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Google Leads $542m Funding Round For Augmented Reality Wearables Company
An anonymous reader writes: After rumors broke last week, Magic Leap has officially closed the deal on a $542 million Series B investment led by Google. The company has been extremely tight-lipped about what they're working on, but some digging reveals it is most likely an augmented reality wearable that uses a lightfield display. "Using our Dynamic Digitized Lightfield Signal, imagine being able to generate images indistinguishable from real objects and then being able to place those images seamlessly into the real world," the company teases. Having closed an investment round, Magic Leap is now soliciting developers to create for their platform and hiring a huge swath of positions.
All the secretive talk about this company's product reminds me a lot of the Segway launch.
This seems so much more interesting than a watch.
I have not worn a watch for years. I can't at work because I work in a hospital. Outside work, I don't bother because I can get the time off my phone or a clock etc.
Augmented reality could be useful in all sorts of jobs and leisure activities.
So far, the only wearable technology I use is a stereo in-ear bluetooth headset.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Is it going to require a Google+ account?
No I will never let this one go.
If they're using light field tech it should be of variable focus (i.e. what you look at is what gets into focus). If they can do the computation fast enough (again a big if) your eyes would never notice (again assuming appropriate displays - which don't exist yet). Even if they get variable focus (and parallax and other imaging tricks), I think "indistinguishable" augmented reality will still be limited by two major factors which I don't see any tech ready to touch in the near future: full visible spectrum color space (can't be done with just RGB), and more importantly - total brightness and contrast ratio (i.e. match the output of the sun (as perceived by the eye) and the dynamic contrast range of the human eye).
Neo never knew he was in the matrix, whereas the trekkies generally knew.
I come here for the love
A codpiece?
Have gnu, will travel.
TFA's tech is all an extension of Google Glass in a way
Google's after the defense contractor market now...developing/marketing Glass as a consumer product was an afterthought and mostly for PR, imho
Thank you Dave Raggett
Thinking of the #1 searched-for keyword on Google, I'm wondering what this will be used for mainly...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Your post started off good, noting the issue of focus (the actual depth cue related to focus, though, is not focus itself, but accommodation--the response of the eye to defocus) which is often ignored and people commonly only address stereopsis and motion parallax. However, it then took a couple of wrong turns. First is the issue of color reproduction. Humans are trichromats. We have three types of cone cells in our retinas, and a variant of RGB (read: color space based on only three primaries) can reproduce the full CIE perceptual color gamut. Prototype display systems that do just that exist, and I've seen more than one demoed at SIGGRAPH over the past decade. Perhaps your confusion stems from the very different situation with lighting, where the full spectral response of the luminaire matters because the resultant perceived colors are the product of the light spectrum and the lit surface spectral reflectance, convolved with the retinal cone cell response curves, and so two lights with the same whitepoint but different spectra can result in a situation where two surfaces are perceived to have the same color under one of the lights, but different colors under the other. However, this does not apply to emissive displays, where three primaries is all you need, as long as the choice in primaries is right and the maximum saturation achievable is sufficient. The second wrong turn is in regards to contrast. High dynamic range displays exceeding the dynamic range of the human eye have been around for quite a few years--just search for BrightSide technologies. I still remember the initial prototype at the graphics lab at UBC (where I did my masters). So all the issues have been individually resolved; it's just a matter of putting it all together.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
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After I checked some of the job requirements posted on their website I was initially tempted to think that they are working on a VRD(virtual retinal display) variant. Then I found this - http://www.google.com/patents/...
why dont you explain? if it is lol funny then you should be able to say why
Sergey Brin, director of X projects at Google and co-founder of the company, has a strong anti-authoritarian and anti-military streak. The idea that he'd invest himself so deeply into a project focused on military applications is laugh-out-loud funny.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Humans are trichromats. We have three types of cone cells in our retinas...
It's not quite that simple. Putting aside the rare few tetrachromats with four kinds of cone cells, there are also the rods, which can sense a broad spectrum of light overlapping the ranges of the cone cells—some more than others. The color isn't going to look quite right if the overall brightness reported by the rods doesn't match the per-component brightnesses reported by the cones.
That said, three well-chosen primary colors can get us most of the way there, perhaps enough so that these minor differences won't matter—unless you happen to be tetrachromatic.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
so where was his "strong anti-authoritarian and anti-military streak" when he was rolling over for the NSA **for years**...
Google invades privacy for profit and for decades gave the NSA (and god knows who else) an unaccountable back door to all our data
you're trying to pass the Kool-Aide and it's not going to fly...
Thank you Dave Raggett
The idea that there might be some human tetrachromats has been entirely discredited.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
The idea that there might be some human tetrachromats has been entirely discredited.
I stand corrected. It appears that while there are plenty of humans with four cones, this has only been identified (in 2012) to lead to enhanced color differentiation in one subject after 20 years of research. The vast majority are "non-functional tetrachromats". So perhaps not entirely discredited, but close enough as makes little difference.
This is separate from the ability for trichromats to distinguish more colors by taking into account both the cones and the rods, which is well-established, though generally limited to the low-light conditions where the rods are more sensitive.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
I think it's hilarious that facebook paid 2 billion for Oculus, while Magic Leap has far superior tech and seems to value itself around 1.6 billion.
Here are two possible explanations:
1. Zuckerberg is an idiot CEO who overpays for things (he did pay 20 billion for whatsapp, after all).
2. Zucker knows his stock is way overpriced, so he is actually getting a better deal than it appears. Most of the Oculus acquisition is paid for with fb stock.
Either way, another very smart move by Google.