in the old 1 gig win98 machine. Yes I am a packrat.)
Of the good ones on the VFX-1, I could play for an easy half hour. The biggest problem was you had to change modes and lift the headset in FU to see instruments (which you had to do to land).
As you sa
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It's easy to make people throw up in VR, it's hard to not make them throw up, but _not_ impossible.
Down to content: Keep up mostly up, limit turn rates, provide a consistent visual reference.
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I've played around with these VR systems (Samsung Gear, Dev Kits, Vive) and even had the chance to try out the Virtuality headsets decades ago. Even with a LCD screen, the Samsung Gear headset is still too heavy to be comfortable for long period of use. Not as bad as Virtuality headsets, which were way too heavy as they had CRT's. We are probably going to have to wait until high-speed flexible plastic LEDs become available.
The other problem is this distinction between dev kits and regular consumer headsets.
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Dev kits really need to be over-engineered and over-spec'ed compared to consumer-oriented hardware, especially early in a product family's life. A company that releases a brand new product, then renders it completely obsolete within 12 months will piss off a LOT of people, so you need to ensure that the first-gen hardware has at LEAST enough horsepower to limp along with the likely next-generation hardware. People grumble when the expensive hardware they buy today sucks at running software written for next
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Yea, here's the thing though. Occulus blew it too. Sure, they had a demonstrably usable product but they also suckered investors, took developers for a huge ride, lied about their intent to support Linux, and ultimately failed to deliver something anyone but Facebook can care about.
Re:you didn't give me YOUR money (Score:5, Interesting)
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Luckey sold Oculus to Facebook for multiple billions of dollars. Dude's not fighting for anything at this point, aside from PR goodwill after selling a kickstarted company to Facebook for billions of dollars.
Re:you didn't give me YOUR money (Score:5, Informative)
So yeah, I'd rather have seen all that funding go to Oculus instead... except that they're now owned by Satan.
Re: you didn't give me YOUR money (Score:2, Interesting)
That.. And a lot of people I know bought occulus for the cross platform support. Then they dropped Linux.
Really hope HTC vive beats the crap out of them long term.
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HTC has been having MAJOR financial problems for a long time.
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Yes, but that doesn't matter [arstechnica.com], because the core technology (the software ecosystem, platform, and room-scale tracking) belongs to Valve. HTC just provides some industrial assemblage and quality control, which Valve may replace anytime with a different vendor.
Re: you didn't give me YOUR money (Score:4, Funny)
> And a lot of people I know bought occulus for the cross platform support
There are dozens of us. DOZENS!
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As far as investors are concerned, if Satan can get the product out the door and return on their investments they are good with it.
Often what happens is an idea made by a tech guy who has little business experience, tries selling the product for much less then it is worth. To only find that that they can't keep it up. Then a business guy goes in and shoots up the price, but makes the company more stable, however the customers are now annoyed that they will have to pay twice as much as they expected.
Price
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"The product [magic leap] put out is reasonably solid,"
So actually what he says is it's not bad as a first iteration of a hardware/software system. Indeed, he is upset and wants to portray his competitor in a bad light.
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I think given the Hype, money and time people have a right to demand a little more than just ok.
You have a right to demand whatever you want but that doesn't mean it's reasonable.
Look at it this way: suppose the magic leap product improves enough to match the demos five years from now. That will be very late, but will you really complain? It will have taken a long time, but then we'll have something cool.
Re:you didn't give me YOUR money (Score:5, Insightful)
The full quote:
The product they put out is reasonably solid, but is nowhere close to what they had hyped up, and has several flaws that prevent it from becoming a broadly useful tool for development of AR applications.
What he's actually saying is it's not bad -- compared to the state of the art three years ago. Given that the company was hyping this as the AR equivalent of Mr. Fusion, what they delivered is woefully disappointing.
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What he's actually saying is it's not bad -- compared to the state of the art three years ago. Given that the company was hyping this as the AR equivalent of Mr. Fusion, what they delivered is woefully disappointing.
Nah, what he's actually saying is, "Buy my stuff, not theirs."
Re: you didn't give me YOUR money (Score:1)
Except he already sold his stuff to FaceBook. He does not work for Oculus anymore.
