The old demo videos from a year or two ago showed that the Magic Leap could not do opaque black. Black = transparent on their clear screens.
If that's still the case, then every single example image on their site is a misrepresentation. They all show black and indicate the Magic Leap can do opacity.
I call bullshit until I see that they've solved that problem.
> Miller wanted to show me one other neat trick. He walked to the far end of the large room and asked me to launch Gimbal. The robot obediently appeared in the distance, floating next to Miller. Miller then walked into the same space as the robot and promptly disappeared. Well, mostly disappeared, I could still see his legs jutting out from the bottom of the robot.
> My first reaction was, “Of course that’s what happens.” But then I realized I was seeing a fictional thing created by Magic Leap technology completely obscure a real-world human being. My eyes were seeing two things existing in the same place and had decided that the creation, not the engineer, was the real thing and simply ignored Miller, at least that’s how Abovitz later explained it to me.
Read the Rolling Stone article where it explains how the light field tech works. It's nothing at all like a conventional display, but rather treats the eye as a filter and delivers to the eye the photons necessary to cause your _visual cortex_ to render the desired image. That's what makes this so different from any other VR/AR/mixed platform out there.
Edit: Let me quote the article instead of explaining it poorly:
"What that would mean is that the brain grabs more information and renders more detail when it needs to. And that completely changed the way Abovitz and his team were thinking about the light field problem. Suddenly, if the theory was right, technology didn’t need to capture the entirety of the light field and recreate it, it just needed to grab the right bits of that light field and feed it to the visual cortex through the eye...He was sure if they could create a chip that would deliver the right parts of a light field to the brain, he could trick it into thinking it was seeing real things that weren’t there. The realization meant that they were trying to get rid of the display and just use what humans already have."
Anyone who thinks it works like an Oculus is totally and completely wrong, as one is AR vs VR. Whether it works similarly to a Hololens is completely unknown. The technical details just aren't available. A ton of handwaving and promises of features but very little information on actual technology.
I thought they had solved this. "Such may be used to cancel light from the planar waveguides with respect to light from the background or real world, in some respects similar to noise canceling headphones." from https://gpuofthebrain.com/blog/2016/7/22/how-magic-leap-will...
I think you have to take those demo videos with a pinch of salt. It's impossible to demo tech like this without wearing the device. Assumedly the field of view is inaccurate as well. What's interesting is that it's a 'light field' and not just a screen, hopefully opening up areas of innovation. Let's see how it pans out once more details are revealed.
"Rendering black" is an unsolved problem technically.
There are a few approaches. One is selectively blocking incoming light at the lens, however due to the nature of light because the distance between the lens and the eye that would allow for the right per pixel degree specificity is relatively large, you would get bleeding from the other incident light and the "black" would look at best fuzzy.
The other way to do it is to create a "standing wave" so to speak on the retina, and again that requires an almost photon control level of the display.
Neither of which I am confident ML has demonstrated effectively.
On the other hand, for many applications where people say they want to "render black," darkening the entire field of view and rendering on top of that is sufficient and not particularly hard to do.
Well that's a completely different display system in that case. That would be more like pass-through rather than see-through. Currently the latency on pass-through is not anywhere close to ready from a processing standpoint.
That said, I am actually bullish on a really good pass-through system, nobody is working on it seriously though.
Nope, sorry. The backing LCD will be out of focus. The whole AR thing is a lot of technology that sounds simple, but ends up being really really hard in practice.
If that's still the case, then every single example image on their site is a misrepresentation. They all show black and indicate the Magic Leap can do opacity.
I call bullshit until I see that they've solved that problem.