[HN Gopher] My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead
___________________________________________________________________
My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead
Author : 74d-fe6-2c6
Score : 122 points
Date : 2021-10-12 10:29 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.magicleap.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.magicleap.com)
| wongarsu wrote:
| Is it just me, or is that announcement full of weirdly specific
| statements. Like "Magic Leap 2 will be the industry's smallest
| and lightest device built for enterprise adoption", implying that
| smaller/lighter devices exist, just not ones specifically built
| for enterprise adoption.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a contrast against HoloLens 2.
| wongarsu wrote:
| That makes some sense. They should have just said "smaller
| and lighter than AR headsets produced by any company
| headquartered in Redmond, WA"
| criddell wrote:
| They should stop pre-announcing and just ship something great.
| Nothing good has ever come from their PR machine.
| lkdjfglkj wrote:
| It's not just you. They're called weasel words
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
| somedude895 wrote:
| "Benito Mussolini was the kindest, most wonderful and
| generous man among all the axis leaders."
|
| Works wonders
| fsloth wrote:
| Would be ethnical majority resident of Mussolini's Italia
| over Stalin's USSR 10/10. Man the bleakness of those
| options.
| delecti wrote:
| Aren't the the alternatives Germany or Japan? I'm not at
| all a WW2 expert, but I don't think that decision is
| quite as clearcut (at least between Germany or Italy).
|
| Though the question was about the leaders, and I'm even
| less confident in my ability to imagine an answer to that
| question.
| fsloth wrote:
| I humorously selected just one pairing of 'specific axis
| state' - 'specific notorious allied state'. It was not
| intended as a serious analysis of average life outcomes
| in said totalitarian regimes.
| [deleted]
| beambot wrote:
| > According to IDC, the AR/VR market is expected to grow to
| nearly $140 billion by the end of 2024.
|
| That number seems wildly exaggerated... unless I'm missing
| something?
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >That number seems wildly exaggerated... unless I'm missing
| something?
|
| Both Apple and Facebook are wildly understood to be launching
| AR glasses with serious marketing pushes in 2022.
|
| 100 million units sold between the two of them over 2.5 years
| at an average price around the price of an iPhone (so $1000)
| plus some app sales adds up to $140BN. I guess. I agree that
| even there it seems high.
| lostgame wrote:
| Yeah, seems way too high.
|
| I recently got an Oculus Quest 2 and was immediately stunned by
| the dearth of content that exists on the platform.
|
| AR/VR is a hard sell, still; besides the initial experience -
| and as a dev in the AR/VR industry I'm honestly waiting for
| when we can get rid of the screen door effect in VR and better
| solutions to the lighting problem in AR.
| yughurt wrote:
| If you're interested in what's possible atm, check out the
| Varjo XR-3. No screen door effect.
| supermatt wrote:
| Are the any AR headsets that will give me a good multi-monitor
| setup where I can still see everything going on around me? Id
| happily pay $1500 for something like that.
| metafunctor wrote:
| No, that does not exist as of today.
|
| If you can settle for VR, you might be happy with Immersed and
| Vive Focus 3.
|
| There are no AR headsets today that would be remotely useful
| for day-to-day work, let alone with any kind of passable
| software support. Stuff from Varjo (like the XR-3) is getting
| there, but it's not there yet.
| dexterdog wrote:
| Why would you want the segregation of multiple monitors with a
| headset?
| dagw wrote:
| https://varjo.com/products/xr-3/ is probably as close as you'll
| get today. However it costs around $6k and is still far from
| perfect.
| cyberpsybin wrote:
| *Scam Leap 2
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 'Enterprise' is the right market. You can afford what this costs
| if it saves you the consequences of doing a concrete pour wrong.
| raesene9 wrote:
| I must admit I'd forgotten about Magic Leap, amazed to see
| they're still going and raising even more money.
|
| In my head, I always put them in a bucket with Theranos and
| uBeam, Startups who made product claims which experts in their
| fields said were not possible.
|
| I guess slick marketing wins over those doubts in some VC circles
| but you wonder if anyone at the early stage Magic Leap investors
| is getting asked tough questions about why they approved it, or
| if they've all just moved on to other roles.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I must admit I'd forgotten about Magic Leap, amazed to see
| they're still going and raising even more money.
|
| It's basically the only alternative for an investor who wants
| to get into AR, other than buying MSFT of AAPL stocks. That's
| why, despite shipping a V1 almost as good as the HoloLens V1
| they are getting funded again.
|
| Problem is, by the time Magic Leap gets it's V2 out there's a
| good chance we'll be seeing HoloLens V3 in the field.
| krageon wrote:
| I have tried the leap in practice and the experience was
| significantly above what I expected. The tracking worked most
| of the time (how???), with occasional wonkyness. The accuracy
| was very good (outside of the wonks). Where it is very limited
| is number of applications.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| The problem, to me, looks like getting 90% of the way there
| is possible. However, getting from 90% to 99.9% (to get rid
| of that "wonkyness"), seems to be way way way harder. Magic
| Leap has made little to no progress in working out the kinks
| in their product despite raising literally billions of
| dollars.
