I love this guys blog, he does fantastic tear downs of display technology and I just don't see anyone else doing it in the space. He called out the 85% shade when they presented the initial preview a couple months ago.
He is genuinely not impressed by much and maybe he should be in some cases, but if you look at his body of work he's not just some yahoo brigading on magic leap hate and if there's a better technical voice on display tech out there, I haven't seen it.
While true, there's just no way you can infer the opacity from those frame grabs.
On the one hand he says he says he used the whites of Shaq's eyes as a reference and on the other he states that the design of the glasses hugs the users head to block out ambient light getting in from the side.
There's a slew of issues with this derivation. To arrive at a number like 15%, without showing his homework, is as questionable as the marketing claims of Leap themselves.
I'm not saying he's wrong but it does sound like a lot of bias.
He is saying that it is an approximation (see in comments):
"I looked at what I thought were comparable regions. I checked several frames of the video and the frame at 0:51 in the article is what I used. The method is admittedly very approximate as you have to guess the “gamma curve” of the video capture device to back out the linear value (I used a gamma of 2.2)."
He is genuinely not impressed by much and maybe he should be in some cases, but if you look at his body of work he's not just some yahoo brigading on magic leap hate and if there's a better technical voice on display tech out there, I haven't seen it.