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.
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.<p>[0] - <a href="https://www.kguttag.com/2016/11/20/magic-leap-separating-magic-and-reality/" rel="nofollow">https://www.kguttag.com/2016/11/20/magic-leap-separating-mag...</a>
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.<p>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.
My takeaway: Magic Leap is definitely not vaporware. It is a solid first product.<p>I agree with Ajedi32 comment that <i>Overall it's evolutionary, not revolutionary</i>, which is great per se.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Can anyone out there tell me if the Magic Leap One is as revolutionary compared to similar products as they want me to think it is?<p>I'm not that familiar with the AR/VR/HUD space and I'm having a hard time cutting through the marketing.
I jaw-dropped at something not yet mentioned here.<p>Taking a look at Step 9 (<a href="https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Magic+Leap+One+Teardown/112245#s214896" rel="nofollow">https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Magic+Leap+One+Teardown/1122...</a>) where the LCOS display is revealed, I took a look at the linked PDF.<p>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.<p>I ran the display through <a href="https://www.sven.de/dpi/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sven.de/dpi/</a> (specifying a display size of 0.4 inches), and it decided the display has 5507.27 PPI.<p>The PDF says that the active area is 8.64mm x 4.86mm, so that PPI rating isn't perfectly accurate - but _<i>wow</i>_, 1080p in less than 1cm x 0.5cm. Ha.<p>The LCOS module is shown 2nd from right in Step 15. <a href="https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Magic+Leap+One+Teardown/112245#s214987" rel="nofollow">https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Magic+Leap+One+Teardown/1122...</a><p>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.
Still no real demos? :-)
[0] <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/06/magic_leap_revealed/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/06/magic_leap_revealed...</a>
[1] <a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/09/magic_leap_neither_magic_nor_leaping/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/09/magic_leap_neither_...</a>
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?
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.
Wow! Anyone else reminded of the gargoyle rig from Snow Crash?<p>I went from "probably vaporware" to "I should look into buying one of these" just from looking through this teardown.
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.
Be interesting to hook up a jtag to the SoC and fpgas to pull out what they do. that's going to be the secret sauce for all the super speedy stuff.
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.