Part 1: Top 3 Augmented Reality Headsets
co-authored by Anthony Sessa & Marcus Moretti
This is the first edition of Augment. In this publication, we’ll tell you about the big things happening in AR or share our answer to an important question in the field. These posts are for anyone interested in AR tech, entrepreneurship, or product design. Since we’re new to this we want to hear your thoughts: add comments or shoot us an email to send feedback. Don’t hold back.
This is Part 1 of our AR Headset analyses. In this review we will be taking a look at what we believe to be the most exciting AR headsets around. In future examinations we will review other new and existing headsets.
AR has entered popular culture via social media apps (Snapchat, Instagram) and gaming apps (Pokémon Go). We’re still in the “toy” phase of this revolutionary new technology. The arrival of killer AR applications (killAR apps) depends on mainstream adoption of powerful AR hardware, the likes of which has not hit the mass consumer market yet. In this post we initiate a rolling review of the landscape of publicly announced AR headset devices with significant funding and resources. Here we review three major headsets — the Microsoft Hololens, the Meta 2, and the Magic Leap One. Later posts will review other headsets or revisit our assessments as the companies ship new devices.
A quick snapshot below predicts revenue generation of AR vs VR, showing AR being the winner by and large, putting AR at a $85B–90B revenue projection in 2022 over VR’s $15B projection.
The markets that each technology will take hold in are bit unclear but the graphs below show AR being part of quite a few more industries than VR. This makes sense to us given AR is clearly a more practical technology, most likely replacing your personal computing device(s) and mobile phones.
Microsoft Hololens
- Status: Developer Kits and Enterprise Applications
- Tethered: No
- Price: $3,000 — $5,000
- Operating System: A custom version of Windows 10 called the “Windows Mixed Reality” platform.
I (Anthony) have been lucky enough to try the Hololens and can say it is an amazing, mind peeling experience. (Marcus hasn’t tried it yet) The Hololens exemplifies the future of computing and shows how serious Microsoft is at being a leader in that market. That said, the functionality provided to developers is constantly changing and is not yet ready for consumers given the price point and overall user experience. Given the state of the product, I’ve been surprised to hear of it being used in enterprise use-cases from medical education and surgeries to manufacturing diagnostics (concept image below) to vehicle engineering.
Microsoft intends for the device to:
“Create flexible, safe holographic training scenarios in the real world. Give clients 3D prototypes they can visualize and inspect. See and identify problems before work starts. Teams can deliver results faster when they understand and iterate in mixed reality.”
Source: MSFT
One of the most amazing aspects of the Hololens is the combination of hardware and software that allows for seriously good spatial mapping.
This key capability allows a device to detect surfaces like walls, floors, couches, desks — any solid object in the device’s field of view (FOV). The Hololens performs spatial mapping almost instantaneously. It’s way ahead of iOS ARKit, which is limited to floor and wall detection, takes 2–10 seconds to detect a surface, and fails every now and then — give us more Apple!
Spatial mapping performance is key to a great AR user experience, but it is also the foundation for advanced machine vision implementations, allowing the devices to recognize the objects, people and places we are seeing. This tech will power the killAR apps. And Microsoft is making developer adoption easy: The hardware and software are well-understood and -documented.
The Hololens uses complex lenses made up of nanoscales. Nanoscales require their own post to explain. For now, I’ll defer to an excellent write up discussing the lenses in varying levels of technical detail. Nanoscales are a common hardware implementation for a vast array of other AR headsets that are already on the market, which is a good sign for the future of this tech.
The Hololens uses hand gesture inputs, which are constantly being updated by Microsoft.
Additionally the Hololens uses Windows 10’s voice recognition, Cortana, which we do not hear much about in comparison to Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri.
The #1 criticism of the Hololens is its very tiny field of view (FOV), or the space in which you can actually see Holograms in both your direct and peripheral vision.
But we think Microsoft was right to launch with limited FOV. Getting the product out for development feedback was more important than waiting on great FOV hardware, which may still be a few years away.
Meta 2
- Status: Developer Kits
- Tethered: Yes
- Operating System: Custom
- Price: $1,495.00
Meta is an independent startup that’s raised $73M and is working on its second-generation AR headset, the Meta 2.
One of the main differentiators of Meta’s technology is the way the user can manipulate the holograms intuitively with their hands. Here’s a whole Ted talk from Meta about it.
My 10-minute experience (again, Anthony’s — Marcus hasn’t touched it) with the device required constant instruction and I had trouble grabbing and moving holograms throughout my demo.
Meta’s headset is much more comfortable than the Hololens. User comfort will be important to address before public launch, but this should be one of the last features perfected since the ergonomics of the headset will change as the technology changes.
One of the major downfalls of the Meta 2 is its lenses. They do not use the sophisticated nanoscale hardware that Hololens uses. The Meta 2 uses something called silvering, which is fancy for mirrors on the lenses which reflect little screens in the top of the headset (diagram below). This projection method made the holograms much less rich than the Hololens’s visuals since the silvering combined with the visor was very translucent.
For the amount of funding Meta has raised, I was underwhelmed.
MagicLeap
- Status: Soon to be available Creator (Developer) Edition.
- Tethered: Yes but connected to a computer / battery pack.
- Operating System: Custom
- Price: As much as a high-end smart phone.
- Release Date: In 2018
If you have not heard of MagicLeap, below is the quick and dirty. This is what their soon to be released in 2018 Magic Leap One Creator Edition:
Magic Leap has raised a total of $2.3 Billion in funding. Yes, with a B.
Their latest round was led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A few others on the list of funders are Google, Alibaba, and Warner.
A major part of the funding — $592 million to be exact — is going towards completely manufacturing and distributing the device in Florida, where their HQ is located.
Their Founder and CEO, Rony Abovitz, more often referred to as just “Rony” by AR enthusiasts, is an eccentric, established, and visionary entrepreneur. He founded MAKO Surgical, an advanced medical robotics company, which went public in 2008. Nevertheless, Rony has been criticized for not releasing details and painting a clear picture the state of Magic Leap.
On a similar note, Magic Leap is one of most secretive companies to have existed at this scale. Very few people have tried it, not even Anthony. We’ve spoken to two people who have tried the massive, tethered version of the device, referred to as “The Beast”. Both individuals have said that in comparison to the Meta 2 and Hololens, The Beast’s differentiator is the high resolution of close-up objects.
The other reason Magic Leap has raised so much money is that they are developing a new kind of processor called a Photonic Lightfield Chip (PLC). The PLC is supposed to directly project light onto the eye. This technology would in comparison to other headsets reduce the amount of time it takes images to reach your brain. In essence, tricking the brain into thinking objects truly exist in the world in front of us.
“The lightfield part refers to the way Leap accommodates multiple focal points, so you’ll be able to clearly see holograms at various distances.” (Source)
Recently MagicLeap has released its SDK, Lumin, which is a huge step for the company. We’ll see how quickly developers adopt the SDK.
Conclusion
This is a snapshot of the observable AR headset landscape. We’ll keep the table at the top of this post updated in this Google Sheet. If there’s another device we should track in this table, reply to this email to let us know. Next week we’ll look at the AR software landscape. Thanks for reading!
