And then I got to try it two days ago. And it was decidedly the worst AR experience I've ever had.
I have a laser-cut box of acrylic from a Kickstarter here called the Seebright Ripple that was basically "Google Cardboard for AR" that I'm about to throw away and even that was a better experience.
You can't trust first-time user reactions to mixed-reality technologies. They get lost in the concept that they are seeing any image at all. They don't know the competitor devices on the market, and don't have any comparison to be made to properly evaluate the object.
In the Meta 2's case, the only thing they had over the Hololens was wider FOV. In every other aspect, it was worse: heavier, tethered to a computer, not adjustable enough to make the image comfortably visible, extremely bad tracking, extremely bad hand gesture input. And yet, Robert Scoble thinks this is the most important product demo he's ever seen. They could have gone out onto the conference floor at where we were and found better tracking running on an iPad [0]. It was embarrassingly bad.
So what is the Magic Leap? We won't know until they actually show us. There hasn't been any real evidence on it yet.
[0] And at this point, if you're going to be tethered to a PC, you might as well just use Vive's Lighthouse tracking. Save yourself the time, money, and bad customer reactions.
I've been hearing the same things about the Meta 2 (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/meta-view#/entity) for months now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxwrXacMe6Y
And then I got to try it two days ago. And it was decidedly the worst AR experience I've ever had.
I have a laser-cut box of acrylic from a Kickstarter here called the Seebright Ripple that was basically "Google Cardboard for AR" that I'm about to throw away and even that was a better experience.
You can't trust first-time user reactions to mixed-reality technologies. They get lost in the concept that they are seeing any image at all. They don't know the competitor devices on the market, and don't have any comparison to be made to properly evaluate the object.
In the Meta 2's case, the only thing they had over the Hololens was wider FOV. In every other aspect, it was worse: heavier, tethered to a computer, not adjustable enough to make the image comfortably visible, extremely bad tracking, extremely bad hand gesture input. And yet, Robert Scoble thinks this is the most important product demo he's ever seen. They could have gone out onto the conference floor at where we were and found better tracking running on an iPad [0]. It was embarrassingly bad.
So what is the Magic Leap? We won't know until they actually show us. There hasn't been any real evidence on it yet.
[0] And at this point, if you're going to be tethered to a PC, you might as well just use Vive's Lighthouse tracking. Save yourself the time, money, and bad customer reactions.