Heres my video flying inside my house:
The jaw dropping aspects:
- it correctly knows when to mask for the column
- it does lighting effects from the planes headlights
- it does particle collisions with my furniture when it crashes
- it crashes by detecting i hit the wall
It really is amazing tech but it is very unpolished. But I am very hopeful they keep pushing and it gets cheaper and more people can experience it and develop for it.
This is like the amiga. We are at the infancy of AR.
I still haven't seen a compelling use case for AR.
It’s still kinda clunky now, but the tech will get better. That’s a money saver (and a big improvement) with the main barriers being tech and familiarity, and those just come with time. Very bullish on that
Note: Magic Leap specs are from a quick google search and may be out of date. Even improved they'll have the same issues to a slightly lesser degree.
First - field of view: The horizontal field of Magic Leap is 40 degrees. My primary monitor, a 16x9 32" monitor at about 3 feet from my eyes, is 42 degrees. So this can't even show me 100% of that, and definitely can't show me a second monitor in my peripheral vision.
Field of view is hard to improve as the optics are really close to your eyes and being head worn have limits of size and weight.
Second - Resolution: The magic leap resolution is apparently 1280x960, significantly less than 1080p. That's not even close to the 4K monitor I'm typing this on. That low resolution has to cover the entire area of my monitor. More if I want to stretch the field of wider.
Picture yourself programming on a 1280x960 32" monitor. Just to see I set my system that way for a minute. PIXELS EVERYWHERE! Also, now I need to reset all my carefully curated windows.
It's hard to improve resolution. The displays are very small to keep size and weight down. HMD displays are generally about the highest of DPI that can be built.
Third - Brightness: You can't draw black on a see-through HMD, all you can do is make the existing world brighter. The lenses are too close to the eye to be able to do any kind of masking or blocking of the ambient light.
So your display system won't be able to show much of an image over bright area; the text is either white over world color or background colored in a white field. It's not good for reading text and almost illegible at typical sizes in office lighting.
You can't improve brightness easily. These tiny displays make a lot of heat right near your head. Making them brighter means bigger heatsinks, taking weight and size, and more power with requires bigger batteries or shorter run time.
You can kinda cheat one a little with dark sunglass lenses to make the whole world darker. Or you can go to VR and just block the whole world and draw your interface over a video stream. The second option isn't really compelling because it for AR demos like Magic Leap shows.