| tomas789 wrote:
| I wrote a camera/IMU tracking software (VIO) before. I can
| confirm this statement. Get it working is difficult and
| requires getting all the algos right. Getting it work
| reliably is a lot of rigorous testing, collecting datasets,
| evaluating slightest changes, tuning numerical stability,
| experimenting with different techniques which might work
| better in low light and optimizing for the hardware (VIO is
| intensive but the best VIO is useless if there is no
| computation power left for the app itself).
|
| Neither of this is required for a slick demo in well lit
| room and perhaps on better HW.
| ghaff wrote:
| The 90% statement is both true and is one of the things
| that really sucks people in. There are any number of
| technologies that kinda/sorta work as a PoC. There's a
| gaping chasm between that PoC and a viable working product
| but a lot of people look at the PoC and can imagine what
| the working product looks like--and think to themselves
| that it's only about some refinement.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| What can one say? I also tried it (have always been fan of
| new interaction methods) and was severely disappointed. Even
| the "put reflective stickers on your fingers and use an off-
| the-shelf wiimote" had better tracking, though it is
| obviously less convenient.
|
| That said, I am waiting for v2 from these guys and/or anyone
| else.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Edit: Oops replied to the wrong comment.
| krageon wrote:
| They were talking about fingers and we're talking about
| leap. It's about hands :)
| dfcowell wrote:
| I think you're talking about Leap Motion, not Magic Leap.
| I made the same mistake until I dug into the article.
| IshKebab wrote:
| You mean the headset position tracking? That already worked
| very reliable on the Hololens years ago, and it works almost
| as well on the Quest, which is far far cheaper. It was a
| solved technology before the Magic Leap launched. Or did you
| mean some other kind of tracking?
| nikanj wrote:
| > I guess slick marketing wins over those doubts in some VC
| circles but you wonder if anyone at the early stage Magic Leap
| investors is getting asked tough questions about why they
| approved it, or if they've all just moved on to other roles.
|
| I would guess this depends on whether or not they managed to
| hoist the stock to someone else in subsequent rounds. Investing
| in a scam can still be a good deal, as long as you get out
| before the jig is up
| eberkund wrote:
| *as long as you _get out_ before the jig is up
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| That seems to be the playbook for today's highly valued
| unicorns. Squeeze out all the value then dump the stock on
| the public before things start going down. It's not exactly a
| scam but it's the same kind of thinking: Doing irrational
| things is fine as long as you are confident there will be a
| greater fool later on.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > In my head, I always put them in a bucket with Theranos and
| uBeam, Startups who made product claims which experts in their
| fields said were not possible.
|
| What was it that experts said wasn't possible about Magic Leap?
| My understanding was that their product was a more advanced
| version of the tech in Microsoft's HaloLens and the primary
| challenges for both were bringing down the cost, expanding the
| FOV and DOF, and finding realistic use cases.
|
| Microsoft went the enterprise route, like Google did with Lens,
| while Magic Leap tried to release something that felt boutique.
| breezeTrowel wrote:
| > _Startups who made product claims which experts in their
| fields said were not possible._
|
| Can you clarify what you mean by this? What aspect is
| considered impossible? Augmented Reality has been around for a
| while. There's the Microsoft HoloLens. Not to mention all the
| AR demos Apple does whenever they announce a new iPhone.
|
| Check out this page, for example:
|
| https://www.apple.com/augmented-reality/
|
| especially the Snapchat one. You have rendered images being
| obscured by physical objects directly "in front" of them.
|
| If anything, Magic Leap seems a bit ordinary with only its size
| being the standout feature. But, even there, it looks like
| they're already beat by Snapchat's Specatcles (see:
| https://www.spectacles.com/ )
|
| So I fail to see how Magic Leap's product claims are in any way
| similar to Theranos or uBeam. If anything, their claims are not
| that impressive given the competition.
| adrr wrote:
| I wonder if Microsoft spent $2.5 billion to develop HoloLens.
| josefresco wrote:
| https://www.spectacles.com/creatorform "The new Spectacles
| are not for sale."
| excalibur wrote:
| The Spectacles aren't even an AR headset, although they do
| include a cheap-looking VR viewer. They're primarily a 3D
| camera you can wear on your face.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| ????
|
| the hype was around their fiber scanning display patents,
| they were showing investors a totally new technology that
| projects images into your eyeballs. There are numerous
| articles describing the patented pie-in-the-sky vs the state-
| of-the-art, just one example here: [0]
|
| > They don't even have an decent brightness control of the
| pixels and didn't even attempt to show color reproduction
| (requiring extremely precise laser control). Yes the images
| are old, but there are a series of extremely hard problems
| outlined above that are likely not solvable which is likely
| why we have not seen any better pictures of an FSD from
| ANYONE (ML or others) in the last 7 years.
|
| Magic Leap was unable to improve and miniaturize this
| technology - its a dead end - so they ended up using the same
| tech as everyone else
|
| [0] https://kguttag.com/2016/11/28/magic-leap-no-fiber-scan-
| disp...
| gurumeditations wrote:
| Clearly you do not know of their history leading up to the
| release of the first ML device. Hype, magical promises, and
| fake demos galore.
| yodon wrote:
| > Clearly you do not know ...
