The Entire VR Industry in One Little Email
The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox.
Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson took the stage at the Future Investment Initiative (FII) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia this past week to talk a bit about her time as the company’s new leader. There’s been precious little information surrounding Magic Leap’s second-gen AR headset, however the company also announced that the enterprise-focused device slated to first release in late 2021 with a few notable improvements.
Johnson didn’t speak directly about the company’s next headset on stage at FII, however a slide was shown promising a Q4 2021 window for early access release.
There’s little else to go on for now, however the company says its second-gen headset will be “50% smaller, 20% lighter, with 100% larger field of view.”
Looking at the first-gen Magic Leap headset itself, and not taking into account the compute unit, the 2018 version weighs 316 g, which would make the second-gen device approximately 250 g.
As for FOV, Magic Leap 1 features a 4:3 aspect ratio, and an estimated horizontal FOV of 40 degrees, a vertical FOV of 30 degrees, and a FOV diagonal of 50 degrees. There’s no telling what aspect ratio the next Magic Leap headset will feature, or how the company will effectively market its “100% larger” FOV moving forward; the company only quotes the diagonal FOV of 50 degrees in marketing material.
Here, it’s very likely the company is talking about a 100 percent increase of overall surface area, and not a 100 percent increase of a single spec (re: not going from 40 to 80 horizontal FOV). That would give it around a 55 degree horizontal FOV.
Note: To increase the specs of all provided FOVs by 100 percent, the surface area would need to increase by four times, which is a tall order.
This comes as a modest upgrade, but one that businesses can probably get behind if it’s delivered at a competitive price point comparative to Microsoft’s HoloLens 2, its largest competitor in the field of enterprise-focused AR headsets. Since Magic Leap’s pivot to enterprise last year, the company has been serving mostly the same clientele, which includes industrial applications, medicine, education, and manufacturing.
Source: Read Full Article