Ifixit is such a treasure trove these days. Their guides are so well-made, accessible to all audiences, and they don't seem to have any biases towards any one platform/technical agenda. I really hope they're able to stay independent and not get bought out by Microsoft or Facebook.
I've used them a number of times to take apart various devices I've come across for repairing/replacing things. I would love to meet the ultra-super patient folks who create these guides.
Plus they have these great high-quality images. There used to be a bunch of these guides with information of similar detail, but often they have with the most horrible pictures…
One big takeaway is the confirmation that ML-1 is using focus plane sequential LCOS SLM with waveguide optics. Perennial Magic Leap critic KGonTech correctly called this in 2016[0] based on Magic Leap patents.
No matter what you think of Magic Leap generally, they did some amazing engineering here and I think that's worth appreciating. The stacked waveguide model is a great hack around the varifocal plane (accommodation) problem, but to make it work in a form factor that isn't gargatuan was a feat. Yes, it's only two planes, but it's a step forward.
Not to mention that it runs on batteries and is a fully integrated development environment - you gotta hand it to them that this was an engineering feat.
Thanks you. I think this thread is too ready to be dismissive. It's pretty impressive even if it's not the absolute best, best, best! We're taking a little too much joy in trying to disprove the hype.
I needed to hear this as I'm on the hate bandwagon too. Its unfortunate that they promised so much. Its like they told everyone they were going to create world peace, but only solved one military conflict.
Practically speaking, what does only two planes mean? Does this mean they can only overlay elements at two different apparent distances in the environment? Are these distances fixed or variable?
If they hadn't been putting out unrealistic hype for years people might give them a bit more slack for a seemingly competently engineered product. They presented themselves as having some revolutionary proprietary technology. In reality almost everything here is off the shelf components being assembled by some unnamed third party manufacturer. The only unique part they make themselves is the "photonic chips" which aren't actually that revolutionary, other people had more or less the same idea and decided the benefits didn't outweigh the problems.
My takeaway: Magic Leap is definitely not vaporware. It is a solid first product.
I agree with Ajedi32 comment that Overall it's evolutionary, not revolutionary, which is great per se.
The hype was unacheivable, as their marketing videos are (were?) misleading to say the least. Which I think is a strategic mistake that can hurt its adoption.
If they have a chance to return all of their investment, it depends of what they will be delivering in two or three years. If it continue its evolution agressively or this product is all they have.
If the choice comes to "be an optimist, over-hype, get funding, and survive until engineering investments pay off" or "be realist, get less funding, deliver even more mediocre product (because less funding = less engineering talent), and die" which one would you chose?
In the end what matters is runway and culture. With enough runway and solid engineering management they have a pretty high chance to eventually release revolutionary product.
I am kind of glad that they actually have a real product. IT still feels like they took in way too much investment but at least they are not a complete fraud like I started to suspect.
Yeah, it may have taken a billion dollars but a billion dollars doesn't guarantee success. The product is impressive, even if Hololens stole their thunder two years ago. The engineers should be proud.
I don't see a market for it though, so it's hard for me to see how the company can survive until the technology matures enough for the mainstream. I think it will be more than 5 years, possibly 10. Timing is so important for a startup and Magic Leap is too early.
My current impression is that it's a decent, incremental step up from the Hololens. It's cheaper, more comfortable to wear, has a wider FOV, and supports displaying images at two different focal planes (which helps with realism when viewing objects at different distances).
I'm fairly familiar with the space, and my office picked up a Magic Leap to tinker with it. It feels revolutionary if you haven't tried its predecessors; if you have then it feels like the logical next step. If you've tried the Hololens, it's a nice step up in both the control department (the controller is miles better than the crummy'stare-at-it-and-pinch-fingers' Hololens interaction) and the field-of-view department (It isn't perfect, but its a far step beyond Hololens' "tiny viewport if you look straight ahead". In general it feels more polished, and at a lower price point as well, I can't think of any reason you'd waste your time with Hololens now.
It is, however, over-=hyped. I hear the engineering team at Magic Leap hates the marketing team for hyping it like it's literal magic. The hardware team is supposedly steaming ahead, and compared to the one they are currently working on, the released version is pretty dated, but what are you gonna do when they want to finally release a product after all this hype?
I'm not sure how to properly interpret "4.5um pixel size" within the context of a non-square module. The pixel dimensions (square? slightly rectangular?) aren't in the PDF. I'm also not sure how to compute how many 4.5um pixels there are within 1 sq mm, which I would very much like to do.
Wow, I was really distracted when I wrote the above. Specifically
> ...which I think means a single row or column has approximately 222 pixels in it.
No no. This was supposed to say that, at 4.5um, 1 millimeter of space has 222 pixels in it per row/column! (So given any 4.5um column, a 1mm width/height span will have 222 pixels in it.)
iFixit videos have becoming better and better. I really like this teardown where they explain the technological motivation behind the placement of parts. One thing I do not get is why the control board seems so weird. It's as if different teams worked on different parts and just decided to slap things together on a board without any sort of optimization. Have anyone seen something like this before?
As someone (without a huge amount of experience) designing some hardware in the space, me too. The two usb controllers was the first thing that made me double-take. Maybe one is only capable of doing back-forth on the external line and one is dedicated to control for the camera/light hardware? My huge takeaway was, "yep, charging 2k for a bunch of last year's good phone hardware means you can stuff A LOT of it in without worrying about your BOM too much".
Tegra X2, Myriad 2, Intel MAX 10 FPGA and a lot of other vision-related chips. etc. Wow a lot of expensive chips. As a dev reference kit, the BOM and the hardware development cost can justify the $2000. Glad to see they at least made a real hardware.
