Opinions on the State of the Industry
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AR / VR OpiniOns On The StaTe Of The indusTry by < [email protected] > CONTENTS: WHERE VR WENT WRONG, WHY THIS MATTERS TO AR AND HOW TO SET IT RIGHT. PRIVATE LAUNCH PaRTY VR / AR STYLE AUGMENTED WORLD EXPO OPTICALLY TRANSPARENT Christopher Grayson The largest Augmented Reality DISPLAYS will be speaking. and Virtual Reality event of any kind, in the world. SMARTGLASSES GENERAL PURPOSE AR INTERFACE OTHER NOTABLE DEVELOPMENTS CONSUMER FACE RECOGNITION & Mesh-netWORKS Monday, Feb. 27th Wednesday, May 31st EVENTS REQUEST AN INVITE WeWork Civic Center, to Friday, June 2nd CONCLUSIONS San Francisco Santa Clara Convention Center 2 Where Vr WenT WrOng, Why This maTTers to ar and how to seT iT righT. Where Vr content went off course 3 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Oculus rift ships to the consumer COnsumer StereOscopiC (Class Of 2011) For CES 2011, stereoscopic cameras were a thing. Many were introduced but now no longer available. The trend peaked prematurely. The problem in 2011 was that there were no good 3D content consumption devices, VR headsets were still a few years away. You could take stereoscopic 3D images and videos, but there were very few ways to view them. The personal viewers that existed were little more than glorified Victorian era stereoscopes. Where Vr content went off course 4 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Oculus Oculus dK1 Oculus rift Kickstarter ships ships to the consumer OCulus & The 2nd coming Of Vr Oculus launched their Kickstarter in 2012, by the time they came to market in 2016, there were many other pretenders joining the fray. The focus shifted to gaming where 360° content is the norm. With the gaming industry in the driver’s seat, and with 360° the standard approach, it was taken as a given that 360° was best for all things (and even treated as more important than depth). Stereoscopic cameras were off the market just before headsets arrived. Where Vr content went off course 5 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 COnsumer 360° (The dead end) Then the consumer market was flooded with 360º cameras, most of them ball shaped. This category was a huge distraction. A good test for gadget success in the mass consumer market is, “How will a smartphone eat this?” In the short run, new gadgets come along as standalone On 360° Cinema What is 360° devices. They typically achieve mass market success if “It’s nonsense, video good for? they are “pocketable,” and if so, they are only viable up you are looking forward, and • Real Estate until they are absorbed into the smartphone. Phone? sometimes left and right, • Entertainment events: Music Player? Digital Assistant/Day Planner? Camera? but not behind you. • Sports All now merely features or apps on our smartphones. It’s really a waste of pixels.” • Music Ball shaped 360º cameras are neither pocketable nor a —Greg Madison … but not for either form factor easily absorbed into a smartphone … and UX, Unity cinematic or UGC most do not even capture in stereoscopic, so the “VR” source: Fast Companyx x 3D video content. experience is an inside-the-cylinder effect. Where Vr content went off course 6 …and why it matters to ar (to go forward, take one step back) 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Who will show leadership? “Camera-Through” ar The stereoscopic camera in a phone was the right direction, but the lenses need to be placed at the proper pupillary-distance, aprox. 60mm, to match human scale. VINTAGE EXAMPLES: Vuzix camera-through AR To go forward, AR needs to take one step back. This turns any phone-based VR headset into an AR headset via camera-through, just as AR was performed in pre-2011 AR & VR headsets. With the size of the iPhone’s hardware market, if Apple adopted this approach, it would both flood the market with UGC VR content, as well as create a transitional Camera-through attachments shown on NVIS & Sensics VR headsets in years past. stage from smartphone to AR smartglasses. Where Vr content went off course 7 Notable Had the industry not lost focus and taken a distracting detour with 360° cameras, stereoscopic camera smartphones could have been both a boon for UGC VR content, as well as the basis for camera-through AR. Lucid is principally a VR video editing software company. CEO Han Jin says they COurse correCTiOn introduced their stereoscopic camera, LucidCam, because If a player steps up to shows some leadership, this can still happen. there were no good consumer stereoscopic Apple should have done it with the introduction of the iPhone 7. I’ve lost cameras on the market. confidence that Apple is going to show industry leadership. Given