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Magic Leap One Creator Edition

Magic Leap isn't having a great time of things. The visitor's actual tech demos have been panned, its hardware hasn't reviewed specially well, and now Palmer Luckey, the onetime founder of Oculus, has weighed in with his own thoughts on the platform, hardware, and capabilities. His conclusion is that the Magic Jump is more than of a "Tragic Heap" to use his phrasing.

Luckey's review covers several points I haven't seen widely discussed in other ML coverage, including the shortcomings of the company'south decision to use magnetic tracking rather than line-of-sight or positional reporting. The controller doesn't review well (information technology lacks a clickable trackpad and responds poorly to any kind of quick motion). The Lightpack computer, containing an integrated Nvidia Tegra X2 (Parker) SoC is praised for its overall performance — this seems to be the function of the ML that everyone likes the virtually, including the fact that the heat-generating and heaviest part of the system is sensibly clipped to one's belt rather than hanging off your face.

Having merely previously been familiar with Palmer via his public statements, I've got to say, the human has a talent for the not-so-subtly delivered insult. After noting that it'southward a shame the ML bombardment isn't replaceable, he breezily dismisses the bespeak with "nobody is going to use their ML1 long enough for that to matter to anyone only collectors with an aim to preserve the history of AR and VR." Granted, the Oculus Rift's sales figures haven't exactly set the earth on burn — the PSVR is believed to control the vast majority of the VR market that requires a standalone figurer or console — only compared to the Rift, the Jump seems to offer a weak value.

WaveGuides

How the Magic Jump'south waveguides piece of work. Prototype by iFixit

Luckey unloads on Magic Spring for its headset (Lightwear) design, noting the vast gap between the company's rhetorical claims and the practical reality of its shipping product. While the Magic Leap does use a prepare of dual wave guides to requite it 2 planes of focus rather than the single airplane implemented by Oculus and HTC, its design falls vastly short of what the company claimed it would offering. Here's Palmer:

The supposed "Photonic Lightfield Chips" are only waveguides paired with reflective sequential-colour LCOS displays and LED illumination, the same technology anybody else has been using for years, including Microsoft in their last-gen HoloLens. The ML1 is a not a "lightfield projector" or display past any broadly accustomed definition, and equally a Bi-Focal Display, only solves vergence-accommodation disharmonize in contrived demos that put all UI and environmental elements at one of two focus planes. Mismatch occurs at all other depths. In much the same style, a broken clock displays the correct time twice a day.

He then goes into more than detail on how stacking wave guides to create more focal planes is unlikely to calibration well based on frame rate, prototype quality, and weight concerns. Headset tracking is also mediocre, the FOV is nevertheless quite limited, and the operating system is, to employ his words, "Android with custom stuff on top," rather than the unique, ML-specific Os that Magic Leap claims to have built.

All of these issues and flaws would exist understandable in a offset-generation product from a small Kickstarter team or similar enquiry endeavor from a major company. What makes Magic Jump inexplainable is that this represents years of piece of work from a dedicated team that received over $2.3B in investor funding. The only magic in Magic Leap seems to be how they pulled that off.

At present Read: Magic Leap Teardown Finds Precious Little Pixie Grit, Magic Leap'south Starting time Demo is Anything But Impressive, and Magic Leap Has Launched, Hopefully With Parachutes