Magic Leap’s futuristic headset has same limitation as Microsoft HoloLens

The Magic Leap One setup.
Magic Leap

• Magic Leap is a secretive Florida-based startup that
  makes augmented-reality headsets.
• On Wednesday morning, it launched its first device:
  Magic Leap One. It’s a product that’s over six years and $2.3
  billion in the making.
• The first media impressions were published on Wednesday
  morning, and they all point to the same problem shared by
  Microsoft’s HoloLens headset: a tiny field of view.

The next step after smartphones is almost certainly some form of
augmented reality — at least, that’s what investors believe, to
the point where they’ve pumped over $2.3 billion into Magic Leap,
a Florida-based startup that creates AR headsets.

For years, Magic Leap has
raised astronomical rounds of funding from the likes of
Google, Alibaba, Fidelity, and JPMorgan. And on Wednesday
morning, after years of hype and fundraising, Magic Leap released
its first product: the Magic
Leap One Creator Edition.

It includes a headset, a controller, and a corresponding computer
(the circular thing on the left in the picture above). The idea
is simple: It’s a wearable computer.

The Magic Leap One
headset, known as “Lightwear,” debuted earlier this
year.
Magic Leap

Looking through Magic Leap One’s “Lightwear” glasses, you can
manage your email, watch YouTube videos, or do whatever other
stuff you’d do on a smartphone or computer. Instead of on a
screen, it’s projected into the world around you.

You know the movie “Minority Report”? It’s kind of old at this
point, but if you’ve seen it, you may remember Tom Cruise using a
computer essentially projected into the world in front of him.

“Minority Report” came out
in 2002, when Tom Cruise was just 40. Unlike Tom Cruise, Magic
Leap requires a headset to see the computer.
Twentieth Century Fox / Dreamworks
SKG

Magic Leap’s headset is similar, and it goes where you go. But
there’s a huge difference between what Magic Leap is
promising and what it’s offering.

This line in one hands-on with the headset,
from CNET’s Scott Stein, says it all: “The display’s small
field of view doesn’t cover everything you see in the room.”

Simply put, Magic Leap’s headset offers a viewing
window into an “augmented” reality, rather than fully
engulfing users in that reality.

Imagine a window-sized rectangle in the middle of your view,
through which you can see various things — your emails floating
in mid-air, or an NBA game running on a floating screen, or
whatever other stuff you’d normally do on a smartphone or a
computer. That’s what it’s like using Magic Leap One. It’s like
looking through a window into a digital world, but the edges of
it disappear the moment you turn your head.

It turns out, that feels about as natural as it sounds.

“Not being able to see a fuller view of the room’s virtual
objects is a serious drawback,” Stein said. “Sometimes I lose
track of things I can’t see, and require sound to help me track
where the augmented things are hiding, and where to turn.” Stein
wasn’t alone in his criticism — every one of
the handful of previews Magic Leap One issued the same
concern.

It’s the same problem that Microsoft’s similarly futuristic AR
headset, HoloLens, suffers from; using HoloLens feels like
looking through a window into a different world rather than
moving into one.

Stein makes a similar comparison: “It’s not all that
fundamentally different from the HoloLens,” he wrote. “The Magic
Leap One feels better in terms of display, controls, graphics and
immersiveness … Still, though, there are significant drawbacks
to Magic Leap’s AR hardware, mostly in terms of its limited field
of view.”

Microsoft’s HoloLens,
left, and the Magic Leap One “Lightwear.”
Microsoft / Magic Leap

Seeing only what’s directly in the middle of your vision while
wearing a headset is one of HoloLens’ biggest limitation, and it
ends up feeling like a tease of something amazing.

When I last wore the HoloLens, it told me where to walk by
painting arrows on the floor in front of my eyes.

The proof of concept there is obvious — imagine wearing a simple
pair of glasses that offered Google Maps within your vision.
Amazing!

But so are the limitations. Magic Leap One and HoloLens can’t
project anything into your peripheral vision, nor can they get
anywhere near close to filling the field of vision of an average
person. 

This is tremendously meaningful in ways that are
inherently human, like seeing something moving out of the corner
of your eye and being able to shift attention accordingly. It’s
only after you limit your field of vision that it feels so
integral to sight, but it really is — try walking around for a
few minutes with your hands held up to your eyes,
binoculars-style, and see how it goes. 

This is one of the largest limitations of all augmented/mixed
reality at the moment, and Magic Leap One is no different.
Subsequent models of Magic Leap’s hardware are said to expand the
field of view, but in reality it’s clear that it needs
to fill your field of view — or at least come close
enough to not feel like you’re looking through a window.

When that future comes, augmented-reality products will come much
closer to delivering what they promise. But, for now, they’re
just very impressive computer glasses.