|
| Your comment would work just as well and could be just as
| informative without the personal attack
| tootie wrote:
| What they lied about was the fidelity. They made demo video
| in 2015 that was a fully prerendered video of what they
| expected their AR experience to look like. Years later, the
| top of line headsets are fuzzy and very limited in field of
| view and have not seen any adoption outside of very niche
| applications.
|
| https://youtu.be/ctUx3BzuQgQ
| raesene9 wrote:
| I was careful to say "product claims" and not products. I
| don't doubt AR is possible, but that the claims Magic Leap
| made in their early demonstrations were not realistic.
|
| I was thinking of the early demonstrations they had, where
| the lighting and occlusion just didn't seem plausible (e.g.
| the infamous whale demo https://youtu.be/LM0T6hLH15k?t=30).
| These early demos were called out by skeptics as being not
| plausible (https://www.theregister.com/2016/12/09/magic_leap_
| neither_ma... or https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-
| reality-behind-m...)
|
| Is AR possible, sure, but it has restrictions and when Magic
| Leap's product hit the market those restrictions were
| obvious.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Theranos was doing illegal things.
| baybal2 wrote:
| One on my list of mind boggling "Tech 2.0" scams were:
|
| 1. Teranos
|
| 2. Magic Leap
|
| 3. Andelur Ghost
|
| Only the last one still didn't get enough media attention.
| People who scored Andelur handshakes with the military &
| intelligence are the types who did it for Advanced Tactical
| Security & Communications Ltd (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 )
|
| Andelur is basically trying to sell the governments around the
| world a Chinese toy copter for millions of dollars through
| incredible "Tech 2.0" type marketing fudging.
|
| One thing these fellows can do for sure is a Hollywood grade
| CG. I was with a company on a competing bid for border patrol
| drone.
|
| Even I, somebody with quite good experience with CG, was
| initially fooled by their videos. Indeed, they intentionally
| were trying to numb your guard by showing it flying in the
| rain, and being sprayed by water.
| https://youtu.be/5xDEroiMQWk?t=100
|
| It took me a few minutes to figure out that the rain, and water
| spay in their videos were also impressively disguised computer
| graphics.
| notabanker wrote:
| Do you mean Anduril?
|
| I have only a passing knowledge of Anduril, thanks for
| sharing your impression of them. But knowing his track
| record, I tend to believe Palmer Luckey has the ability to
| achieve daring innovations. That said, with quantum leap
| innovation, failure is the more likely outcome.
| baybal2 wrote:
| _> Ghost is practically invisible to the targets it
| observes, with a frontal cross-section smaller than some of
| the phones I have owned over the years. Stay tuned for true
| invisibility._
|
| I don't tend to believe people telling something like this
| being credible.
|
| Especially when they try to pass lobotomised Chinese RC toy
| heli for "an Apex of Aerospace Engineering," and carefully
| photoshops all its photos to disguise its Made in China
| ancestry https://ibb.co/8DT5JMc
|
| And now these guys seem to be heading towards starting an
| IPO.
| notabanker wrote:
| The video you shared is unbelievable (in every sense of
| the word).
| knownjorbist wrote:
| Would you care to reply to the people who attest that the
| magic leap is actually underwhelming given the current state
| of AR?
| baybal2 wrote:
| I will. I work in an engineering company which shipped a
| number of AR glasses projects (for clients I can't name,)
| and I can say that whomever did engineering for Magic Leap
| had no idea whatsoever about basics of optics, and such.
|
| And their overall engineering level is totally amateurish
| -- you cannot have such shoddy job being done for money,
| let alone such amount of money, but they have everything to
| tick the checkbox in the buzzword department: waveguides,
| holographics, structural colour, photonic chips...
|
| Want talk more, leave a way to contact you on your profile
| page
|
| One main point:
|
| Holographic waveguides, and such are a dead end development
| with a substandard image quality which you cannot do
| anything about, as well as its inefficiency (these
| waveguides waste 70-90%+ of light.)
|
| You can make them more opaque to preserve more light, but
| then you get VR sunglasses, instead of what the promise is.
|
| _The fundamental problem is that the amount of image light
| transferred is inversely proportional to the amount of
| light obscured._ -- they are extremely inefficient, and
| there is physically no way around this.
|
| For this reason this solution really had to be sent to the
| wastebin on day one, and not be presented as the next best
| thing after sliced bread. This is obvious to anybody
| knowing optics on above a high school level, and it's
| inconceivable how anybody paying real engineers can opt for
| this solution.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| its interesting that they appear to only have two SLAM cameras
| (that I can see)
|
| I can see at the front they have two extra cameras, that look
| like they are a near/far pair.
|
| It'll be interesting to see what the tracking performance is
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I am impressed they aren't defunct. After all they raised $3B[1]
| and their valuation is $2B so they are a long way away from
| making their investors whole. They did replace their entire top
| line management team it seems so maybe that helps?
|
| A friend of mine who was approaching AR from a more theoretical
| point rather than a product point shared some of the physics of
| how many nits of brightness the display needs to produce to
| occlude the actual background and it is a lot. ML worked around
| some of that problem by shading the background think sunglasses
| with a 50% light reduction, which helps but then you're trying to
| match shading. Basically it is a really hard problem and had they
| not been so "out there" in their original claims I really don't
| think they would be so challenged in their marketing now.
