The tech keeps getting better.. https://amp.twimg.com/v/b011d12a-128c-41f5-9a25-eddf7e4616be.

Thoughts on their progress?

They always make some great looking videos, but I'm very much a rubber-meets-the-road kind of guy. We met with a rep from ML recently, so I'm hoping to get some eyes-on time in the near future. The HoloLens is super cool but the field of view is a real buzzkill. And as if that weren't enough, there's still Meta 2 in the mix.

In pretty much all of the VR and AR cases, the tech and hardware has well outstripped the content in both concept and execution. We have all these amazing toys, but everyone seems just a bit confused about why. We're buying them on the strength of what we individually imagine them to be. This feels the same - LA and ML are opening a joint research center but with pretty vague goals.

Yeah, the field of view on the hololens was the most disappointing part of the hardware. After trying it out and then looking at the marketing materials, I can tell that most of it is marketing BS. The hololens FOV is about equivalent to holding an 8.5x11 inch sheet of paper 18 inches away from your face. To view an entire scene which is larger than that FOV would require you to be constantly moving your head around to scan the entire scene.

The surprising bit about the hololens (which I'd never considered) is that because it's a hologram, the color "black" is transparent, so if you're a keen observer of both the hololens and magic leap videos, you'll notice that they very carefully design their scene objects to not have black or dark colors. It's an interesting design limitation, but by no means does it detract from the coolness of the hardware.

I think the super interesting challenge, which becomes apparent when you watch these AR videos, is whether or not they can handle dynamic background objects. Magic Leap is noticeably absent -- they're projecting their video onto a static background with no moving actors, so they don't have to worry about depth & occlusion rendering. The hololens does a decent job with this, but it's pretty easy to confuse the hardware.

My humble opinion is that the more secretive a company is about their future tech, the less likely it is that it is actually viable. Microsoft has given public demos and done hackathons with hololens, so we can make a pretty clear distinction between what is hype and what is real. Magic leap on the other hand... 100% hype at this point in time. I would be reluctant to trust journalists who are invited to a private demo because they are certainly going to be hand picked and biased to write only favorable input or risk not being invited back for a second viewing.

Interesting new development though: Magic Leap has purchased a new office building in downtown Seattle, so maybe some of us will be able to get an inside scoop or preview on their tech in the near future.

Does anybody know anybody that has tried the magic leap glasses?

oh sweet, i've only been able to read that the few people who have actually seen it in action said it was amazing. I remember reading they raised a ton of money before anybody had really seen it in action.

Anyway, the reason why I was asking if anybody had known anybody that had seen it was because it seems so secretive and wanted to know how awesome it really is by more of a word of mouth thing rather than just what i read in articles. Not that i don't think its going to be awesome, i'm really looking forward to seeing what they've got, i'm wondering if there's any cons like microsoft had with the field of view of their hololense, or what if there's anything they bring to the table that microsoft doesn't (black is transparent in the hololense, is the magic leap able to render black?). what kind of technology are they using? hololense adds light to the scene, is magic leap going to do like a transparent led display or something (in that case white would probably be transparent, haha)?

EDIT:

haha, basically what slayemin said