Re: you didn't give me YOUR money (Score:1)
And yet, ive not seen any evidence the magic leap HARDWARE is not capable of everything they promised. for everything else the openxr spec isnt even final yet.
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And yet, ive not seen any evidence the magic leap HARDWARE is not capable of everything they promised.
Based on the reviews I've seen online, the current hardware is NOT capable of providing the functionality that was promised. For example; there are only two focal depths, the screens embedded in the goggles do not provide wide viewing angles and the AR is far from opaque.
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The full quote:
The product they put out is reasonably solid, but is nowhere close to what they had hyped up, and has several flaws that prevent it from becoming a broadly useful tool for development of AR applications.
What he's actually saying is it's not bad -- compared to the state of the art three years ago. Given that the company was hyping this as the AR equivalent of Mr. Fusion, what they delivered is woefully disappointing.
No, what he's saying is that despite hype and funding, it's not really anything new. If you've ever tried the Hololens dev kit, it's not much better than that. Except the Hololens kit has been out for 2.5 years. So basically years of hype and hundreds of millions of dollars, and they launched the same thing MS did years ago. Not really worth it.
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That only means that the product actually somewhat works and is not only a load of marketing hype. That is not really any endorsement and a pretty damning remark, in fact.
Also, Magic Leap is hardly a competitor of Oculus - they are not even in the same market. AR *does not* compete with or replace VR, they serve totally different purposes and applications (and also the price bracket is completely elsewhere).
Oculus doesn't have anything AR related in their portfolio, AFAIK.
Re:you didn't give me YOUR money (Score:5, Interesting)
So actually what he says is it's not bad as a first iteration of a hardware/software system.
Well aside from the fact that you cut off the most relevant parts of the quote (sentences stop with a full stop not a comma), even if they did put out a solid product that wouldn't change anything. They didn't promise a solid product, they promised to change the world and blow minds, sucking up investment capital that could have better spent elsewhere.
But I thought we were heading towards a VR (Score:1)
revolution just like we are currently in the 3D printer revolution? Witness all the 3D printed cars and houses we currently have.
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Mmmmm, shorts!
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> Thank fuck the endless barrage of 3D printing hype spam has finally abated on slashdot
Only to be replaced by the endless barrage of XR hype spam.
VR != AR (Score:4)
Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus, has something to say about the competing Magic Leap gear.
Founder of company bashes competitor. News at 11...
It is less of a functional developer kit and more of a flashy hype vehicle that almost nobody can actually use in a meaningful way, and many of their design decisions seem to be driven by that reality.
That is unfortunately a fair description of most VR technology that has ever been developed in the last 30 years. The hype has always exceeded the reality substantially even as far back as the early 1990s (see the movie Lawnmower Man back in 1992 for an example of the hype train in the form of a terrible movie). Understand that I used to make my living with VR tech and it has a soft spot in my heart. But the market potential of VR has been blown WAY out of proportion to the reality of it. AR is a huge market. VR not so much, particularly the bits requiring an immersive headset. Where VR is useful it's incredibly helpful but literally every application of it is the very definition of a niche market.
It does not deliver on almost any of the promises that allowed them to monopolize funding in the AR investment community.
AR != VR so I'm not really sure what he's on about. If investors are confusing the two then they are morons. But frankly most of the AR investment seems quite healthy because it's being done by companies like Google, Apple, and the like. You'll note that aside from Facebook, none of the other big tech companies are worried much about VR but they are spending a LOT of money on AR because there are vast, obvious, and hugely profitable applications for the tech. The closest VR comes to a mass market application is for games but even that is still a pretty small population segment and market compared to AR technology. AR tech includes all sorts of location aware smartphone tech, heads up displays, self driving and driver assisting car tech, warehousing, skilled trades, and so much more. VR is useful for some games and a few niche simulations like flight simulators and other training applications plus a bit of marketing. I'm not saying VR is useless, just that it's a smaller market opportunity than AR. Orders of magnitude smaller.
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That is unfortunately a fair description of most VR technology that has ever been developed in the last 30 years. The hype has always exceeded the reality substantially even as far back as the early 1990s (see the movie Lawnmower Man back in 1992 for an example of the hype train in the form of a terrible movie).
