Another Magic Leap video , and a few crumbs of information emerge.
The “Magic Leap One Creators Edition” in now know to be:
- Powered by an NVidia Tegra X2
- Runs a custom Linux x64 OS called LumenOS
… and that’s about it.
The demo was pretty underwhelming for a company that’s supposedly been working on this tech for 4 years (since 1st VC $ influx). Despite many many requests the FOV question was ignored, probably because the answer isn’t that impressive. The demos shown looked to be really unimpressive, the FPS looked really low, perhaps as low as 24FPS.
Pros:
- They seem to have spent a lot of time working on supporting (8) gestures
- It will “map” the environment (i.e. provide a room mesh and (soon) an API about “surfaces” (e.g. where’s the floor, where’s a big table area… etc.)
- Looks to support AR out-of-the-box
- Unity support now, Unreal coming.
- GL 4.5, GLES 3.1, Vulkan
- Described as a “game console”
Cons:
- No VR – this was brushed off repeatedly as the device is targeted for AR
- shared memory – i.e. the GPU/CPU share memory – typical mobile experience but this means a computation vs graphics tug-of-war for system resources. Also means a tiled renderer.
- It’s an additive display.
- Not clear on triangle count, at one point it a scene was “200 to 4K triangles” (seems small) to 800K triangles (that’s a tad big). From the demos the former seems about right.
- Described as a “game console”
- This is the “Developers Edition” means is like an Oculus DK1/2 vs the consumer CV1 version. Does this mean the final consumer “game console” will be different?
- No mention of price.
So this is a AR focused HMD, with an (apparent) small field of view, and (apparent) low framerate, that has an external belt-worn “battery pack”. It based upon an (until now) automotive console focused SOC, running a customized Linux kernel (based upon NVidia’s Vibrante kernel?), and has an apparently nice (if small) UI library that’s designed to make designing gesture-based apps easy.
So. It seems like this an underdeveloped AR platform that has reasonable software support and low specs. Maybe too low. Small FOV, low refresh rate. It’s an additive display – which means no VR and most importantly NO VIDEO/MOVIE support – you’re not going to watch Netflix on this guy. There was some talk about fill-rate – well folks, video is ALL fill rate (and in this case battery life as well).
They also failed to show the killer-app of AR, social interaction – multiplayer is DIY via the WiFi connection. They really should spend some of that money and demo a chat room – but of course, networking is yet another resource hog, and adding a network communication layer is a lot of work. But the hardest nut to crack would be multiple users having a shared AR environment when each HMD has it’s own local map. Not really something that’s left as an exercise to the developer.
AT&T are the US distributors. Why AT&T, does it also have a SIM card? It’s a developer edition, that usually means $$$ so why use a consumer store to sell them?
It’s coming out in the summer – hello – it’s mid July now, not much summer left.
The AR headset space is actually getting crowded with players that are on their 2nd or 3rd generation of hardware. Microsoft is coming out with Hololens 2 soon so ML better have some really compelling aspect if they expect it to take off – or even be mildly competitive.