the LucidCam is a reference model. Han also agrees with introduction of both the Surface Studio and HoloLens, I’m most inclined to view Greg Madison of Unity, and Microsoft as the innovation leader among large tech companies today. As a Mac this author, that 360º video is, user since the 80s, I don’t say that casually and would love to be proven wrong. in most cases, a distraction. I write with unwavering conviction: If just one major handset maker stepped up and introduced a smartphone with a stereoscopic camera*, capable of UGC VR video and camera-through AR, it would do more to propel both the VR & AR industries forward than another dozen me-too headsets, or anything happening in the AR smartglasses space. * it has to happen at scale, so it has to be from a major handset maker — a startup simply cannot do it —in fact, Apple or Samsung may be the only two players with enough market share to impact the market — though in their absence, another handset maker could make a big splash in the market by moving fast. Where Vr content went off course 8 Notable To The DeTracTors Don’t let the Perfect be the Enemy of The Good. I receive a lot of industry resistance to my advocacy of stereoscopy in smartphone cameras. It comes in the form of two arguments, both almost entirely from those in the gaming space: Notable The hand gesture tracking of • Those who say 180º stereoscopic capture for UGC Occipital’s volumetric mapping Leap Motion, as demonstrated tech is similar to that which is not VR, to be VR is must be 360º capture and for VR, also has cross-over Microsoft uses in Kinect, or the anything less should not be tolerated. application in AR. Apple acquired Prime Sense. • Those who say only six-degrees of freedom of The Occipital Bridge headset combines their Structure Sensor movement through volumetric space is VR and and some impressive software, anything less should not be tolerated. creating a camera-through inside- out mapping AR experience. To both I say: 1 The Structure Sony sold 9.7M PS4’s in the holiday quarter of 2016 . Sensor is also In the same quarter Apple sold 78.3M iPhones2 available stand- and the total Android market sold 350.2M3. alone for iOS. Sources: 1 Sony Corporation’s final calendar quarter is their Q3 fiscal quarter, hence quarters are reported here as holiday 2016 quarter. 2 Apple reported their Q4 2016 iPhone sales. 3 iDC Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Feb. 1 2017 Volumetric broadcast is the holy grail. 9 Yes, of course, volumeTric Notable Don’t let the Perfect be the Enemy of The Good. 8i is currently leading the industry There are use cases where 360° is acceptable. There in volumetric capture. They’ve are use cases where 180° is preferable. There are use just raised a $27M series B led by Time Warner Investments. They’re cases where directed stereoscopic works best … Notable the hottest thing in volumetric capture at this time. I expect their main competition to come from VOlumeTriC SIMPLYGON the Hollywood special effects …but broadcasting volumetrically captured content is industry. It should be no surprise Microsoft just keeps winning. that they’re based in LA. coming. Everyone in the industry knows it is the metric against which all other VR content will measured. They recently acquired Simplygon, maker of compression software Between startups, gaming, industrial products in the that substantially reduces the engineering and medical field, and motion capture in polygon count of 3D models. Cappasity is a small startup out special effects — there are too many hardware players in When content is volumetrically of Russia that relocated to Silicon the space to mention here. scanned, it is first a point Valley. Recently pivoting from The software companies to watch are those that can cloud model that must then be game avatars to focus on the take the point cloud data from capture devices, convert converted into polygons — facets apparel industry and the multi- that comprise an object’s surface. it to polygons of acceptable resolution for display, and billion-dollar problem of online-fit. A complex shape can comprise They are an intel partner, but their compress them enough to push through a pipe … and millions of polygons, fine for software works with other capture eventually do all of this on the fly so that the content can special effects post production, hardware as well. be streamed at an acceptable frame rate. but far too large to stream. 10 OpTiCally TransparenT displays Optical see-through displays 11 WaVeguides Today, there are only three companies that matter in waveguides. Why? Because there are only three who have shown they can go all the way to manufacturing. Hardware is hard. Near-eye optics are very hard.