Comment by Guest91283 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Guest91283 | Hacker News Reader

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That's sort of like watching a video game cinematic trailer, and saying no post processing was done on the rendered video. That might be true, but it doesn't represent the gameplay, or in this case, the experience of using the device.

Most of this video makes absolutely no sense. What messages is the user browsing? E-mails, or some type of Magic Leap messaging system? How is the 3D map of Everest generated, a trail marked out and animated on it, and attached through a message by a child? Or what about the storefront browsing 3D shoes? We could have 3D scanned shoes displayed on the internet at the moment, but no one wants to see 3D shoes, they want to see a few high resolution photos of the actual product.

Right now, they're not showing any real world use cases, and just prerendering fictitious interfaces. I feel like this demo is completely out of touch with reality. No one is going to be sending 3D presentation messages. No one is going to be making 3D storefronts. It has nothing to do with technological limitations, they're just not efficient or practical.

This demo is trying to show how it can enhance my daily life while browsing messages and content online. So, let's see someone interacting with Gmail, Spotify, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, etc. Show me why I'd want to use this device and not pull out my phone to browse e-mails or storefronts.

> No one is going to be making 3D storefronts.

This is right there with visionary phrases such as "640KB is enough". Probably not going to happen next year though.

I stand by that statement for the foreseeable future. If you look at how technology and the internet has changed in the past two decades, it's going in the opposite direction of this video. This reminds me of Flash in the late 90s, early 00s. There were countless extravagant sites with 3D elements during that time period, and they all died to make way for more efficient user experiences to consume content.

This technology has lots of interesting use cases, but what's demonstrated in the video isn't one of them.

There were probably more people making 3D storefronts twenty years ago than there are today.

Given that it's new technology and the applications that could make use of this don't exist, I think you have to give them a little more leeway with their marketing material. I agree that most of the "apps" are likely custom-built just for this demo (I'm basing this on the appearance that the apps are interactive rather than just canned videos projected into space) but that doesn't mean it's invalid to showcase those as possibilities.

What would have been really neat is to have the Everest map fixed in space and the user could walk around it and lean in to zoom. Sort of like how many sci-fi movies have 3D mapping projections (Avatar, Prometheus, etc. etc.) that the characters can walk around and sometimes physically interact with. That would have been a good demonstration that it's not just canned video.

A few decades ago, someone would have been considered totally correct to say that no one is going to be streaming live video over the internet as it's just not efficient or practical. As bandwidth, storage, and processing power tend towards infinity, all those impractical ideas suddenly become possible. Imagine being able to search the entirety of the internet instantly as you type each keystroke. Impractical? Maybe Google will crack that some day.

i agree. the parent points out some reasonable objections, like certainly the 10 year old didn't make a 3d magic-leap mount everest project for gradeschool science fair.

However, the point you make is how I interpreted it. We have the ability to do what google glass couldn't amd overlay realtime data into the real-world, also they can use data to provide contextual information.

Is it a long way off? Maybe. Maybe not. A lot of video game trailers give you a good picture of gameplay. I would play this game...

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