"JOIN US AT SOLAR.IO AND RUTHLESSLY DISRUPT THE ENERGY GRID"

Man, welcome to the future.

Well, mostly unless said author has a persistent social media profile, you manually do it

You could use Google Alerts, which will send you an email every time the author name appears in a news item.

The frightening context that the White House belongs to Putin? I find that pretty frightening, personally.

Putin happens to be someone who is good at scheming. This is because he is largely unfettered by politics, and he sticks to fairly simple goals like "destabilize the enemy".

There appears to be a popular confluence of high-discount-rate political leaders nowadays. Wonder if MAD will eventually be outmoded by instant & retaliation-disabling schemes.

Bert the turtle was very alert..

This is as good a time as any to stop using social media.

That may be changing.

That has been/is changing.

D-Prime is an incredibly good AI MC name

Whoever thought that one up deserves free lunch in perpetuity

No Free Lunch ;)

"We're going to make augmented reality everything! Repair manuals, etc"

Bullshit. You're going to model and diagram every part and repair guide from every production model vehicle ever?

Magic Leap would need a software development industry unto itself to build the solutions being batted lightly about in the OP like pingpong balls

I think that having an (the) entire industry writing solutions for Magic Leap is exactly what they are envisioning. It would be a platform, i.e. Chilton would build an app for it.

Now, whether or not they are actually going to be the biggest thing in graphical interfaces since the flat screen is another question...

There's just no way.

They aren't going to beat Oculus/FB, or Sony, or HTC.

They don't have a product; they clearly must have some incredible tech demos, and a wizard working VC

Yeah, the simplest explanation is exactly that. What evidence is there that they're better than the current HMD race that is rapidly progressing?

Who else has plowed a billion into a waveguide and light engine factory?

I hope they can deliver what they are promising.

I remain highly skeptical.

I'm skeptical too, but I could envision a path where this gets a lot of the work done at a tooling level. All these products will have CAD models behind them already, AutoCad and SolidWorks, et al, could introduce tooling to pump out the assets necessary for this at not-terrible levels of effort, couldn't they?

One of the advisors to Magic Leap is currently the CEO of Onshape (and was also the creator of SolidWorks). There will surely be an Onshape app for Magic Leap at some point.

Back in the 90's when I was doing 3D on the web, we looked at this and the results weren't compelling. The models used for CAD/CAM aren't the same sort of thing you would want a GPU to try and render in a 3D scene. Just as one trivial example, none of them had normals so you'd need to do a lot of model cleanup simply to get them to render as a solid object.

CAD data is getting used more often in 3d graphics (although there's still some cleanup). It's used commonly for product shots and starting to be used for games. The most recent GDC had a McLaren pulled from CAD data running real time in Unreal Engine[1]. I honestly don't think much cleanup was done because of the timeline for projects like these (I thought I heard 6 weeks start to finish focusing on custom engine development for interaction and shading).

In my experience, the problem is more in how the model is organized; having ever screw or washer as a separate piece of geometry causes problems (3d tools have trouble with very large geometry counts even if the poly count isn't high). CAD data also doesn't work very well with non-hard materials like upholstery; stitching is likely missing, as well as things that make cloth/leather look normal like pinching or gravity pushing on things.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oZfvoG6qYQ

Can't you just calculate the surface normals? What am I missing?

You had to be able to orient the normals correctly. For a hull this might be easy enough but for many objects it was a challenge.

Gouraud shading like it's 1989? :)

Sure, and there are already standards for exporting 3d geometry data.

The process isn't rocket science but the scale is.

PSA: Adderall is not Limitless

Yeah tolerance and comedowns

Some people are just more optimized for multithreading

I can hardly fathom the solar Babylon Musk has conjured up in his head

Well at least I finally managed to get out of real mode and onto cooperative multitasking...

I'm going to name my firstborn Babylon Musk

>Why not just nationalize the whole thing?

Because the government only drives innovation when it's in competition with other governments (wars mostly). Give it a basic service to manage and it tends to do the shittiest acceptable job possible.