|
| [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-leap
| gilrain wrote:
| They're pivoting to enterprise, eh. So.
|
| Industrial Leap and Magic?
| Animats wrote:
| _" We have accelerated the organization's pivot to enterprise."_
|
| Or, "we can't make this affordable".
| eitally wrote:
| It somewhat amuses me to see the parallels with Google Glass in
| this regard. I worry the enterprise market may already be quite
| crowded, though, and there are ample niche vendors specializing
| in AR for different use cases (construction, manufacturing,
| medicine/surgery, etc). I don't know that Magic Leap isn't a
| year late and a dollar short.
| camillomiller wrote:
| The real news is that they still have capital to invest in
| development. I honestly thought they were already dead. They
| might need a rebranding.
| [deleted]
| emsy wrote:
| Possible Edison 2 announcement from Theranos soon?
| pavlov wrote:
| The post mentions that Magic Leap recently raised money at a
| valuation of $2B.
|
| Seems like a significant downround, considering they'd already
| raised at least $2.4B in the past. I'd guess their pre-launch
| valuation must have been closer to $10B.
| aaron695 wrote:
| > According to IDC, the AR/VR market is expected to grow to
| nearly $140 billion by the end of 2024.
|
| AR has nothing at all to do with VR.
|
| But I guess if you're talking about a technology that even
| science fiction writers can't show it doing anything other than
| sexually suggestive ads, your target audience isn't chasing a
| coherent narrative.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| I never quite figured out these tweets:
|
| https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/656667346837200896?...
|
| I've had the Magic Leap demo. It was worth going to Florida for.
|
| https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/842399282485460992?...
|
| So, a while ago I said that seeing Magic Leap was the coolest
| thing I'd seen since the iPhone.
|
| It's now much cooler than that.
|
| Any suggestions?
| phonon wrote:
| The demo he refers to was not (and could never be) an actual
| commercial product. It was stationary and the optics were 100x
| what could fit on a mobile device. What they eventually shipped
| had very little to do with the tech used in the private demo.
|
| Turns out optical physics is not like software...
| shmatt wrote:
| Which makes another tweet of his even weirder. Someone
| questioned the plausibility of making that demo mobile
|
| >it's perfectly clear. Just not public.
|
| https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/656667935205797888
|
| The only difference between 2015 ML and Theranos is that
| faking tech in healthcare is just a lot more illegal.
|
| If they promised investors there was a definite plan the demo
| becomes a real product, and knew thats a lie, could they sue?
| notabanker wrote:
| I could be wrong on the timeline, but wasn't Ben Evans at that
| time a partner at Andreesen Horowitz. Partners are expected to
| be cheerleaders of their investments. After all difficult
| technologies become manifest by cheerleading them until one of
| them catches on.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| He was, yes
| simias wrote:
| I didn't know Magic Leap was still a thing, I'm somewhat
| impressed. I definitely understand the negativity in the comments
| but at the same time with their experience with the v1 maybe
| they'll manage to deliver something useful this time?
|
| Some skepticism is definitely warranted, but I'm looking forward
| to actual demonstrations of this hardware. Assuming of course
| that this time they'll actually share proper demo footage instead
| of obviously bullshit marketing videos.
| leetrout wrote:
| If you have not experienced the magic leap videos do not do it
| justice.
|
| Heres my video flying inside my house:
|
| https://youtu.be/Grlk03MdScQ
|
| The jaw dropping aspects:
|
| - it correctly knows when to mask for the column
|
| - it does lighting effects from the planes headlights
|
| - it does particle collisions with my furniture when it crashes
|
| - it crashes by detecting i hit the wall
|
| It really is amazing tech but it is very unpolished. But I am
| very hopeful they keep pushing and it gets cheaper and more
| people can experience it and develop for it.
|
| This is like the amiga. We are at the infancy of AR.
| taneq wrote:
| TBH that's better than I expected. I'd call the column masking
| "barely adequate" rather than "correctly" but it's at least
| making an attempt to reconstruct the scene and do additive
| composition in realtime.
|
| Wasn't the real breakthrough meant to be to do with variable
| focus lightfield voodoo meaning that the rendered components
| looked like they 'fitted in' with the scene and could occlude
| as well as be occluded, rather than being additive CGI floating
| in front of it?
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| Are you serious? This looks like an undergraduate project
| hacked up with OpenCV.. I'd still give it an A though.
| leetrout wrote:
| As I said, video does not do it justice. If you walk around
| while flying everything stays very well locked in place.
|
| It probably _is_ using OpenCV under the hood.
| fossuser wrote:
| I normally don't like to pile on with negativity, but I'd
| argue the video does do it justice. I played with one
| myself (the only one I ever saw in the wild and she only
| had one because her SO was one of the original investors)
| and it was similar to what the video shows. My first
| experience with VR was impressive, Magic Leap was a
| disappointment.
|
| The background is dark, the occlusions are bad, the
| hardware is large, and the FOV is poor.
|
| Magic Leap really burned a lot of good will imo by sucking
| up enormous amounts of AR funding having 'demo' marketing
| that was at best intentionally misleading if not just
| fraudulent.