In the past I would have agreed with you, but at present the situation is very different. There's a variety of very solid products out there and several very solid SDKs as well. What we are seeing currently is nothing at all like the toys of the past with games, big platforms, and even the bloody porn industry getting in on the action.
VR is smaller than AR in the same way that desktop home PCs are smaller than workplaces. You're conflating two very different target markets. In the consumer space VR is far l
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The issue with the VR products out today is that they missed putting out a good product when people were still hyped about it, they came to late and took to long to get good. Oculus Rift was launched at $600 without controller and focused an seated experiences, not a great deal. Now at $400 ($350 on sale) with controllers and some games included and roomscale it's actually a decent product, but everybody lost interest in VR quite a while before that happened. Similar issue with Oculus Go at $200, it would h
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Motion sickness (Score:2)
You will never solve the motion sickness problem.
Regarding motion sickness, first not everybody is affected the same. (Just like not everybody is sea sick)
Some where already happy with the tech 20 years ago (VFX1-era) and since then it's only getting better (better resolution, wider field of view, more responsiveness).
For the rest, the problem has been studied, is quite well understood (basically, sensory input has to match each other. Thus there should be as little lag as possible between head motion and update of image), and since the recent Occulus wav
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Key applications for these head mounted displays have no motion sickness issues.
VR and AR are very much related. The Oculus Gear VR, that lets me use my Samsung Note Phone for the display, has a Pass Through Mode where you see the real world throug
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As soon as they get lighter and have higher resolution
Most importantly they have to be more than an additive display. The problem with Hololens and now Magic Leap ("HoloLens v1.1" according to lucky) is that they don't black out any pixels. So it's like a projector in that if your room isn't black you don't get any black in your image. That's a big problem for a lot of work that is white with black text. It's going to be hard to have high resolution with low contrast.
MagicLeap implied with their demos that they were somehow blacking out light paths... but
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You will never solve the motion sickness problem.
You are absolutely right since I am not actively involved in any VR research or product development. In the meantime the only true joke here is someone on a technology forum making a "You'll never solve..." claim.
We know what causes motion sickness, through successive iterations it the problem has already been reduced. As hardware is getting better the solution will be in reach. Please don't jump up so quickly to express your ignorance of the technology.
Market sizes (Score:2)
There's a variety of very solid products out there and several very solid SDKs as well.
That's a "build it and they will come" argument. We could have an honest disagreement about how "solid" the products are but there is no argument that they have improved quite a lot. But just because the technology has advanced doesn't mean it will be adopted widely or that there are use cases people care about. Ask yourself what problem is this tech solving for people and then what are its advantages and disadvantages over the alternatives. VR is mostly a solution in search of a problem. Doesn't matte
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That's a "build it and they will come" argument.
Yes and no. My argument was they already came. There's a HUGE push from all sorts of players not just from the developers of VR for the technology. Build it an it will come has been the efforts of the past.
Ask yourself what problem is this tech solving for people and then what are its advantages and disadvantages over the alternatives. VR is mostly a solution in search of a problem.
Entertainment is created. It was never solving a problem in the first place, much like computer games never solved a problem either.
"Toys"? I was working with supercomputers costing 6 figures, CAVE [wikipedia.org] systems, and 3D headsets as far back as 20 years ago.
So now you're holding the niche above all else? The fact is VR pushes of the past in the general market were toys in comparison to what we have now, not the least because the
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Re:VR != AR (Score:4, Interesting)
AR was the useful one (Score:2)
What are some of the niches where VR is incredibly useful?
I think the poster meant that *AR* is the incredibly useful tech.
It's basically useful whenever you would need some head-up type display to give extra information.
But the problem is that these are tons of small specific tasks.
There are tons of them so the market is very vast (nearly everybody could use some AR tech at some point)
But each task is vastly different and specific (think getting head-up navigation instructions while driving vs. a surgeon getting useful data hands free while operating. Both are us
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Another use for VR is for things like modeling and floor planning. My company has a few experimental projects related to this. If you know about Tlit Brush, that's the idea, but targeted at businesses rather than consumers. It also has an undeniable wow factor when showing stuff to potential customers.
