Will This Augmented Reality Machine Really Replace Your PC?
Will This Augmented Reality Machine Really Replace Your
PC?
Neuroscience-based tech may one day replace PCs and
phones.
By Selina Wang May 24, 2016
Among the seagulls and pelicans of Silicon Valley’s
Redwood Shores, there’s a startup called Meta that’s trying to change
everything about computers and the way we use them.
Put on the Meta 2 headset, and ten holographic computer
screens will hover in mid-air. Press the floating Amazon.com webpage with Nike
sneakers and the shoes pop out. You can pull the image apart and examine the
inner soles. A phone icon appears in front of you, ringing. Press it, and the
caller appears in holographic form. She can hand you a model of the Vienna
Opera House; you can hold it and turn it around.
With Meta’s technology, you become the operating system
by controlling 3D content with your hands. Meta is a smaller player in the
growing field of augmented reality, which puts digital images on top of the
real world. (It’s not virtual reality, a more immersive experience that
attempts to replace the world around you).
While bigger companies like Microsoft Corp. and Sony
Corp. are using these new reality technologies for video games, Meta’s founders
are pursuing practical uses. Meta Chief Executive Officer Meron Gribetz says
his floating digital images can eventually replace your keyboard, computer
screen and menu icon.
Meta’s goal is to make interactions with virtual objects
a seamless extension of the real world. Soon, in Meta’s offices, the 100 or so
employees will ditch their monitors and work exclusively through headsets.
Gribetz is betting that someday, clicking, dragging, and pushing buttons on a
flat screen will seem quaintly obsolete to all of us.
“My vision is to build an OS that’s 100 times easier to
use than a Macintosh,” Gribetz said. "We’re excited to remove the start
menu—all of these metaphors and buttons and icons that take your brain extra
steps to decode, and that are making my grandmother’s job of using computers
much harder.”
Gribetz, 30, founded Meta in 2012 after studying
neuroscience and computer science at Columbia University and working in the
Israeli intelligence corps. He built the first Meta prototype with an
oven-heated knife and hot glue gun the same year he founded the startup, and in
2013 debuted its first augmented reality headset after raising funds through
Kickstarter. Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, has been inventing
wearable devices for more than three decades, including his EyeTap augmented
reality glasses in the late 1990s.
Since that first version, the design has been refined
with the Meta 2, a lighter headset with higher resolution images and new
sensors. Gribetz, who buzzes with excitement when he talks about the future of
augmented reality, expects headsets to get lighter and smaller.
“Within five years I think Meta will be able to build a
strip of glass that’s nearly invisible and projects holograms on your eye
indoors and outdoors,” Gribetz said. “It won’t happen in one shot, but it will
start being able to replace people’s phones in 5 years.”
Getting there requires overcoming a host of technical
issues. While there are already multiple virtual reality devices that are
consumer-ready, it’s still early days for augmented reality headsets, which
have to deal with the hurdles of processing the real-world environment.
One challenge: maximizing how much of the area in front
of you can contain virtual objects. If that field of view is too narrow,
hovering images will disappear from peripheral vision the moment you look away.
While the Meta 2 has expanded its field of view from the earlier model, it
requires a PC for power so that a user is tethered to a computer and can’t move
more than ten or so feet from the desktop, unlike the wireless Microsoft
headset.
Both the Meta 2 and Hololens are being offered as
developer editions, which means they’re sold to corporations and software
developers who will create ways to use the device—whether that’s making apps
for 3-D data visualization, architecture, or education. Developers have to pay
$949 for Meta 2 and $3,000 for Hololens.
“Meta is definitely one of those companies that can drive
whatever the next computing platform is,” said Phil Chen of Horizons Ventures
Ltd., a Hong Kong firm that invested in Meta last year.
With sales of desktops and smartphones slowing, many of
the tech industry’s biggest names are pouring resources into artificial reality.
The market is projected to reach $80 billion within the decade.
Deep-pocketed rivals, including Intel Corp.’s Recon
Instruments, are investing in the sector. Magic Leap Inc. raised $793.5 million
in February, with backing from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Google and Qualcomm
Ventures. Last year, Meta raised $23 million in a Series A funding led by
Horizons Ventures, backed by Hong Kong’s richest person, along with BOE
Optoelectronics and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
“It’s a very crowded marketplace right now. You’re also
competing against significant entities like Microsoft and Google who have much
more resources to drive this forward,” said Tuong Nguyen, an analyst at Gartner
Inc. “Especially with some of the smaller players, it will require some help or
collaboration with bigger players to get that scale.”
Gribetz is betting that Meta can stay ahead of the pack
with its unique approach, where academic research drives the design decisions.
Neuroscientists work closely with engineers to make sure interfaces aren’t
rejected by the brain, according to Stefano Baldassi, director of user research
at Meta.
“There are intimate and nontrivial connections between
the human senses and this computer, said Baldassi. "They need to be studied
in incredible depth for the product to succeed and to scale to the masses.”
So far, Meta says it has won some major customers,
including Apple Inc., Amazon Inc., Boeing Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. The
company’s headsets are being used by more than a thousand smaller developers,
too.
Medical startup SimX is using Meta headsets to create
simulations that train doctors, enabling them to see a virtual patient—one that
could be pregnant, wounded or vomiting. The trainees interact with the patient
and can take an ultrasound or use a stethoscope. Since the software projects
medical machines and other characters in the room, Meta’s expansive field of
vision is necessary to see the entire scene.
“Every person who puts it on takes a step back and says
‘Woah’,” Simx CEO Ryan Ribeira said. “They’re immersed in the situation and
think of the person as a real person. They forget it’s an augmented reality
projection.”
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