Throwback review: Meta 2 hands-on (and more!)
Thanks to my job as an XR consultant and blogger, I have had the pleasure of trying many AR and VR headsets. There are some that I miss experiencing, and one of my biggest regrets of the past was that I had never been able to try the now-defunct Meta 2 augmented reality glasses.
This week, thanks to the Italian consultancy company Magnetica (they’re very talented, check them out!), that has been so kind to host me for some hours, I have been able to try them. The CEO Emiliano Gusmini told me that it was a device far ahead of its time, and after I have tried them, I can tell you that he was not wrong. Let me tell you my impressions on this device!
Meta 2 hands-on
What were the Meta 2?
Meta 2 was an augmented reality headset released in 2016-2017 as an evolution of the original Meta 1, which was a headset hacked from other existing commercial hardware (Epson Moverio and Intel Realsense). The Meta 2 had a birdbath based optics (like the modern Nreal) and it was able to provide a wide field of view (90°). All the interactions inside the device happened by using the hands, and in fact, natural hands interaction was the peculiarity of the Meta 2.
Notice that I’m always using the Past Tense. That’s because exactly when Meta was going to get a new investment directly from China, due to the Trade Wars between China and the USA, the money was negated at the last minute, and the company had to close. That’s a very sad story to hear… as an entrepreneur, I feel the pain.
So, yes, this is a review about an abandoned product… that’s why I’ll keep it short. But I think that it could be interesting for people that didn’t know about the device or that want to have a dive in the past.
Meta 2 specs
- Resolution: 2560×1440
- Refresh rate: 75Hz
- FOV: 90°
- Sensors: SLAM + hands tracking
- Cameras: 720p front-facing RGB camera for mixed reality recordings
- Audio: 4 built-in surround sound speakers + 3 integrated Microphones
Meta 2 hands-on
The Meta 2 glasses are pretty bulky: since they have to provide a quite big FOV while using a reflection mechanism (birdbath: the image is showcased on a screen, and then a mirror projects it onto the lenses in front of the eyes of the users), they must have a big optical system. This reminds me of the one that I’ve seen in the North Star headset. Anyway, wearing it I haven’t found a particular discomfort (apart from being a bit front-heavy), so they are only a big ugly to be seen.
The materials are of very good quality, and the headset is well-conceived. I fit it on my head using the classical rear knob that now is present in almost all XR headsets out there.
The real issue of the device is that it must be tethered to a PC, and it shares again the same pain with the North Star. Who knows if the company had received the next round of funding if they could have reduced this requirement of the connection to a simple computational box (like Magic Leap) or a smartphone (like Nreal). I guess we’ll never know. For sure the cable is a big pain because while VR is something that you want to play in a specific place in your home (or in your office), AR makes the most of sense when it is contextual, that is when you can move around and see the system giving you contextual information depending on what you’re seeing. Tethered AR has very limited applications, and so the tether of the Meta glasses was a big deal at that time because Microsoft had been able of making the HoloLens working as a standalone headset.
If we remove the cable, I can say that the experience that you could have with the Meta in 2016 is comparable to the one that you can have in some Chinese AR headset today, and in certain things, it was even better.
The visuals of the headset are pretty nice, and the colors are bright. The holograms look a bit too transparent for my tastes, though. What is impressive is the field of view: 90° diagonal is something that you can dream today with HoloLens or Magic Leap (and even Nreal), and it is similar to the… guess who? North Star. I can tell you that 90° is an acceptable field of view for natural interactions in AR: the more the better, but with that order of magnitude you finally stop thinking about having an AR window and you start thinking about an augmented world around you.
What I felt being pure magic was the natural interaction, though. In a time where the HoloLens 1 only offered the damn AirTap that no one in the world was able to perform well, Meta already offered bimanual interactions. With the Meta 2, you can take an object by grasping it, and then moving it around by moving your hand, you can rotate and scale objects by using the gestures that you would naturally use. In 2016, this was impressive. Does it work? Well, more or less. In my tests, the scale by moving the hands closer or farther usually was a bit rough, but it worked quite well, while the rotation by rotating one hand around the other was usually mistaken for a scaling operation. The company clearly needed fresh money to polish this kind of interactions. But let me tell you that the idea of the natural interface with the hands, now fully realized by the HoloLens 2, was great and when it works, it feels like magic.
Positional tracking of the device is a bit choppy: the 6DOF tracking works, but it looks like having a low framerate, and the movement is not fluid at all. It is decent for a devkit, but not comparable at all with today’s standards of Magic leap One and HoloLens 2.
Meta 2 final impressions
It’s a pity that Meta 2 failed. The device was a bit rough, but the company was on the right track to provide usable augmented reality headsets with natural interactions and a high FOV. Probably a Meta 3 would have been a system with a portable computational box and working hands interactions… something that could have competed with a device like the Magic Leap One, while having received much less money ($73M against the $2.3B of Magic Leap). We’ll never know.
Other devices
Emiliano, the CEO of Magnetica, let me also experience other gadgets from the past.
VR gloves
These are some VR glasses from Kickstarter campaigns that have failed or whose companies have pivoted towards something else. The first one was so uncomfortable…
DreamWorld
The first DreamWorld AR glasses were glasses that you could tether to the PC to have affordable AR. Let’s start from the positive side of these glasses: the colors of the virtual elements were bright. All the rest is a negative side: the materials felt cheap, the tracking was terrible, the only interactions were by look-and-stare because there were no controllers, etc.. Now the company has released new models, but the first one that I tried last week was really underwhelming.
Mattel View Master
This headset for kids is a Cardboard made in plastic by Mattel. I tried to put my head inside it and I found it overly uncomfortable on my face. I don’t know if it is because I’ve not the head of a kid, or because the ergonomics were mediocre. Someone who has a kid please answer my question!
Merge
The Merge VR headset is a cardboard that I’ve advised to many people and I can confirm that is pretty nice. What I love about it is that its material is like sponge, so that you can also throw the headset on the floor and nothing brakes. It is perfect to be used in exhibitions, or other contexts were people may break it.
It is not the most elegant cardboard, but it is very well made and it is durable. You can also open a hole on its front to use it for AR.
Merge has also an associated Merge Cube, that is a cube full of markers that can be used to develop cute AR or VR experiences. For some marketing stunts, it is very useful and easy to be used. The fact that you can manipulate it easily with your hands while the augmentations cover it makes it a fun AR toy, even if holding the cube with one hand and the phone with the other one is not a great user experience.
It is made in soft materials as well, so it is very resistant as the headset and you can also use it as antistress 🙂
And that’s it for this throwback to the past! What are the abandoned AR/VR devices that you thought you were great but didn’t make it? Let me know in the comments or on my social media channels!
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