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Google May Lead $500M Round in Magic Leap Virtual Reality Tech
- Schwolop 12y agoAnyone have anything concrete on what this is, how it works, whether it's more than vapourware? On the basis of publicly available information it sounds a lot like ... nothing. Expensive nothing, for that matter.
- Lewisham 12y agoI do believe there is something here. I know Grahame Devine from the Santa Cruz circuit and met him a couple of times. He was serious about his one-man band independent iOS development, and he seemed very happy about staying in Santa Cruz. And then I heard he had upped and left to Florida with his family, which is a big change. He has the rap sheet [1] to do pretty much whatever he wants, so I took his move to Florida as a big sign that Magic Leap exists (moving to Florida is no joke, and he's not a pump-and-dump kinda guy) and whatever does exist is cool (he wants to build cool things, and there's plenty of that in the Bay Area). [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Devine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Devine
- Karunamon 12y agoThat was my initial thought too, but I don't think Google would be funding a completely crap project. I'd like to think they did their homework..
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- aidenn0 12y agoYeah some of the quotes really raised my bogometer.
- nikhizzle 12y agoA more technical overview of what the article suggests they are building: https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications/NVIDIA-NELD_0.pdf https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications...
- tdicola 12y agoWow, $500M is a huge investment. How many people work there right now and how many hundreds/thousands do they expect to hire with that much money?
- Alain-lf 12y agoA whole lot of money for a whole lot of buzzword but no information in sight... Magic Leap's own website has even less information. "On Oculus Rift and pretty much every other virtual and augmented reality experience, what the viewer sees is flat and floating in space at a set distance." I was under the impression that the Oculus Rift had full stereoscopic 3d? Either I'm wrong or this article is wrong.
- psykotic 12y agoThe article is wrong. What they're clumsily describing there sounds like Google Glass style AR.
- jblow 12y agoThe article isn't wrong, it's just ambiguously written. When you are viewing stereoscopic 3D, you are indeed looking at a surface that is flat and at a fixed distance from your eyes. This has consequences in terms of how your eyes are used to working versus how they have to work in a situation like this. So you might have fun wondering how to build something that doesn't work like that.
- psykotic 12y agoYou're not wrong, but I still think the article is wrong. They are probably paraphrasing a statement from Magic Leap and miscomprehending it in the process. > So you might have fun wondering how to build something that doesn't work like that. For head-mounted use, there are light-field glasses like those of Doug Lanman. Who knows if that is anything like what Magic Leap is actually working on. They are so absurdly secretive that all I've heard so far are contradictory rumors.
- epistasis 12y agoNo, the article is right, "set distance" means that the eye focuses on a distance that is fixed, namely the distance to screens. It can have full stereoscopic 3D and still force the human eye to focus at a given distance. This is a big change from real life, where the eye is continuously changing the focus based on the depth of objects of interest. Other, non-screen based technologies, such as DLP [1] would allow the rendered field of depth to adjust based on the eye's focus, allowing the scene to be more realistic, and reducing mental fatigue. I think there was a different company using someting like this. [2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Light_Processing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Light_Processing [2] http://kotaku.com/people-really-want-that-other-scary-cool-virtual-realit-1507985058 http://kotaku.com/people-really-want-that-other-scary-cool-v...
- ChuckMcM 12y agoI will be very surprised if this is true. I could see Google buying out something like TechnicalIllusions but my experience with super secretive folks is that the lack of additional eyeballs on the technology results in big gaps are discovered right when folks think it should be "done."
- MilkyWayMasta 12y agoBest article I've seen so far talking about the technology: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/science/taking-real-life-sickness-out-of-virtual-reality.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/science/taking-real-life-s...
- themgt 12y agoYeah definitely, combined with reading/watching the Nvidia info it starts to make sense - the technology is incredible on many levels but the problem is it means you've only got 1/5th -> 1/6th the resolution. if they're truly solved (and patented) that with some stroke of genius, they could completely win the VR wars. Also interesting to wonder whether the solution could be applicable to a light field camera.
