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Comment by shikshake | Hacker News Reader

I've looked around their website and the links people have commented here, but I've yet to see a video or image of the device actually working. I know it's hard to demo AR devices, but a simple video of a phone camera pointing through the device to show that there is actually content displaying would add much more credibility. Especially for $350 I need to see some sort of product demonstration.

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It's not much, but https://www.instagram.com/p/CgAu-TTlBHS. They're not exactly helping their credibility with claims of 16x superZoom from a 720p camera.

It looks like it is actually a 5mp camera. Specifically a Omnivision OV5640. I wonder if it is a 720p camera at 16x zoom.

https://docs.brilliantmonocle.com/monocle/monocle/#camera

It's a 5MP camera for still photos, limited to 720p for video--although the data sheet says it can do 1080p as well. Perhaps that's bottlenecked elsewhere in the system.

from https://docs.brilliantmonocle.com/monocle/monocle/#bluetooth...:

    It supports Bluetooth 5.2, up to 2Mb/s.

720p == 1280w x 720h * 3bytes (rgb) * 8bits/byte == 22.1Mb / frame

So video compression is going to have to get more than ~10x reduction to fit into 2Mb/s and that's just 1 frame/sec.

10x reduction from raw to jpg is not what worries me (provided decent-ish computing power) as much as that this is a theoretical maximum under lab conditions. When has any wireless technology ever delivered?

When 802.11n 300mbps was the hot thing that made LAN obsolete, you'd be happy to get 60 megabits (which is still plenty for most purposes, don't get me wrong, but it isn't 300). Bluetooth is more resilient due to spectrum hopping that I wish newer WiFis had taken over (no more channel madness where you either have to coordinate with 3d neighbors or, on auto, might have good and bad days; everything just uses the whole spectrum as efficiently as possible), but I still doubt you'll have one fps stable.

720p claim may be specific to the video recording features while the stills capture could be at the higher resolution. or they could just be over-sampling to help reduce with noise by down-scaling the larger resolution to the smaller.

It seems to me that unlike HoloLens and such, it's not trying to be seamless. It's almost entirely obstructing one eye with a small screen. They use a translucent case so you can sorta see around the screen, but not very well. Kinda butts up against what the actual promise of AR was supposed to be.

To some extend. It would already be revolutional if they have an actual product instead of empty promises.

So basically the same experience as a thermal monocular. Which is pretty decent "augmented vision" once you get used to it.

It looks like the website does show a "through the lens" still photo as a part of a chat/endorsement bottom left hand side of the front page. "yeah super excited that our devkit has launched. here's me testing replay."

The carousel with the play button works if you use the keyboard. It gives you an idea of how it works.

Does not work with Hacker's Keyboard (https://github.com/klausw/hackerskeyboard). It closes itself after a few deciseconds, whereas usually the permanent notification feature can be tapped to open and use a keyboard anywhere. Or maybe I haven't tried using it on the new Android 11 yet and yet another of my favorite hacks broke.... now that I try it elsewhere, it seems this app got broken by google breaking userspace again... Never mind, looks like I'll have to go and fetch a USB keyboard for this in the future :/

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