Basic sensors look the same between HL1 and HL2, which is nice. Still 4 monochrome cameras for SLAM, 1 TOF for spatial mapping. For me personally, knowing the size of the battery and the refresh rate of the TOF with more consistent power is really huge. Also curious about burn in from the battery-bun. Doesn’t it get hot? And the snapdragon 850 is just an overclocked 845. That’s going to be a bit hotter too? Also curious why MEMS? It’s not cheaper or lighter or much smaller than LCOS so, I think, must be the reason for the FOV improvement (right?) but Karl Guttag complains this will make for more blurry digital images (complain? who Karl?).
Piano playing stage demo was cool but there was noticeable awkwardness in the way the hand gestures were performed (exaggerated movements) — which is actually really familiar from working with magic leap’s hand tracking. Either that needs to get better by the summer or there’s going to be some serious disappointment down the road.
Anyone seen any performance comparisons between the NVidia Tegra X2 (Magic Leap’s SOC) and Qualcomm 850 (HoloLens 2’s SOC)? I know the 845 (basically same as 850) was regarded as better than X1, but most assumed X2 would leapfrog. Haven’t found anything conclusive, though.
Doubling of FOV between HL1 and HL2 might have been miscommunicated and meant something different from what most people thought it meant. It turns out the FOV of the HL2 is actually very close to the FOV of the Magic Leap One, both of which are noticeably bigger than the original HoloLens but still significantly smaller than what everyone says they want.
My friend and VR visionary Jasper Brekelmans calculated out the HL2 FOV in degrees to be 43.57 x 29.04 with a diagonal of
52.36. Magic Leap is 40 x 30, with a diagonal of 50 (thank you magic leap for supporting whole numbers).
From now on, whenever someone talks about the field of view in AR/VR/MR/XR, we’ll all have to ask if that is being measured in degrees or steradians. Oh wells.
Internet bad boy Robert Scoble turns out to probably have one of the most interesting takes on the HoloLens 2 announcement. I hope his rehabilitation continues to go well. On the other hand it was a really bad week for tech journalists in general.
Unity even made an announcement about HoloLens 2 and even though they have been working on their own in-house core tools for XR development, way down deep in the fine print they are saying that you will need to use the Mixed Reality Toolkit v2 to develop for HoloLens – which is very eeeeenteeresting.
Coolest thing for me, outside of the device itself, was the Azure Spatial Anchors announcement. No one is really paying attention to Azure Spatial Anchors, yet, but this is a game changer. It means implementing Vernor Vinge’s belief circles. It means anyone can build their own Pokemon Go app. And it works on ARKit, ARCore and HoloLens –> so the future of XR is cross-platform.
Mike Taulty, who I can’t say enough great things about, as usual has dived in first and written up a tour of the new service.
Crap, my boss just came back from lunch. Gotta work now.
What, me complain? I just don’t repeat marketing hype.
We will have to revisit resolution and color depth, and speckle when we can look through the unit and run some objective tests it to measure the effective rather than theoretical resolution. For a lot of reasons I have posted on my blog (www.kguttag.com) it always comes out to about 1/2 the claimed LBS resolution.
There is no advantage that I know of for LBS over LCOS for the FOV at least in this range. Note Magic Leap, by your own admission, got almost the exact same FOV using LCOS.
Thanks Karl,
I always learn a lot from you. Really curious about the advantages of MEMS over LCOS, too — the only thing that makes sense is the FOV, but we’ll probably need to get our hands on a HoloLens hardware engineer to know for sure.
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