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posted by martyb on Friday August 10 2018, @06:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the mixed-reality,-mixed-reviews dept.

After years of hype, Magic Leap starts selling $2,300 AR headset

After years of behind-closed-doors demos and over-the-top hype, Magic Leap's augmented reality glasses took one more step towards reality today. The company has opened up orders for the $2,295 "Creator Edition" of its first headset, the Magic Leap One.

That price includes in-person delivery and setup of the developer-focused hardware, though that delivery is only available in select US cities for the time being—Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle will be covered on day one. Those in other locations have to reserve a spot and wait for wider availability.

The hand-delivery is in part to determine which of two adjustable sizes for the headset is most appropriate for you—Magic Leap says "you'll be measured upon delivery to ensure the perfect fit." Magic Leap also says "limited quantities" are being made available now and that delivery of current orders will take place within "120 days and typically much sooner."

Compare the price to the $3,000-$5,000 developer versions of Microsoft's HoloLens, or the $1,500 Google Glass.

It requires a connected "lightpack" computer that clips onto a pocket or shoulder strap. The device has an Nvidia Tegra X2 chipset (2 Denver 2.0 cores, 4 ARM Cortex A57 cores, with one Denver core and two of the A57 cores accessible to developers), 8GB of memory, 128GB of storage, and a battery supposedly offering 3 hours of use. It also comes with a wireless handheld controller similar to ones offered by Oculus, Samsung, etc., although it is fully tracked by the headset's cameras, offering "a full range of motion" according to The Verge.

The field of view of the device is 40° horizontal, 30° vertical. This is larger than HoloLens's 30° horizontal, 17.5° vertical field of view, but is far less than that of VR headsets (typically 100-110° horizontal, and 200-210° horizontal for the Pimax and StarVR headsets) and human vision (around 220° horizontal when including peripheral vision).

Detailed review at The Verge.

Previously: Magic Leap Bashed for Being Vaporware
Magic Leap Finally Announces a Product, But is It Still Vaporware?


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 10 2018, @07:34PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday August 10 2018, @07:34PM (#720040) Journal

    It's a product for developers, who could make their money back by writing software for it, and early adopters, who have money to blow on an inferior Gen. 1 product.

    There could be plenty of use cases for it, but it probably has to exist for a while before we see any killer apps. I'd point to stuff already done by smartphones but with less finesse. Such as automatic translation of text by holding up your smartphone and using the camera. Or identifying objects, plants, etc. using the camera. Or augmented reality Street View [theverge.com]. All of these would be pretty good if they were hands-free (it would also be funny and potentially useful to have multiple of them happening at the same time, such as Street View + sign translations in a foreign country).

    Google and Microsoft have come up with some business, engineering, and medical use cases for their AR devices. There will be people seriously evaluating these and potentially coming up with some great time-saving or even life-saving measures. For example, the endless amount of checklists that doctors and nurses need to juggle could be put in an AR interface. Have the checklist to the side, and have it slide into the field of view when it is glanced at. When drugs are administered, require the AR device to see a label or bar code before administering the drug, and throw up an alert if that is not done or if it is the wrong drug. This isn't even something cool like AR-assisted surgery, just a way to cut down on medical mistakes [newyorker.com]:

    A decade ago [1997], Israeli scientists published a study in which engineers observed patient care in I.C.U.s for twenty-four-hour stretches. They found that the average patient required a hundred and seventy-eight individual actions per day, ranging from administering a drug to suctioning the lungs, and every one of them posed risks. Remarkably, the nurses and doctors were observed to make an error in just one per cent of these actions—but that still amounted to an average of two errors a day with every patient. Intensive care succeeds only when we hold the odds of doing harm low enough for the odds of doing good to prevail. This is hard. There are dangers simply in lying unconscious in bed for a few days. Muscles atrophy. Bones lose mass. Pressure ulcers form. Veins begin to clot off. You have to stretch and exercise patients’ flaccid limbs daily to avoid contractures, give subcutaneous injections of blood thinners at least twice a day, turn patients in bed every few hours, bathe them and change their sheets without knocking out a tube or a line, brush their teeth twice a day to avoid pneumonia from bacterial buildup in their mouths. Add a ventilator, dialysis, and open wounds to care for, and the difficulties only accumulate.

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  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday August 10 2018, @07:39PM (1 child)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 10 2018, @07:39PM (#720042) Journal

    On the one hand, yeah.

    On the other hand, there's something Orwellian there that makes me feel like I'd go mad if I were a nurse. Being micromanaged by an algorithm all the time sounds exhausting.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 10 2018, @07:52PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday August 10 2018, @07:52PM (#720047) Journal

      I was just in a hospital. They already do it, but with a computer that they have to go back to repeatedly. And they have to scan the patient's armband and ask them their name and DOB every time they give drugs. They can call other personnel with a voice-activated device. They also had a low-tech whiteboard for writing down some stuff.

      And they still got things wrong, i.e. important requirements for the patient weren't addressed until brought up.

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