Magic Leap Expands Shipments of Its AR Headset To 48 US States (techcrunch.com)

At the company's first developer conference, Magic Leap announced they are opening orders of the Magic Leap One Creator's Edition headset to the 48 contiguous states of the USA. If you're in Hawaii or Alaska, no dice. TechCrunch reports: Previously, you had to be in Chicago, LA, Miami, NYC, San Francisco or Seattle in order to get your hands on it. Also, if you had previously ordered the headset in one of those cities, someone would come to you, drop it off and get you set up personally. That service is expanding to 50 cities, but you also don't need to have someone set it up for you in order to buy one now. It's worth reiterating that this thing costs $2,295. The company is doing a financing plan with Affirm so that interested buyers can spread the cost of the device over 24 months.

Comments

Bummer

[110010001000]

Bummer, but at that low price I can see why they wouldn't want to ship to Hawaii or Alaska.

Re:Bummer

[Actually, I do RTFA]

they tell me the kit includes a guy coming to your house and helping you setup the googles

Not anymore. FTFA:

[t]hat service is expanding to 50 cities, but you also donâ(TM)t need to have someone set it up for you in order to buy one now.

Meh.

[msauve]

So, they thought that exclusivity would drive demand. They failed, so now offer an overpriced product to the great unwashed because they're not able to sell what they can build.

Color me unimpressed.

Re:Meh.

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Well it's fucking Developer's kit, isn't it? It's not like it's actually meant for mass market.

Disclaimer, I live within 10 miles of MagicLeap HQ. I don't work there, and I don't currently know anyone that does, but I'm told by someone who DOES know employees that there are multiple other product lines ready to go.

The current device exists so that people can create content that future devices will give access to.

Re:Meh.

[msauve]

"Well it's fucking Developer's kit, isn't it? "

Is it? If you search for "magic leap creator edition," you'll find a web page of their's. It says "So if you're a developer, creator or explorer, be one of the first to forge the Magicverse." Also, a bunch of meaningless drivel like "Use your Control as a paint brush, a conductorâ(TM)s baton or a weaponized ice cream cone that launches Rocky Road at 14 scoops per second."

It says nothing about any sort of development kit, which would presumably include stuff like technical documentation and a development environment. It doesn't even say what you get when you buy one. So it's not just a "fucking Developer's kit," is it?

Re:Meh.

[Miamicanes]

Go to http://creator.magicleap.com/

You have to sign up for access, and the number of hoops you have to jump through to get into the site for the first time and see anything at all is kind of annoying... but once you're in, the site is quite good, and generally fluff/bullshit-free. It's almost like the development team hid it to keep it safe from the marketing team's interference. It's a total night/day difference from the "main" site... lots of real, meaty content. Anyone can register, and it's definitely worth the effort if you're even slightly curious.

Big tip: make a special effort to recursively work your way down the "Bootcamp in a box" section... it links to other important sections that aren't necessarily obvious or easy to find from the menu on the left (that was 1-2 months ago... it might have improved since then).

When running the various "Hello Cube" variants for the first time, remember that the real device has a limited field of view where holographic content can go, and the simulator faithfully emulates this behavior. If you don't see the cube, look around the whole virtual room VERY carefully and systematically, sweeping through a 360-degree arc approximately between the floor and ceiling. Chances are, the cube IS there somewhere... it might even be located within the part of the room you can see, but outside the zone where holographic content can be.

You also might be too close to the cube to see it -- anything surface closer than ~18 inches gets culled by Unity, and remember, the INSIDE/REAR surfaces of Unity/OpenGL triangles are normally culled & invisible if you're looking at them as well, so if your virtual nose is metaphorically poking into the cube, you probably won't see ANYTHING at all. If you don't see anything after exhaustively & systematically looking around the room in a 360-degree circle, try stepping back ~4 feet and look around the room again.

Pay special attention to the "Planes" and "Raycast" examples. If your biggest question after a couple of days is, "How do I make sure {something} ends up on the table, or sofa, or a specific area of the floor", it's probably because you haven't worked through the Planes & Raycast examples yet, and as a result you're missing a fairly fundamental point of mixed-reality development. With early augmented-reality development for devices like Google Glass, you could skirt around the problem because conceptually, everything you rendered was being displayed on a ghostly planar surface a few feet away. Magic Leap takes it up a few notches, and allows you to choose the apparent distance of an object, too. With freedom and power comes responsibility... being able to place objects semi-arbitrarily within a room means that at some level, your program has to be at least vaguely aware of what's IN the room surrounding you, and take that into consideration when deciding where to put things. You CAN'T just blindly position objects at arbitrary coordinates & expect everything to "just work"... you have to make sure that you're either putting things where nothing already exists in the real world, or be ready to deal with the consequences OF making ghostly holograms coexist within the same volume of space as a real-world object.