I became really rapt in the early days of Magic Leap PR ~14-15 ' on the basis that Neil Stephenson was joining their team in a creative capacity, and they had lots of job openings for writers and other creatives. It seemed that they may be trying to build a true virtual world with neat hardware to access it. I'm not certain that dream is dead, but the emphasis has been squarely on the hardware thus far. I'm really pleased to know that it isn't vaporware.
10,000 hours is five full work years. That's a really long time. The device itself only costs a few thousand dollars, and it's going to be technologically obsolete long before the lasers wear out.
I can't think of anything I own in my life that lasts for 10,000 hours of use, except for housing. Hell, cars don't last nearly that long, not without major maintenance. 10,000 hours of highway driving is a million kilometers.
Feels like that Juicero thing all over again, billions of dollars, many many years spent on a freakishly expensive, outrageously complicated hardware design that is all over the place. While out there in the real world, it was Microsoft of all companies that got the MVP done and out there, and is actively learning and improving.
Why does anyone think this is a viable first product? What plan is there to turn the discreet focus levels into a continuous variable field of focus? What plan is there to make objects appear opaque instead of clear? What do they say about increasing the fov to beyond a tiny patch? This is indeed vaporware. When conventional VR headsets mature, cameras can be mounted to them and they will achieve the exact same thing as the ML but be infinitely better.
[+] [-] PascLeRasc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] craftyguy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oflannabhra|7 years ago|reply
[0] - https://www.kguttag.com/2016/11/20/magic-leap-separating-mag...
[+] [-] lhl|7 years ago|reply
For more technical information about the Magic Leap rendering stack and their dual-focal plane approach, here's the deck from a SIGGRAPH talk: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h36TJRkK4KteRUVcoXAnbHzTFfu...
[+] [-] russdill|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|7 years ago|reply
Not to mention that it runs on batteries and is a fully integrated development environment - you gotta hand it to them that this was an engineering feat.
[+] [-] kjeetgill|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] my_usernam3|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CydeWeys|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattnewport|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soneca|7 years ago|reply
I agree with Ajedi32 comment that Overall it's evolutionary, not revolutionary, which is great per se.
The hype was unacheivable, as their marketing videos are (were?) misleading to say the least. Which I think is a strategic mistake that can hurt its adoption.
If they have a chance to return all of their investment, it depends of what they will be delivering in two or three years. If it continue its evolution agressively or this product is all they have.
[+] [-] TrainedMonkey|7 years ago|reply
In the end what matters is runway and culture. With enough runway and solid engineering management they have a pretty high chance to eventually release revolutionary product.
[+] [-] russdill|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxxxxx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] modeless|7 years ago|reply
I don't see a market for it though, so it's hard for me to see how the company can survive until the technology matures enough for the mainstream. I think it will be more than 5 years, possibly 10. Timing is so important for a startup and Magic Leap is too early.
[+] [-] wilsonnb3|7 years ago|reply
I'm not that familiar with the AR/VR/HUD space and I'm having a hard time cutting through the marketing.
[+] [-] Ajedi32|7 years ago|reply
Overall it's evolutionary, not revolutionary.
[+] [-] Notorious_BLT|7 years ago|reply
It is, however, over-=hyped. I hear the engineering team at Magic Leap hates the marketing team for hyping it like it's literal magic. The hardware team is supposedly steaming ahead, and compared to the one they are currently working on, the released version is pretty dated, but what are you gonna do when they want to finally release a product after all this hype?
[+] [-] reggieband|7 years ago|reply
I was expecting typical astroturfing and there is a bit of that. But they are also tempering expectations.
[+] [-] exikyut|7 years ago|reply
Taking a look at Step 9 (https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Magic+Leap+One+Teardown/1122...) where the LCOS display is revealed, I took a look at the linked PDF.
That PDF says the pixel size is 4.5um. 1000/4.5 is 222, which I think means a single row or column has approximately 222 pixels in it.
I ran the display through https://www.sven.de/dpi/ (specifying a display size of 0.4 inches), and it decided the display has 5507.27 PPI.
The PDF says that the active area is 8.64mm x 4.86mm, so that PPI rating isn't perfectly accurate - but _wow_, 1080p in less than 1cm x 0.5cm. Ha.
The LCOS module is shown 2nd from right in Step 15. https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Magic+Leap+One+Teardown/1122...
I'm not sure how to properly interpret "4.5um pixel size" within the context of a non-square module. The pixel dimensions (square? slightly rectangular?) aren't in the PDF. I'm also not sure how to compute how many 4.5um pixels there are within 1 sq mm, which I would very much like to do.
[+] [-] exikyut|7 years ago|reply
> ...which I think means a single row or column has approximately 222 pixels in it.
No no. This was supposed to say that, at 4.5um, 1 millimeter of space has 222 pixels in it per row/column! (So given any 4.5um column, a 1mm width/height span will have 222 pixels in it.)
[+] [-] pome|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kalleboo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syntaxing|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] defterGoose|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbumsik|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sspencer|7 years ago|reply
I went from "probably vaporware" to "I should look into buying one of these" just from looking through this teardown.
[+] [-] portlander12345|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raziel2701|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kalleboo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reilly3000|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] CydeWeys|7 years ago|reply
I can't think of anything I own in my life that lasts for 10,000 hours of use, except for housing. Hell, cars don't last nearly that long, not without major maintenance. 10,000 hours of highway driving is a million kilometers.
[+] [-] stefan_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newphoneguy|7 years ago|reply