|
| I'm still bullish on AR being the next platform when the
| hardware is ready, but I'd bet on Apple or Oculus pulling
| that off, I wouldn't go near anything from Magic Leap.
|
| This about sums it up:
| https://twitter.com/fernandojsg/status/1017411969169555457
|
| It's a little reminiscent of General Magic - something like
| the AR they want is likely to exist in the future, but I'd
| surprised if it's from them.
|
| Can you imagine Steve Jobs shipping something at the
| quality level of that video?
| snek_case wrote:
| Yeah. I'm kind of left feeling like I'd rather fly the plane
| in a better looking simulated environment, with a first-
| person perspective. It's more flexible and fun than being
| tied to flying it in the environment around you.
|
| I still haven't seen a compelling use case for AR.
| tjs8rj wrote:
| Coolest one I've seen is VR workspaces. Buying a $5k setup
| per head where they can work from space or the Grand Canyon
| with unlimited monitors, sit/stand/lay down, software
| upgrades (only a few pieces of hardware to replace),
| virtual meetings, building and modeling anything they want,
| etc
|
| It's still kinda clunky now, but the tech will get better.
| That's a money saver (and a big improvement) with the main
| barriers being tech and familiarity, and those just come
| with time. Very bullish on that
| smoldesu wrote:
| I dunno, I still can't quite see the potential of that.
| And even if they _did_ get it working perfectly, then
| they 're following in the footsteps of _other_ people who
| 've already done this on headsets that are a fraction of
| the price (like Immersed or Virtual Desktop).
|
| Even if they do manage to create mind-blowing hardware,
| they aren't exactly cornering a market here.
| snek_case wrote:
| AR seems to me like one of those technologies that people
| keep claiming is definitely going to be "the future" even
| though the use cases are dubious.
| Tarragon wrote:
| There are hardware limits that will make this less
| compelling than you imagine. I'll give 3 reasons.
|
| Note: Magic Leap specs are from a quick google search and
| may be out of date. Even improved they'll have the same
| issues to a slightly lesser degree.
|
| First - field of view: The horizontal field of Magic Leap
| is 40 degrees. My primary monitor, a 16x9 32" monitor at
| about 3 feet from my eyes, is 42 degrees. So this can't
| even show me 100% of that, and definitely can't show me a
| second monitor in my peripheral vision.
|
| Field of view is hard to improve as the optics are really
| close to your eyes and being head worn have limits of
| size and weight.
|
| Second - Resolution: The magic leap resolution is
| apparently 1280x960, significantly less than 1080p.
| That's not even close to the 4K monitor I'm typing this
| on. That low resolution has to cover the entire area of
| my monitor. More if I want to stretch the field of wider.
|
| Picture yourself programming on a 1280x960 32" monitor.
| Just to see I set my system that way for a minute. PIXELS
| EVERYWHERE! Also, now I need to reset all my carefully
| curated windows.
|
| It's hard to improve resolution. The displays are very
| small to keep size and weight down. HMD displays are
| generally about the highest of DPI that can be built.
|
| Third - Brightness: You can't draw black on a see-through
| HMD, all you can do is make the existing world brighter.
| The lenses are too close to the eye to be able to do any
| kind of masking or blocking of the ambient light.
|
| So your display system won't be able to show much of an
| image over bright area; the text is either white over
| world color or background colored in a white field. It's
| not good for reading text and almost illegible at typical
| sizes in office lighting.
|
| You can't improve brightness easily. These tiny displays
| make a lot of heat right near your head. Making them
| brighter means bigger heatsinks, taking weight and size,
| and more power with requires bigger batteries or shorter
| run time.
|
| You can kinda cheat one a little with dark sunglass
| lenses to make the whole world darker. Or you can go to
| VR and just block the whole world and draw your interface
| over a video stream. The second option isn't really
| compelling because it for AR demos like Magic Leap shows.
| fossuser wrote:
| The use case is a virtual meta-layer for the real world
| where you can interact with stuff without needing to look
| at a small glass handheld display.
|
| Things like, pulling up addresses of buildings you look at,
| names of people you've met, line on ground for gps, playing
| board games with people without needing a board or dealing
| with the rule book (software assisted), see meta
| information floating around devices (battery level, year,
| serial number), etc. etc.
|
| The UX of phones is pretty good but it suffers from its
| form factor. If you could have a UX for the world you can
| really enable a lot more human abilities in a really
| intuitive way and you can get closer to something that
| feels like telepathy.
| lostgame wrote:
| >> This is like the amiga.
|
| Problem is it was marketed like a supercomputer and what we got
| was an Amiga.
|
| Which is fine for the hobbyist nerds who can see the potential.
| Not so good for literally anyone else.
| leetrout wrote:
| I do not disagree.
|
| They are kinda doing the Tesla approach now (or as of 2019)
| where they are trying to sell a higher end experience.
|
| Their medical demos / apps were really awesome.
|
| You could place a virtual cadaver on the physical table.
|
| When they work out view sharing that is gonna be amazing for
| collaboration.
|
| They have a dream of "5G cities" where everyone walks around
| with these things fully connected.
|
| I think that is the wrong direction. Will be curious to see
| what comes of it.