- mmoss 12y agoIn the Nvidia video they are using OLED screens from another HMD. It looks like it has a bunch of microlenses on top of it, maybe 200 or so. So it seems like resolution would be a big issue since small form factor OLEDs only go up to 2560 x 1440 in current devices available to consumers.
- rjvir 12y ago$500M sounds like a typo. That is absolutely unheard of for a stealth company. For reference, Oculus had a $75M round last December, and they had ignited an entire VR developer community. Uber had a record setting round earlier this year and raised $1.2 billion. But Uber is... well, Uber.
- joelrunyon 12y agoColor raised 40M for an unlaunched app. This at least seems to have some real world utility.
- mwilcox 12y agoThey already raised $50mil Series A in February, it doesn't seem that unrealistic. Remember, a typical film budget for these guys easily breaks into the hundreds of millions.
- jonah 12y agoHere's the video associated with the Nvidia paper on Near-Eye Light Field Displays linked elsewhere in the comments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g It gives a very clear overview of the concept and prototypes.
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- fooderf 12y agoThis tech certainly has a long way to go. I managed to use a prototype of the light field tech at gtc back to back with the oculus dk2. It's certainly cool research, but don't get the impression the light field protypes are offering a vr experience anywhere near what oculus has offered with any of their hardware.
- VikingCoder 12y agoGREAT VIDEO. Wow, I didn't really understand the whole point of this, until about the 4 minute mark in that video. It allows you to focus on near objects, and focus on far objects. It's not an infinite depth-of-field display... You visually get to chose where you focus! It's like the DISPLAY version of a Lytro camera! (I wonder if you could hook up a one to the other!) This is amazing!
- VikingCoder 12y agoHere's another video, with a human explaining the advantages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deI1IzbveEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deI1IzbveEQ
- pmalynin 12y agoRight. Because as Clinkle has shown us, stealth companies raising massive rounds at gigantic valuations without any major traction works out well for everyone involved.
- nl 12y agoAt $500M it isn't an investment expecting a return, it's money to block other companies buying it.
- arxpoetica 12y agoIf the technology is as significant as it appears to be, doesn't it reach into enough billion (and trillion?) dollar industries? The investment in this kind of technology isn't just about gaming or Hollywood.
- akiselev 12y agoIt's about gaming and entertainment because that is by far the biggest, most visible market with the most ROI in hardware and software. The upfront investment and man power required to push a technology from early adopters to widespread adoption isn't usually trivial. Just like gaming pushed scientific research to new heights by commoditizing GPUs, VR gaming will be just a big a boon for all industries.
- nyolfen 12y agono single industry is in the trillion dollar range, not even oil
- KaoruAoiShiho 12y agoCompletely wrong. Oil is several tens of trillion
- muhfuhkuh 12y agoThere are some _single_ financial firms with a trillion under management. Blackrock comes to mind. So it's not a stretch that there are industries in that range.
- seanflyon 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_re...
- josephpmay 12y agoI've been following this company for about a month now, and following this technology (light field displays) for a few years. I think this technology will basically replace all forms of screens eventually; it's just a question of timing. I'm annoyed I didn't hear about this company earlier, because they're based in my home town, but I just moved to California.
- habosa 12y agoThis story has the best and worst of the current SV environment in one. On one hand, it's amazing to see that the boundaries of technology are moving so fast that someone could come along a year after Oculus makes big news with something that might blow them out of the water (according to marketing hype). On the other hand, $500M for an unlaunched startup with no users is crazy. That money could be stretched so far in so many ways and it's being dumped into a company without a dime in revenue. There is clearly no attempt to be 'lean'. It's hard to believe that they really 'need' $500M to develop this new tech, they're not flying to space and they're not pushing a medical device through FDA trials. I guess the best thing to do is sit back and watch.
- bentcorner 12y agoCool, but I'm very skeptical (at least if they purport to deliver the picture in the article). Here's an article discussing the pros/cons of hard ar/see-through ar: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-ar-anytime-soon/ http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-... It seems like it's still a very, very hard problem to solve.
- adventured 12y agoThis might be some really cool technology, but $500 million rounds for pre-revenue, pre-real product, pre-publicly known companies is what happens when you're at the end of the line for a funding bubble.