Where VR is useful (Score:2)
What are some of the niches where VR is incredibly useful?
Simulations (think flight simulators or other forms of training), certain games, porn, sales/marketing, architecture (virtual walkthroughs), and education are common market segments. Probably in some cases also remote operation. Most of these are sort of niche segments within a larger industry segment.
The main limitation of VR is that it's a cool technology but there just aren't a lot of use cases which are economically sensible in the real world. Simulation and virtual walkthroughs are where it historic
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I have the HTC Vive. I don't do much gaming at all, but the one thing I do use it for, and the reason for which it was purchased, is for architectural modeling. Used it to show me my kitchen remodel long before it was even started. Just a few minutes in VR showed me that the layout chosen would work very well, given the space constraints. When we built and installed the cabinets, everything looked exactly as I expected, because I'd seen it many times in VR. This is one area that I think is perfect for V
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When you are in a hotel in a strange town at 2am, want to go out for a bar fight and don't know of anywhere:
Virtual bar fights:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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VR is a great literary device for Sci Fi and techno thriller novels, such as Michael Crichton's Disclosure.
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Being that people were getting assaulted for wearing google glasses. There is still a lot of work for augmented reality that is needed. VR and AR are nearly the same technology, with the exception of a camera showing you the real world, and display overlapping it, vs. replacing it with something else. Technically you can augment reality so much, that it becomes virtual reality.
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Being that people were getting assaulted for wearing google glasses. There is still a lot of work for augmented reality that is needed.
AR does not require stupid looking glasses or headsets. Your smartphone will likely be your primary means of using AR. I already used it for astronomy, flight tracking (try flightradar24), street sign translation (google translate), navigation, and more. It's also likely going to become a big feature in cars in the coming years. Heads up displays, navigation aids, etc all can benefit from AR.
VR and AR are nearly the same technology, with the exception of a camera showing you the real world, and display overlapping it, vs. replacing it with something else
They overlap in some ways but no they are not the same technology. VR requires little to no awareness of actual
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Founder of company bashes competitor. News at 11...
However, those folk have not been so harsh with Google, Microsoft, or Valve. There is clearly a feeling to treat *this* competitor different. The tone of the industry thus far has been to encourage everyone's success, as trying to snipe each other is seen as too risky in a market that is far from certain to take hold. Magic Leap is considered different in ways that invite people taking more openly bearish stances within the industry. Letting Magic Leap be held up as an example of the VR+AR industry is s
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Founder of company bashes competitor. News at 11...
VR and AR aren't competitors they do very different things. Further, Palmer was fired/left Facebook
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But the market potential of VR has been blown WAY out of proportion to the reality of it. AR is a huge market. VR not so much, particularly the bits requiring an immersive headset. ...
AR != VR so I'm not really sure what he's on about. If investors are confusing the two then they are morons.
This AR != VR thing is all hogwash. Not substantially different than saying a tablet is different from a laptop because it doesn't have a keyboard.
Take a VR display add cameras and algorithms and you have AR.
Take an AR display and project an image to the entire field of view and you have VR.
The only thing that matters going forward is form factor and capabilities. The idea VR and AR are separate things is a temporary situation reflecting current day technology constraints. By the time HMD technology matu
Seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
The way he blew the Rift launch is one of the most epic failures in tech history. To start with so much hype and so much VC and such a market lead. Then to putter around wasting years, pissing off the fanbase with constant delays and a complete lack of communication, string people along expecting a launch any day a year before the product hit the street. Then to release it at more than double the price he had said it would cost and completely kill the early adoption, handing the market to the competition that was at one point years behind. Only to have repeated price cuts the first year as nobody cared to buy at his insanely high price point. And let's not forget him selling out to facebook in the middle of all this.
Palmer Lucky has got to be one of the last people anyone should be listening to in the VR industry.
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I was hyped to buy it, literally with credit card in hand when it went live. I dropped the credit card when I saw the price. I picked it up last summer during the "summer of rift" promo for $400 with oculus touch. I'd have to say it was worth it at that price, thought a day la
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Palmer Lucky has got to be one of the last people anyone should be listening to in the VR industry.
