Hands-on with the $949 mind-bending Meta 2 augmented reality headset
Meta CEO Meron Gribetz unveiled the Meta 2 augmented reality headset at TEDx 2016 last month, showing off — among other things — the headset’s incredibly large, near 90-degree, field-of-view.
...the Meta 2’s (2560×1440) display...
Field-of-view (FoV) matters a hell of a lot more on augmented reality devices than it does on VR headsets. With virtual reality, the more squashed the FoV, the more constrained your viewpoint is, but everything that isn’t the screen is just blackness and thus not all that distracting. In AR, low FoV means that it looks like there’s a little translucent window into the virtual world that you have to fit floating 3D content into. It sucks.
For comparison’s sake, the Gear VR mobile headset offers 98-degree field-of-view.
The tethered nature of the Meta 2 is undoubtedly what makes a FoV of this size possible.
“… in about 5 years, these are all going to look like strips of glass on our eyes that project holograms.” Gribetz said onstage at TEDx 2016 last month. “And just like we don’t care so much about which phone we buy in terms of the hardware; we buy it for the operating system, as a neuroscientist, I always dreamt of building the IOS of the mind, if you will.”
...the hand-tracking controls were a bit more brutish than I would hope, especially dim in comparison to my recent experiences with Leap Motion’s latest Orion update.
Much of these differences in quality come from the fact that while Leap Motion is making dynamic digital skeletons of your hands, Meta is using a variety of sensors and a high-def camera to actively map not only your hands but the environment they are manipulating.
Magic Leap, which has raised nearly $1.4 billion from investors like Google and Alibaba, is building a light field display which will beam holographic images directly onto your eyeballs. Light field displays, which Pamplin called “exciting,” have the potential to dramatically shrink the size of today’s existing AR headsets.
See the full story here: http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/02/hands-on-with-the-949-mind-bending-meta-2-augmented-reality-headset/