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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @10:47PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @10:47PM (#720109)

    latency added by the camera

    Negligible compared to human reaction speeds or visual perception if done right, which is technologically possible even today.

    let in light from outside

    This has its own problems, like being out of the eye's dynamic range. Look into the sun and you won't see any AR display - a camera on the other hand can normalize external and internal signal to a comfortable level

    something that looks pretty much like normal glasses in AR mode

    So you're one of those glassholes that want to record everything they see surreptitiously? I'd take ten gargoyles [marksarney.com] over one of you any day. Seeing people with clunky VR gear will become normal if enough start doing it, just like people wearing glasses became acceptable.

    can be turned into a VR headset by simply covering up the lenses

    I'm not convinced it's phyically possible to miniaturize the commonly used fresnel lenses and optics to provide the same level of visual fidelity in a "looks-like-eyeglasses" apparatus.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 10 2018, @11:10PM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday August 10 2018, @11:10PM (#720118) Journal

    So you're one of those glassholes that want to record everything they see surreptitiously? I'd take ten gargoyles over one of you any day. Seeing people with clunky VR gear will become normal if enough start doing it, just like people wearing glasses became acceptable.

    Yes, you should have the freedom to record everything you see out in public, without letting anyone know you are doing so. If making the camera invisible is what it takes to not get [businessinsider.com] attacked [techcrunch.com], so be it. If private businesses face an epidemic of people making unauthorized recordings, tough shit.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11 2018, @12:44AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11 2018, @12:44AM (#720135)

      you should have the freedom to record everything you see out in public, without letting anyone know you are doing so

      I strongly disagree. Humans have bad hair days. Or bad face days. Humans make mistakes. Humans tell white lies they know will be forgotten soon but have a positive impact. Humans can look ridiculous in freeze frames of recordings while looking fine in face-to-face interaction or even just normal 25fps video (source: looked at freeze frames of TV presenters who should have had enough acting lessons to iron out their kinks).

      All of this is human interaction that works face to face because our perception and memory gives the person in question some dignity. Recordings on camera open up the door to eternal analysis of ephemeral situations and eternal judgement for even the most ephemeral mistakes.

      Recording someone's every move in possibly 120 or 240fps (which is the sort of speed you'll want for an AR camera to sync up with the display anyway) is way past natural face to face capabilities. Not everyone is born with the stone-faced properties of a news anchor. And now you can analyse people's microexpressions, retroactively. The /very real/ possibility of being recorded at any time will force people to act out a persona in order to try to disguise their real feelings - out of respect for others, shame, general privacy reasons or because they just hate being judged. It will certainly change behaviour and not for the best.

      Recording people all the time makes them act differently than they would, were they relaxed. In your future, just having someone with glasses turn into Jane Doe's general direction might make her lock up and feel in a range between uncomfortable and terrified.

      Are you OK with with all this and if yes, why? Do you think it's so important that you're able to prove that dude really ran the red light, your asshole neighbour really called you a pompous douchebag or your GF secretly grinned evilly while telling you wide-eyed that no, she "didn't cheat on you, honest"?

      If anything, I want less cameras in my life and if I weren't visually standing out as much from the crowd as I do due to reasons, I'd destroy or paint all the public ones in my reach. Sometimes, the old ways really were the better ones. I prefer some human courtesy and privacy that humans in public will, but cameras won't offer.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11 2018, @12:34PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11 2018, @12:34PM (#720288)

      Are you prepared for everyone with glasses to barred from bars, restaurants, movie theaters, concerts, etc? Besides just the basic respect for others as AC points out above, these things will happen, and glasses will become unfashionable very quickly.