New Magic Leap Video Shows Your Home as a User Interface

By
Paul James
-
12

The secretive augmented reality project Magic Leap enjoy their fantastical teaser videos, but their latest takes a more sober tone by demonstrating the potential for the technology as a user interface to your life.

See Also: Magic Leap Raises $793.5 Million Series C Investment to Accelerate Adoption of Secretive AR Tech
See Also: Magic Leap Raises $793.5 Million Series C Investment to Accelerate Adoption of Secretive AR Tech

There’s not much new that exists in the world of technology that isn’t either telegraphed months or even years ahead of time or the details of which are somehow leaked before the thing in question makes an appearance. The team at Magic Leap however have managed to keep their augmented reality helmet hidden from everyone but a select, chosen few since we first heard about it back in 2014. The project has since secured 100’s of millions of dollars in funding and all before anything of the device has been seen in public.

This means that any information that is released, is usually pounced upon and that includes their various teaser videos. Originally taking the form of target render footage, the last few peeks into the AR helmet’s capabilities have stressed that what’s being shown represents what it’s like to use Magic Leap.

The latest is the most reserved and practical video from Magic Leap to date and strives to illustrate what it’s like to live every day life with AR, the user experience whilst interacting with applications and just what this brings to the table (literally in this case) as a computing platform.

It’s interesting though that Microsoft’s HoloLens appearances have rendered such demonstrations almost pedestrian at this point, with applications and data overlaid and set upon your physical world its piece de resistance. Nevertheless, the video does illustrate that the computer vision systems used to anchor virtual objects in physical space is working remarkably well, albeit with seemingly very deliberate careful head movements from the demonstrator and some detectable mismatches in movement. How the user is interacting with the imagery isn’t clear however, with actions within the UI made without any hand interaction – eye tracking perhaps?

The video comes as part of an in-depth exploration of the highly secretive project by WIRED, who’s excellent piece nevertheless still leaves many questions unanswered, like when the hell can we try it for ourselves? We’re still no closer to knowing when Magic Leap will cease its vapour trail and produce the good – but we’ll let you know as soon as we do.

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Paul James
Based in the UK, Paul has been immersed in interactive entertainment for the best part of 27 years and has followed advances in gaming with a passionate fervour. His obsession with graphical fidelity over the years has had him branded a ‘graphics whore’ (which he views as the highest compliment) more than once and he holds a particular candle for the dream of the ultimate immersive gaming experience. Having followed and been disappointed by the original VR explosion of the 90s, he then founded RiftVR.com to follow the new and exciting prospect of the rebirth of VR in products like the Oculus Rift. Paul joined forces with Ben to help build the new Road to VR in preparation for what he sees as VR’s coming of age over the next few years.
  • GabyS

    “If you have your Magic Leap glasses on, you can look up at the Empire State Building and watch it being built…” A interesting interview here: http://www.wired.com/?p=1999666

  • GabyS

    So the Magic Leap is a pair of glasses with great FOV and great quality, no pixels/SDE, lightfield tech… sound cool

    • Senscast

      Not necessarily great FOV if you read the wired article, it mentions that the FOV on ML is not any better than Hololens’ 40 degrees. Certainly indicated great resolution close up on comparison to Hololens fading away.

      • Dynastius

        Where does the Wired article say that? I just finished reading it and they do say that all the mixed reality headsets need an improved FOV, but I don’t see any direct comparison between Magic Leap and Hololens or anything about how wide the FOV is on Magic Leap either. Maybe I missed it?

        • Senscast

          Gaby mentioned “great FOV’ my comment was not necessarily. My interpretation was that everything he had seen so far meant objects only appeared in front of the viewer. The Meta2 had the greatest field of view at 90 degrees. This may indicate that the Leap is in between 40 and probably much less than 90 considering the technology. It’s all inference at this point but you could also guess that the lens Abovitz is holding is part of the prototype indicating it’s not wrapped like Meta which would suggest tighter FOV. There have only been 3 or 4 journalists given access to ML to date. Every article published is tightly reviewed to maintain secrecy. The Wired article is cleverly written. “It could be this, my language isn’t definitively telling you but it’s not not telling you” :) Of course this is just my interpretation.

    • Hans Wurst

      I guess you are being sarcastic. Yeah, this video is just a huge fake just like the HoloLens videos. The tech far from being that amazing.

  • α-ray burst

    There’s no way to be sure yet, but I think they may have over-hyped their product. I smell another Google Glass type flop. Unless the form factor is amazing, and the price is < $500.

  • CazCore

    the jittering positional mismatch with the real world was actually quite obvious

  • will bell

    This tech is very interesting, as it appears to be a new kind of display according to some patent info I’ve seen. It may get us around the flat plane focus problem common to all current generation ar/VR, which seems pretty cool. Also it seems like everyone who tries it throws massive amounts of money at it. I don’t know exactly what that means as far as the quality of the eventual product, but it certainly implies that the tech must be very impressive.

  • tomer gilron

    The whole video is CG. The office included.
    I guess it is just concept video.

    Looking again at the previous video I noticed that the guns are real objects and not CG.
    They are there on the table from the start.

  • Hans Wurst

    The only problem with this video as with all Microsoft HoloLens videos us they are staged and far from what we are able to achieve today. Maybe in 5-10 years we’ll see stuff like in this video.