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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Magic Leap has a track record of outright lying [1]. Everything in this "unveiling" looks like CGI. There is no store and nothing is shipping until "2018".

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/8/13894000/magic-leap-ar-mi...

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Apparently it's real:

https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/lightwear-intro...

Common concerns, like FOV (not very big), are addressed in this article:

> The viewing space is about the size of a VHS tape held in front of you with your arms half extended. It’s much larger than the HoloLens, but it’s still there.

The thing is the FOV on the original Hololens prototype was massive, but the FOV had to be constrained down for the actual product because the FOV needed a full backpack computer (instead of the headset).

So it's all well and good that the demo units have a slightly bigger FOV than Hololens but I'm not going to hold my breath until we see the released product have a higher FOV than Hololens.

I wonder how many people would have no idea how big a VHS tape is.

Our family had one of the early consumer VCR/camcorders around 1980. I still had to go grab one out of an old box to see how good my memory of its dimension is. Answer: meh, kinda close, but not an accurate unit of measurement even for a guy that used them from the beginning. And that’s because even old people haven’t touched one in a good ten years.

But, hey, Stranger Things, amirite? We’re all 80s-ophiles or something.

Personally, I would have gone with "the size of a trade paperback". Or maybe "the size of a large hardback book held with the arm fully extended."

Honestly it sounds really small. Not sure how you could have a viable product that only works in a small rectangle in the center of your vision.

That sounds only slightly larger than HoloLens tbh.

For a company with this much funding and hype I expected more than just “a slightly better hololens”.

I think it hinges on whether the lightfield projection is as revolutionary as they say. All the other specs pale in comparison.

At that FoV? I doubt it matters practically from a consumer standpoint

Hololens is about the size of a smartphone at that half-arm-length distance. It's pretty significant. The question remains, what are the resolution and tracking like? The Meta 2 similarly has a wider FOV, but the visuals are fuzzy and the tracking is the worst of any device I've ever used.

Nah hololens is bigger than that (unless your totally standardised smartphone size is massive), and also square.

VHS at half-arms length does sound only a bit bigger than the hololens.

New outlets do sponsored shit all the time. I wouldn't put it past them for this to be just free advertising and it be 100% lies.

2018 is less than two weeks away, though.

"In 2018", not "1/1/18".

A company I work with did a product demo presentation (for a completely unrelated product to Magic Leap) and showed a ton of extremely ambitious features in the demo and zero development work had even been started on that project. In fact, they haven't even hired the development team yet. The end of their demo showed a "Launching in 2018" message.

Marketing's job is to make promises. Whether the company keeps them is another matter.

On the Musk calendar, I think 2018 is 11/1/18 - 11/1/19.

Non-ISO dates on HN?! Blasphemy!

Point being, it's not actually that far away.

Are you trolling?

Or 12 months...

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