| Animats wrote:
| _They have a dream of "5G cities" where everyone walks
| around with these things fully connected._
|
| That's a nightmare. See "Hyperreality"[1], if you haven't.
| That may be the future of AR. Especially if Facebook is
| involved.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
| acchow wrote:
| "it correctly knows when to mask for the column"
|
| correctly? https://imgur.com/h3zHxDW
| [deleted]
| leetrout wrote:
| It doesnt look as bad in stereo when you're distracted by the
| motion.
|
| Such an unusual experience for it to go behind something.
| Aunche wrote:
| Is this much different from the Hololens?
| leetrout wrote:
| The magic leap os is some funky linux / android thing so I
| think it loses out to Hololens right there.
|
| The ML seems to scan rooms better and "lock" things in space
| better but the HL seemed to have a better resolution (_not_
| field of view) when using "normal" apps.
|
| They are both competing on field of view now with the next
| generation of devices but the ML beats the first gen HL hands
| down on the larger FOV.
| croes wrote:
| Hololens 1 and Magic Leap don't have much of a difference.
| The Magic Leap has a greater FOV
| busterarm wrote:
| And yet ML had to raise almost $5B to get to around
| ballpark with the Hololens which I assure you Microsoft
| invested substantially less money into and already has tens
| of billions in government contracts committed to use the
| thing.
| leetrout wrote:
| What they could do, if they figure out the right play,
| with the right hardware, is make this a really compelling
| active entertainment device. You already saw haw popular
| Pokemon Go was... I think locking eyeballs to locations
| has VC's interested.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Yes, but Pokemon Go was popular because it was on a phone
| you already had, because it was an extremely popular
| franchise, and because of the good luck of being a fad at
| the right time.
|
| Nothing else took its place, and, while still being
| popular, it quickly faded from the status of global
| phenomenon.
|
| It's a nice money making game, but not a hardware seller.
| tdeck wrote:
| Most people I knew who played Pokemon Go quickly turned
| off the AR feature anyway.
| shmatt wrote:
| I have to say, I've been reading these comments who love or
| hate ML, treating them as just another internet argument
|
| As someone who was following the public hype but never actually
| saw what they released. This is absolutely completely terrible.
| The promises they made when they raised half a billion dollars
| 7 years ago as a stealth company backed by tech geniuses.
|
| If this is what they have today, what were they showing
| investors 7 years ago? and why did investors think _this_ is
| going to revolutionize the world?
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I saw it during an interview at Ft Lauderdale. I was
| interviewing for the optics metrology engineer position. It
| was as mind blowing as the op is stating. Absolutely
| stunning. This was 5 years ago. Signed a bunch of NDA papers
| so shouldn't talk too much about it.
| defen wrote:
| Have you considered that the demo may have been faked (for
| example maybe they preprogrammed it with room geometry that
| was acquired some other way)?
| lostgame wrote:
| From what I understand - the demo was using a completely
| different set of technology from that which eventually
| came out.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Allow us who haven't experienced it to highly doubt this.
| At the very best it looks like nifty tech that would be fun
| to play around with for a couple of hours until the novelty
| wears off, no more than that.
| dntrkv wrote:
| Just reserve judgement until you experience it yourself. You
| can't reproduce the experience on a 2D screen. That's the
| whole point.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain". If all
| you can show is 20 year old looking graphics that only
| somewhat match the scene they are in (while moving at a
| glacial pace), I am going to bet that the "experience" is
| way over hyped as well.
| bogwog wrote:
| That looks pretty awesome! If this is what they could do with
| the version 1, then v2 might turn out to be really impressive.
| throwaway123x2 wrote:
| I want a good consumer AR headset. VR gives me a headache and I
| really think AR will be more fun / integrated with our lives.
|
| It's sad that MSFT made the HoloLens enterprise only, otherwise
| I'd be next in line for that.
| lostgame wrote:
| I wish the Oculus Quest 2 had higher quality cameras. Some of
| my favourite times in that experience are when I have to see
| the world through my googles.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Narrator: "It was the same subpar meh product they pretended to
| have already released after years of fleecing investors with
| pretty CGI"
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| I think HN is pretty set on the fact that Magic Leap is
| vaporware, isn't it? do they even have a product?
| pvm3 wrote:
| they probably have a large patent portfolio
| moron4hire wrote:
| They do have a product. It didn't live up to Abovitz' hype, but
| that's also why he's not CEO anymore.
|
| The ML1 sits somewhere in the vicinity of the Hololens 1 in
| capability. Some things it does better, some things it does
| worse.
|
| For example, having a real controller was very useful as the
| input latency on the Hololens' hand tracking is a big
| impediment and not having a variety of physical buttons makes
| designing games with lots of different types of interactions
| really hard. I think Waltz of the Wizard on the Quest 2 is the
| only game I've seen with hand tracked input that isn't just
| "point and click".
|
| Wider field of view than the Hololens was nice, but it came at
| the price of lower pixel density.
|
| Being based on Android was a drawback for me, though. Hololens
| has a workspace metaphor, akin to a 3D desktop, that Magic Leap
| never really put much effort into. Hololens also has speech
| recognition as a first-class citizen, whereas Magic Leap left
| it up to developers to roll their own. It's really, really hard
| to get good performance out of Android, too.
