What They Say
Karl Guttag has reviewed the Magic Leap presentation presented last week and came to the conclusion that it doesn’t reveal much that couldn’t be discovered with a teardown. However, he also reported rumours that the firm might be setting itself up to be purchased.
He looks at the decision to use LCOS imagers with an addressable area of 1440 x 1760 resolution and praises the high brightness, if Magic Leap meets its claims of 2,000 cd/m². It uses very high (2.0) index glass that is only just available (Corning Expands High-Index Glass Portfolio to Help Accelerate Mass Adoption of Augmented Reality Technology). He said that although Magic Leap claims transmissivity of a maximum of 22%, he doubts they can achieve this. He also expects that there could be a lot of ‘front projection’ on the basis that:
“My rule of thumb is that if a company does not talk about an obvious issue, then the answer is likely bad.”
He is also sceptical about the ‘segmented dimming’ that is intended to get around the problem of showing black on a transparent display. Magic Leap also confirmed that it had dropped its multi-plane solution to vergence accommodation conflict.
Overall, he said
Blocking ~80% of the light is an unrecoverable mistake. As I have previously written, ML2 looks like a product designed for the consumer market, but it was seen that it would be far too expensive for that market, it was recast as an “enterprise” device.
What We Think
Running a news service can be frustrating. I was hanging on for more about the ML2, but when I decided to publish what I had yesterday, I was too early for this report, by far the most interesting analysis I have seen on this topic from Karl, who is an occasional contributor to Display Daily. (BR)
Feature Image Karl Guttag