- spyder 12y agoThey got awarded $150k from DOD for: Ultra-High Resolution Scanning Fiber Display for HMDs http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/415788 http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/415788 ...Magic Leap is working to commercialize low cost, compact, high field of view, high resolution consumer wearable display systems. A quick search for "Fiber Scanned Display" explains the technology: http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/mfabfiber/ http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/mfabfiber/ If they are building a new kind of 3d display then this may explain why they need a lot of money. They cannot just buy an already massmanufactured display like Oculus is buying it from Samsung.
- iandanforth 12y agoI wonder if, instead of the micro lens array mentioned in other links, they have a fiber with a tip acting as a lens, such that the larger scene is transmitted to each "pixel" in the raster. Each raster point would get a slightly different scene rendered to it, be displayed by the fiber tip, and thus produce the array of images necessary for multi focal viewing. I don't know enough about optics to know if this is possible, but it sure would be cool!
- pja 12y agoA sort of "fly's eye" in reverse? - That would be incredibly expensive to render I would have thought, but maybe I'm missing something.
- nutjob123 12y agoThe fiber scanned display appears to be a strand of fiber, vibrated in one or two dimensions by a pizo-electric. The "pixels" are formed by the end of the fiber strand.
- tree6014 12y agoThey have some very serious talent on their payroll. I noticed Yann LeCun (inventor of convolutional neural networks and head of Facebook's new AI lab) congratulated Gary Bradski on the funding. If you're not familiar with him, here's his LinkedIn profile. https://www.linkedin.com/in/garybradski https://www.linkedin.com/in/garybradski
- downandout 12y agoFrom the looks of the website this may in fact be a next-generation hallucinogenic drug :). Seriously though, the technology looks interesting but I would be careful getting too excited about this. When lots of credible people put tons of money and hype into things....we get stuff like Clinkle and Segway and Color.
- nabla9 12y agoTo have realistic 3D technology you need to have 3 things: 1. Stereopsis - different image for both eyes. 2. Accommodation - ability of eye lense to focus on different distances. 3. vergence - eyes rotate slightly inward or outward so that the projection of an image is always in the center of both retinas Modern 3d technology (movies, VR) provides only sereopsis without accommodation or vergence and vergence-accommodation conflict can cause headaches. You also notice that if you look at different part of the screen from where the movie camera is focused on, the image is blurry. Conventional lens-screen technology (like Olucus Rift) can't solve these problems. You need something new like light field technology or hologram technology. This is why hundreds of millions if not several billions are needed to develop this technology.
- Leszek 12y agoMinor correction: conventional 3d displays provide stereopsis AND vergence, but without accommodation (and the corresponding focal blur). Hence why there is a vergence-accommodation conflict, because one is provided without the other, while normally they are linked.
- higherpurpose 12y agoDisappointed Google is going into AR (ok, ok - "cinematic reality") rather than VR. AR is much more limiting than VR. With VR you can be "anywhere". With AR, you're in the same place - just with some stuff added on top. I'm sure AR will find its own killer apps, but I think VR has much more potential.
- Schwolop 12y agoBollocks. If I augment every pixel and have zero transparency through to the background real world, I've just turned AR into VR. VR is a subset of AR.
- jcfrei 12y agoSeems like the next evolution step in VR. But developers are already struggling to constantly hit 70FPS for the Oculus, where they have to render two scenes. Rendering 35×35 different images per eye (albeit not the whole scene) will increase computation power significantly - so I guess it will take some time until this becomes possible with consumer hardware. In their paper they mention rendering the video with FPS ranging between 15-70, using a NVIDIA Quadro K5000 graphics card (which is a beast, selling for about 1'900$).
- jeffreyrogers 12y agoI read the article and watched the videos at the end. Is this just one elaborate troll?
- ErikRogneby 12y agoThe list of Trademarks they have filed for is pretty informative. http://trademarks.justia.com/owners/magic-leap-inc-2603519/ http://trademarks.justia.com/owners/magic-leap-inc-2603519/ A lot of virtual reality comic book mash-up type stuff.