I’ve been spending many hours behind my iPad’s display experiencing augmented reality. For me, it’s not the question whether we should have a wearable AR/MR device like the Magic Leap One or not. It’s the natural evolution of the technology it inherits, limited by the technological landscape on which it resides.
Some of the disadvantages of handheld mobile AR include, among others:
- Restrained hands – you have to hold the mobile device with your hands of both hands. It’s like being handcuffed with only option to use your fingers as input methods. You are restricted to certain physical poses and movements because of that.
- Hand fatigue – derived from the above, when holding a device in your hand leads to hand fatigue, especially if the experience requires holding the device up above waist height and for a long period of time. It even forced developers to rethink how they design games due to combat this hand fatigue issue (e.g. short level session length). Frustrating when you come to think of it. There are many other restrictions involved but I won’t get into this in this article.
- Experience AR through a window – The mobile device is the window through which you experience the virtual world. Now to get a better view, you need to hold the device close to your face, but this leads to hand fatigue. With the iPad, I could have experienced it better because it has a large screen, with the iPhone things are much tighter
- Focal length differentiation – the mobile device camera’s focal length is different than your eye. The camera’s focal length (at least that of my iPad) is high, making things appear close. This makes the experience somewhat disconnected, in a way that the things that you see through the device don’t align well with the look of things that your eye see around the device. I didn’t even mention the difference in visuals (the camera produce image noise, works bad in low light, white balance is different, etc).
- Many AR Frameworks don’t have occlusion support (ARKit and ARCore don’t support it) – the ability to make virtual objects appear like they are mixed in the scene, rather than just being an overlayed content on top of the real-world video stream. There are AR framework that does or solution that worth with current technologies, but there isn’t official support in the framework itself for it., Even if occlusion does exist, it will be between surfaces and that’s it. It’s way inferior to meshing.
- No Integrated Meshing Capability by Default – The ability to scan the environment and create a 3D reconstruction of it, then this can be used for occlusion and collision, enabling more realistic and immersive augmented reality experiences.
- Limited outdoor use – handheld AR has limited outdoor use because of the need to hold the device in the hand, it’s not comfortable, it looks awkward and it isn’t designed for long outdoor use.
Magic Leap One tackle and solves most of those issues that I’ve mentioned above without using 3rd party solutions, everything is part of the spatial computing platform ready for you to use.
This includes having your hands free so you can use it for gestures or use the 6DoF controller that enabled precise control, haptic feedback and 6DoF to enhance user interaction times fold compared to handheld AR.
Hand fatigue still exists if you use gestures but still, you are not forced to use it, and the developer has the freedom to combine different input methods to make a comfortable experience to users.
The experience is viewed using glasses and with a lightfield display that is aligned with the surrounding optics, giving the user a clear, unified view of the experience from any angle. The only disadvantage is the limited field of view,
Occlusion and collision with physical objects in the environment are enabled by default using the built-in meshing system that scans the environment and constructs a 3D structure of it which can be updated every few seconds. This opens up a whole new world of creative possibilities with persistence and shared experienced like ARKit and ARCore introduced in their latest version of their AR framework (ARKit 2.0, ARCore 1.5).
Although the Magic Leap One was aimed at developers and for indoor use, it still poses a limit on outdoor use. However, Magic Leap laid the right foundation which on top of it future headset can be built that can be used outside, including all the benefits that we’ve talked about here, especially comfortability and environment mapping capability.
When we look at the Magic Leap One, we should actually look a bit forward into the future an imagine the 2nd and 3rd iteration of the product. I am not just looking at the ML1 and say, OK, that’s it, this is not going to work because of 1, 2 and 3. There is a point in the future where Magic Leap will eventually reach (I hope), where many of the disadvantages that we’ve seen will be solves. The thing is that we can start from that point 10 years from now, the technology is not there, and without giving investors the option to see what it can do, we don’t get the investment to push that technology to that future point in time where it is how Rony Aboviitch envision it.
Magic Leap couldn’t have done what it did with the Magic Leap One without having that financial support. Those investors didn’t just see the first product, they have a vision of how this technology can impact our lives when it matures. This is true to many other technologies, not just this one related to Mixed Reality.
It’s important to mention that Magic Leap One is not without its issues and differences. It uses a technology that is in some aspects different than the one uses in handheld AR, especially the one that is related to its display. Although the notion and vision that AR technology is still in its DNA. This means that it’s not a straight natural evolvement of the technology which it is partially inherited and inspired from. However, as the technology evolves, those technological disadvantage gaps will be solved.
This is why I have no doubt about the path Magic Leap is taking. Whether this is the best technology and marketing plan, I have no idea. This is something that Magic Leap will have to deal with as more competitors enter the scene. It might need to adapt and make some technological changes (remember Google Tango) and marketing changes to stay competitive in this market.
Overall, I am excited about this new technology and I am excited to see how it evolved and will evolve in the future.