|
| A bunch of the other stuff was just too wonky to consider. The
| surface meshing was unusable in real life scenarios. The hand
| tracking as well. A lot of people don't realize that the
| Hololens could do full, positional hand tracking, it just
| wasn't a great experience, so everyone designed around nose-
| pointers and just using the hand as a clicker. The hand
| tracking on Magic Leap was even worse, yet they went with
| trying to showcase it.
|
| I think, if Microsoft were to release a controller to get over
| the latency issues of hand tracking on the Hololens, it'd be
| strictly better all around.
|
| I'm rather bearish on AR devices making a big splash in the
| consumer market, especially ones using waveguide displays.
| Waveguides are a technological dead end. There isn't really any
| room for them to grow by even 2x, when they really need to grow
| by at least 20x. Good AR application design is also
| excruciatingly hard. What you typically end up with is a VR app
| made shitty by having to run on an AR headset. Oculus' approach
| of starting with a VR headset and adding AR-passthrough makes a
| lot more sense.
| criddell wrote:
| Surely the NDAs that were signed when they were previewing the
| tech to journalists have expired. I'd love to know what it was
| they were seeing that resulted in so many articles announcing
| something great was coming.
|
| For me, only the Segway (Ginger) was a bigger disappointment.
| specialist wrote:
| The tragedy is they anticipated micromobility. Which will
| (may) be huge. They were just ~20 years too soon.
|
| These "right idea, wrong time" fails confuse me. I just don't
| know what to make of it.
| the-dude wrote:
| https://www.magicleap.com/en-us/magic-leap-1
| baybal2 wrote:
| I think they are Tiranos 2.0.
| dewey wrote:
| Theranos?
| baybal2 wrote:
| Yes, Theranos. Companies with weird, catchy names should
| probably be red flagged by default.
| [deleted]
| gadders wrote:
| This guy had a pretty good series of posts on Magic Leap.
| They're not positive https://kguttag.com/?s=magic+leap
|
| EG "This blog has been reporting why from a technical
| perspective on the massive problems with Magic Leap since
| November 2016. At that point, Magic Leap had "only" raised
| about $1.4B. They were able to raise another $1.2+ billion
| since this blog started reporting on their hype. Magic Leap's
| total VC raise of over $2.6B dwarfs the measly $700m raised by
| the infamous Theranos."
|
| https://kguttag.com/2020/05/03/magic-leap-starts-to-auger-in...
| the-dude wrote:
| If the projected delivery window is the entirety of 2022, it can
| easily slip into 2023 just as well.
|
| TL;DR : Magic Leap 2 will be released somewhere before 2025.
| simonh wrote:
| s/will/may
| kevinwang wrote:
| Wow, I completely missed that magic leap 1 actually came out
| thathndude wrote:
| Here we go again . . .
|
| But in all seriousness, even if they could ship something
| meaningful, one wonders if the brand is tarnished such that it
| makes sense to re-launch with fresh branding.
|
| "Magic Leap" does not conjure up positive images in my mind. Why
| swim against the current unnecessarily?
| mbreese wrote:
| Most people don't know the name Magic Leap. HN is a
| (relatively) small bubble. The only place where the name might
| have a bad effect would be in hiring or raising money. But,
| really changing the name would be worse in that regard as it
| would signal that they (Magic Leap) also thought the name was
| tarnished.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| The point is that the name Magic Leap IS extremely and deeply
| tarnished, in so many ways, and Magic Leap pretending it's
| not just makes them look more laughably delusional than they
| already are (which is extremely), just like Trump still
| believing that he won the election.
|
| I just posted citations and quotes about just the most
| obvious three ways Magic Leap tarnished their own reputation
| from the start:
|
| 1) the sex discrimination lawsuit and nepotistic sexist bro
| culture,
|
| 2) blatantly ripping off other people's ideas without credit
| in the patent applications,
|
| 3) the ridiculous TEDX talk and fraudulent claims on the fake
| video "demos".
|
| But that's just the tip of the iceberg, not even touching on
| the flaws and shortcomings and fraudulent claims about the
| hardware and software itself. Magic Leap's terrible
| reputation has been well covered in many tech and mainstream
| publications, and is known quite widely both inside and
| outside of HN.
|
| Here's a starting point if you really don't already know
| about Magic Leap's well established terrible reputation:
|
| Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses:
|
| https://www.theinformation.com/articles/dented-reality-
| magic...
|
| >Magic Leap had high hopes for sales of its augmented reality
| headset. Instead, the richly valued startup has seen slow
| sales of the device, recent layoffs and executive turnover.
| In the coming years, competition in AR will likely intensify
| as bigger tech companies enter the market.
|
| HN discussion of that article:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21725347
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Are you referring to the sex discrimination lawsuit and
| nepotistic sexist bro culture that tarnished Magic Leap's
| reputation?
|
| Magic Leap Settling Sex Discrimination Lawsuit with Former
| Employee (vrandfun.com):
|
| https://www.vrandfun.com/magic-leap-settling-sex-discriminat...
