Peter Jackson’s Wingnut AR’s first augmented reality demo [video] | Hacker News Reader

Peter Jackson’s Wingnut AR’s first augmented reality demo [video]

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44 pointsDynisty18 comments

"Mind blowing" - When I view that video the first thought is "back blowing" - having to watch something hunched over a table in bad posture will kill backs, and tire arms having to hold the device up. Sure that bug with humans could be fixed, but it will change somewhat - and thats what this demo gets me interested in. What would a human friendly AR entertainment device look like?

It reminds me of the early CG movies where they gratuituosly moved the camera around from all and every angle, and later on the camera angles became tamed and good old fashioned framing returned.

Y’all realize this is a demo, right? Like... no one looks at “hello world” in a new language and says “man I need to make bigger applications than that, this language sucks because all it does is print to the command line!” Right? So when someone is showing off a demo of a brand new technology you do realize that this isn’t representative of how it will work in the real world, its just to show off some of the capabilities. Right? You realize that right? That you’re not actually going to have to watch a movie hunched over a table like that?

You know how I know this will be the next greatest thing? Because 90% of the top level comments here are shitting on it. Meanwhile people in the real world are playing Pokémon Go and looking at dancing hot dogs on Snapchat and actually enjoying AR on their phone right now.

I think the problem is the post's title (which was HN's title initially, and which the previous poster alluded to) describing it as "mind-blowing". Like you said, it's a nice little demo, but it's not doing anything new or exciting compared to what's been on the market for years.

VR headset + camera -> synthesized AR. Then add a zoom mode. They would act like magnifying glasses. It would not be quite the same perspective as getting close, but it would involve less hunching.

A more low-tech solution is to just sit down. Which could be useful for things like AR boardgames.

You're describing pass through AR and it's not that simple.

I see no benefits over TV where best angle is already selected for you (and framing is art in itself), here you have to play the cameraman. How would multiple people (a family) watch this kind of media without getting in each others' way?

And most importantly, they didn't take advantage of biggest feature of platform - interactivity. They are just drawing a dead fish [https://vimeo.com/64895205].

Here's a video of the WWDC presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S14AVwaBF-Y

I don't think computer games are the likely intended use of Wingnut's technology: I think Peter really wants to use it in film-making, e.g. live preview of compositing and effects.

Suppose you attach it to a camera rig, or just integrate the technology into existing film cameras. The problem of holding the camera up all day has been solved, and having to play the cameraman is the point of the exercise.

This will be amazing when we have some kind of tech that's fixed to the wall and can project all of it without having to hold an ipad in an awkward mix of crouching and standing up.

So is that video faked? Or did they actually capture the iPad screen.

Perhaps a mockup - what's the reflection you can see at 1m29s in the glass doors?

I see no value in this at all without headgear.

How do they block light and show a texture (eg. the shiny table)?

They're just rendering an image over another, like layers in Photoshop, and displaying in on a screen. This isn't an overlay over a transparent pane (like the Hololens).

This demo was first shown on June 5th at Apple Conference:

https://www.polygon.com/2017/6/5/15742310/peter-jacksons-ar-...

Why is this on HN frontpage today? (and downvotes)

Evidently because a large enough number of people hadn't seen this before, found it interesting, and upvoted. Is it really so difficult to understand? Even though there's "news" in the name of this site it doesn't mean that everything posted here needs to be straight off the press. It gets upvoted to the front page if there's a large enough audience for it.

No idea why you’re being down voted. I don’t see any significant change from the WWDC demo months ago so this can hardly be called a ‘reveal’

The downvotes were probably from the original phrasing before the post was edited. It said something along the lines that anyone who was interested in this kind of stuff would obviously have already seen it. I totally agree that the title is completely misleading though in that it's not a "reveal" if they've already shown the whole thing before.

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