Also, keep in mind that the ML1 semi-passively builds its internal model of a room in the background as you look around. This also applies to the simulator. If something involving planes/raycasting to find surfaces doesn't seem to be finding a surface that you KNOW is nearby, help it out... slowly look up and down around the room, and do it from several vantage points. The more data you give it (by looking around the room in a systematic manner, from different angles), the better its model of the room will be.

Does anyone know how to "PM" someone here?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://slashdot.org/comments....

I wonder how to season shorts...

Re:Sigh

[Time_Ngler]

That book is all lies

There's a cheap alternative to get your feet wet

[Miamicanes]

If you want to try out a fun product that will whet your appetite for a Magic Leap ML1 or Hololens, check out Aryzon's headset (http://aryzon.com). It's basically the augmented-reality evolution of Google Cardboard -- you mount your phone in it, the display's light bounces from a mirror onto reflective window tinting, and you see a 3D hologram superimposed on whatever is in the room in front of you.

Aryzon's lead (only?) developer has done a fantastic job of writing documentation, creating demo apps, and making tutorial videos ( https://www.youtube.com/channe... ).

Make no mistake... it's nowhere close to being in the same league as a ML1 or a Hololens... but at 30 Euros (~$36) with free shipping worldwide (including to the US), it's actually cheap enough to buy for shits & giggles. Don't be afraid to order one just because it involves mailing to the US from the Netherlands... NL-US mail is pretty fast (it also might be available from Amazon, if you found this post via Google long after it was a current topic on Slashdot).

There are two similar products I'm aware of to Aryzon's headset -- HoloKit and the Lenovo Lightsaber:

* Holokit's website (holokit.io) has been dead for at least the past few days, and probably longer. You can get it from Amazon with 2-day Prime shipping... but I'm not really sure what you could DO with it once it arrives, because as noted... their website is missing in action. And AFAIK, HoloKit doesn't have a headstrap, so you have to use one or both hands just holding it up. Speaking as someone who's done the whole "hold a Cardboard viewer with a heavy phone on your face using one hand" routine in the past, I can definitely say that it gets old (and tiring) really fast.

* The Lightsaber is probably a step-up design-wise, but (AFAIK) has no public SDK. Lenovo has apparently been promising one since last year. Enough said. Without a SDK, it's just a silly toy.

Aryzon is a small company, but their main (only?) developer has done an amazing job of writing demo software, creating documentation for developers, and posting tutorials on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy7KJ7TQ3myJ0fSVqFDudeg/videos).

That said... MagicLeap and Hololens are more than just polished hardware. They both have a substantial amount of software backing them up to do things like 3D surface-mapping and immersive binaural sound. Do you need it if your entire goal is to admire a holographic balloon floating a few feet in front of you? No, not really. But you're really, really going to need it if you want to render something onto a random tabletop, floor, wall, or ceiling in a random room somewhere... because THAT'S a really HARD problem to solve. So hard, in fact, that when you first get into mixed/augmented-reality development, you probably won't even realize it IS a problem until you've been at it for a few days... and then, the sheer enormity of it hits you like a boulder.

TLDR: if $2,295 is out of your budget, buy an Aryzon. It's cheap & fun, and it'll give you an affordable taste of why holographic mixed reality is so cool. Just remember that there IS more to "mixed reality" than "being able to see digital holograms superimposed on whatever's in front of you", the same way there's a world of difference between experiencing 6DoF immersive VR with an Oculus Rift, haptic gloves, and full-body motion tracking and experiencing the equivalent of a Viewmaster where you can stand fixed in one spot and enjoy a 360-degree view by moving your head around.

Re:Financing?

[Gavagai80]

Companies routinely offer financing on far, far cheaper products. Heck, infomercials offered to finance your salad shooters and chia pets into 4 easy payments of $19.95.

Re:Your phone already does all of this

[Miamicanes]

At this point, the main point of something like the ML1 isn't just "rendering floating metadata bubbles next to interesting objects", it's "being able to visualize things in 3D, without many of the drawbacks that severely limit the amount of immersive virtual reality someone can take before they start getting queasy."

The fundamental problem with fully-immersive virtual reality is that current VR hardware just isn't fast or responsive enough to sail over the uncanny valley. If you're wearing a ML1 and rendered objects quiver a bit as you look around, your brain interprets it as "hey, there's motion over there... you should probably pay attention to it, just in case it's a tiger hiding behind a log". If you're wearing an Oculus Rift and the entire virtual room around you sloshes, lags, and jerks around, your brain just goes into meltdown because observed reality is now in frank contradiction of everything your OTHER senses are telling it. And if you're wearing a Rift, looking at some 3D virtual object that follows your head motions, but otherwise remains fixed & motionless regardless of YOUR OWN motion, you'll end up with good old-fashioned motion sickness.

Put another way, mixed reality buys you a metaphorical hall pass & loophole to get around your other senses, by ensuring that MOST of what you see is in agreement with your other senses, regardless of whether specific sub-details accounting for a small percentage of your surroundings are in agreement as well. The more your larger environment appears to be consistent with your other senses, the less likely you are to be affected by vertigo.