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Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Magic Leap, Facebook, Google, Microsoft...

The whole article is interesting. It tells me that Microsoft is really ahead of the curve with display, and some of their competitors really don't know that they are yet.

Reminding me of how Apple had developers working on content that will work with glasses (while working for iPhones and iPads.)


The article teases "When" but doesn't do a good job of answering it... although there are two very important take-aways:

THE FUTURE OF COMPUTERS IS SPATIAL
The people and companies above, and others like them, will have to listen closely to successfully navigate the technological shift over the next decade.

Everything that is on a flat screen is second to something that is in 3D --- Give it 20 years and kids will look at flat screens like a lot of us look at black and white televisions or rotary phones.

And, this is a process that is going to involve numerous upgrade cycles over a decade or more, this is all just beginning. Like tube televisions or LCD screens, I think the laser near eye display is going to be the best solution for a decade or more... 



Fast Company

What we really want to know is what we always want to know: How soon? When will the “Magicverse,” as Magic Leap calls it, be as accessible as picking up a svelte pair of XR glasses from my night table and putting them on?
A better question is how quickly the technology is moving toward a more refined experience, and what challenges remain. To find out, I asked experts from various companies that will play big roles in the developing XR ecosystem. (Some responses have been lightly edited for clarity.)
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It’s about all those digital layers working together and providing you information. And that information could be a bus route. Or if you’re an engineer it could be about understanding what the sewage system looks like underneath the city. These functional layers are almost like radio stations in a way. You can tune into the transportation layer, which might say here’s where all the buses are, here’s where all the Ubers are, here’s where all the trains are, here’s where all the flying Ubers are!
“But then you might tune into the entertainment one. There will be dozens, hundreds, thousands of the entertainment ones alone. (LAYERS) You know we love to be entertained as humans. So you could tune into the Game of Thrones channel and you’re walking down the Embarcadero and there’s a dragon flying and you’re seeing it and I’m seeing it and we’re interacting with it and we’re having this shared experience. You think of Pokémon Go, but much more realistic and much more engaging because now you’re able to see in three dimensions that character happening. That’s what we mean when we talk about ‘the Magicverse.’ It’s all about serving that digital content.”





“[Customers] did tell us a number of things we could improve on with the HoloLens 2, and the ones we chose to concentrate on were immersion, comfort, and usefulness out of the box.
“Looking forward we will continue to invest in those same three categories. What you’ll see in the next version is even more immersiveness, more comfort, and more applications that have more value. It’s relatively easy to do any one of those things but it’s hard to do all three.
“You can make it more immersive by including more powerful displays, but that’s going to make the device bigger, heavier, hotter, and have a shorter battery life. You can make it more comfortable by making it weigh less, but then you give up computing power. So it’s relatively easy to do any one of those things–the challenge is achieving advancements in all three areas. 

FOR FACEBOOK, AR/VR’S KILLER APP IS TOGETHERNESS
Facebook is thought to have some of the best computer vision and spatial computing talent in the industry working on social experiences in VR (like Spaces), and on AR experiences for smartphone apps like Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook. Facebook’s first consumer product, the Portal home speaker/camera, offers some AR experiences–expect the company to add more in the future. The company owns Oculus, which develops VR headsets, but it’s likely exploring options for releasing more of its own AR hardware products in the future.
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It’ll be consumers that decide these things over time. The people and companies above, and others like them, will have to listen closely to successfully navigate the technological shift over the next decade.








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