Comment by tmh79
6 years ago
I have some VC friends tangentially related to the deal. Apparently the original demo was wild, like real magic bonkers. Everyone who tried became a believer. The projected light streams onto the user's eyes so instead of seeing an image overlayed in an intermediate layer as in most AR, the image was projected onto your retinas through this very advanced technology and optics. The issue is that the advanced technology demo used an entire room of computers and sensors for a single user, and it didn't allow the user to move around at all, just sit in a chair and have this thing projected onto your eyes. The goal was to scale this working crazy but impractacle thing into a consumer experience but they just weren't able to, so they pivoted to being another "smart glass" maker. Their tech and patents still actually work, they just aren't able to make a product out of it.
That makes sense. Because I heard on a podcast, this week in tech, I think, from a VC on the panel that was an investor and the rest of the panel was comparing it to Microsoft's ar product and he was adamant that he had seen things that he couldn't talk specifics about but that it was a total game changer.
What podcast & episode was that?
It was TWiT. No idea what episode. I believe it was Calacanis that was the investor that said that though.
If I could get something like that as a desktop monitor replacement, I would be ecstatic. (Assuming appropriately high resolution and refresh rates - but if it's doing eye tracking that'd have to be the case)
I know that "light going into your eyeball" is how your eyes work, and that conventional monitors are not suspected to be great for your eyes, but "shoot light directly at your retinas" always makes me nervous.
Monitors are bad for your eyes because of the strain of long term focusing at a plane a short distance away - not because of the light hitting your retinas.
Lasers are dangerous to the eye because there's no real ramp up for the beam - you can produce an almost arbitrarily powerful pin-prick of light which gives you no warning before it's all hitting the same spot on your retina and destroying it. The beam doesn't diffract of diffuse because it's all one wavelength and colliminated so it puts all that energy suddenly on one part of the eye.
But that property is also what makes the idea of using them for VR/AR amazing: because you could more or less directly target individual parts of the retina with no diffraction, then there's no eyestrain - everything can be made always in focus because the nature of the beam means it essentially bypasses your eye's lens. Your eyes relax because you think everything's in focus already.
I suspect in about 20-30 years that method will be considered antiquated, and brain implants with direct access to the user's visual cortex will be far more sensible for that kind of thing.
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Right?!! What could possibly go wrong?
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Miniaturization of multifocal projection-based technology seems inevitable. What's the best way to keep track of progress in that field, and do you know when it might hit the mass market?
I've had a similar demo a few years ago from some under-the-radar Israeli company, projecting image straight to the retina. It took only a single table, and they talked about how their tech was actually better than Magic Leap – but as most of Israeli high tech, they were looking to get silently acquired by some tech giant instead of developing a product themselves. Never heard of what happened to them later.