The people who got properly burned are the most important to listen to, however you're also being very unfair. He not only delivered a working product (eventually) that did exactly what it says on the box, but in the process basically single handedly kickstarted a now quite competitive industry.
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The way he blew the Rift launch is one of the most epic failures in tech history. To start with so much hype and so much VC and such a market lead. Then to putter around wasting years, pissing off the fanbase with constant delays and a complete lack of communication, string people along expecting a launch any day a year before the product hit the street. Then to release it at more than double the price he had said it would cost and completely kill the early adoption, handing the market to the competition that was at one point years behind. Only to have repeated price cuts the first year as nobody cared to buy at his insanely high price point. And let's not forget him selling out to facebook in the middle of all this.
I mean... they sold Occulus for 3 billion seems successful.
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I see a quite of few Testla on the road. Testla problem is trying to meet demand, that is far from a failure.
People don't like wearing things on their heads (Score:2)
Is this that hard to grasp?
There's a billion dollar industry in contacts and laser surgery to get rid of glasses, which are comparatively unobtrusive. For AR to hit the mainstream, it needs to offer at least the same experience - and there has to be a SUBSTANTIAL benefit to doing so.
VR doesn't require interaction with the outside world (by definition) so you don't care you've got stupid shit on your head. The tech is capable of providing that experience.
AR requires a SUBSTANTIAL advance in laser projection,
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...anyone using this technology knows it's at least 5+ years out....
I think you mistakenly dropped a zero at the end of that number.
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Glasses are in fashion now. They wern't so 20 years ago.
Glasses use to be for old folks or nerds. If you needed your vision corrected, most people would choose contact lenses or laser surgery just to avoid the stigma.
As someone who was wearing glasses from a time there was a stigma, it has became second nature, and they are so much obtrusive.
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Apart from Magic Leap, the general focus of the industry has moved away from HMD AR to handheld AR. You use the phone as a viewfinder to do things.
I will say that if HMD based AR becomes as unobtrusive as sunglasses, I'd see a large market for folks. The market for glasses approximately 10x the market for contact lenses and corrective surgery. Though the 'always wear your bluetooth earpiece' fad has largely subsided, I still occasionally see someone doing that and appreciating the value. Of course we ha
Whatever Palmer. (Score:1)
Second, Magic Leap's tech is much different than existing AR/VR fare. They are having to build their entire graphics stack from scratch. No existing libraries will handle light field calculations. Hardware requirements are probably insane. They probably have bitten off more than they can chew and their first product reflects that.
Oh, and Palmer Luckey is a douche.
Re: (Score:2)
Magic Leap's product may be complete shit, but what they are trying to do is a lot harder.
Recently, in a related press release: (Score:3)
You say VR, I say AR, let's call the (Score:2)
whole thing off. /s
I would like to coin a new term:
Hype-Wear
Please feel free to use it for all this crap.
But you are owned by Facebook (Score:2)
Big killer of mine in any VR when they did that.
Besides not having the rig.
That much was obvious as soon as it appeared (Score:2)
At best it would just be another HoloLens which is damning it with faint praise. Nothing that has been seen of the project (very little) suggests it even reaches even that far. The recent SDK demo was pretty lamentable.
Thanks for the info (Score:1)
Makes mental note to avoid Oculus products from now on...
Re: (Score:2)
The main problem with 3D television is that the TV industry had already given up on it and walked away by the time Blu-Ray finally got its shit together and had actual hardware consumers could go out and buy.
It's not hopeless, though. Eventually, we WILL have TVs with the equivalent of FreeSync that can be driven directly at 96-144hz over HDMI. Once that happens, it'll just be a matter of time until manufacturers of Blu-Ray players add the ability to control 3D shutter glasses into the player itself. Explic
Re: (Score:2)
How big was your TV? As a practical matter, for 3D Hollywood movies to give you the full effect intended for theater viewing, the screen HAS to fill your entire FoV, because near objects are larger than distant objects on the screen, and the nearest an object can GET is the distance at which the object would fill the screen from edge to edge. So yeah, a 52" TV sitting 10 feet away on a high stand is going to suck for 3D. With a 65" or larger TV, viewed from 5-6' away in a darkened room, the effect is MUCH m