|
| HN discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14310144
|
| More:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209363
|
| The whole point of the lawsuit was all about how Magic Leap's
| company culture and product plans and demos and self image all
| revolved around adolescent male egos and sexist fantasies, and
| excluded women.
|
| Tannen Cambell, who filed the lawsuit, was actually hired for
| the express purpose of solving Magic Leap's recognized
| "pink/blue problem", but was rebuffed and ignored. They knew
| they had a problem, and even gave it a name, but they refused
| to solve it.
|
| Read the lawsuit:
|
| https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discriminat...
|
| >Campbell, one of whose responsibilities was to help Magic Leap
| with the "pink/blue problem," had to endure hostile environment
| sex discrimination while proposing ways, not only to make Magic
| Leap's product more woman friendly, but also to make the
| workplace more diverse and inclusive. Campbell was terminated
| after (and because) she, like the child in "The Emperor's New
| Clothes" who blurted out that the Emperor was naked, challenged
| Magic Leap's CEO, Rony Abovitz, to acknowledge the depths of
| misogyny in Magic Leap's culture and take steps to correct an
| gender imbalance that negatively affects the company's core
| culture and renders it so dysfunctional it continues to delay
| the launch of a product that attracted billions of investment
| dollars. Campbell also raised concerns that what Magic Leap
| showed the public in marketing material was not what the
| product actually could do--admonitions ignored in favor of her
| male colleagues' assertions that the images and videos
| presented on Magic Leap's website and on YouTube were
| "aspirational," and not Magic Leap's version of "alternate
| facts."
|
| Did all of that suddenly change after the lawsuit was settled?
|
| Because if it did suddenly tangibly change, then that might be
| evidence that settling a sex discrimination lawsuit by changing
| their behavior was a positive signal.
|
| But if they only forked over a big pile of hush money, signed
| non-disparagement agreements and gag orders, and went their
| separate ways, and Magic Leap didn't actually change their
| culture, then I don't think you could consider it positive sign
| or a constructive settlement for anyone other than the woman
| who was paid to keep her mouth shut.
|
| Quotes from the lawsuit:
|
| >Campbell met September 28, 2016 with Magic Leap CFO Henry and
| Head of Operations Tina Tuli for a conference call with the CFO
| and leadership team at R/GA, an award-winning international
| advertising agency that was Magic Leap's advertising agency of
| record. During the call, Henry said of the product under
| development, "I'm sitting here between two beautiful ladies.
| They're not going to want to put a big ugly device over their
| pretty faces. And I have an office with glass doors, I don't
| want people to see me with these beautiful girls with ugly
| things on their faces." Later, one of the male R/GA executives
| on the call asked Campbell if Henry frequently made sexist
| comments like he had made. A female executive at R/GA also was
| offended by Henry's remarks.
|
| >As an example of more egregious comments, Campbell told
| Abovitz of the "Three Os" incident and Vlietstra's lack of any
| meaningful discipline in response. As an example of unconscious
| bias, she told him of an IT employee who was helping Campbell a
| new logo into the email system. Cognizant that she was taking
| up a lot of the employee's time with minor changes to get the
| logo "perfect," Campbell apologized for taking up so much of
| the employee's time, to which he responded, "Oh, don't worry, I
| get it. You're a woman and you care that things look pretty.
| I'm a man. I just get the work done."
|
| >Euen Thompson, an IT Support Lead, on November 16, 2016, gave
| a tutorial to a group of seven new hires, including two women,
| how to use Magic Leap's IT equipment and resources. One woman
| asked Thompson a question in front of the group and Thompson
| responded, "Yeah, women always have trouble with computers."
| The women in the group, in apparent disbelief, asked Thompson
| to repeat what he said and Thompson replied, "In IT we have a
| saying; stay away from the Three Os: Orientals, Old People and
| Ovaries."
|
| >During Campbell's last four months at Magic Leap, Abovitz--who
| always had been pouty and prone to temper-tantrums, began to
| dig his heels in even more in the face of dissenting ideas and
| to explode ever more frequently into child-like fits of rage,
| threatening retribution when he didn't get his way, felt
| betrayed or was portrayed publically in an unfavorable light.
|
| >[...] the "Wizards Wanted" section of its website. Indeed,
| given that a "wizard" generally is defined as "a man who has
| magical powers," and virtually without exception images of
| wizards are male, Magic Leap's recruiting verbiage contains a
| not-so-subtle "women-need-not-apply" message.
|
| >Sadly, because Magic Leap seldom hires and does not actively
| recruit female candidates, the company loses competitive
| advantage to products like Microsoft's Hololens. Microsoft,
| which employs far more females on its team, developed its
| similar product on a faster time line with more content that
| appeals to both genders.
|
| >"Eric Akerman, vice president of IT, is a high school buddy of
| Abovitz. He is a loud and outspoken and several misogynistic
| comments have emanated from his department and from him."
|
| >"Vice president of IT Akerman, on Nov. 8, 2016, told a large
| group of people who asked why he voted for Trump that it was
| 'because Melania is hot.'"
|
| >Senior Engineer Eric Adams sent out an email December 4, 2015
| through a company email list serv for social activities for
| Magic Leap employees and their families, which email bore the
| subject line, "Board (sic) Wives at home while you are loving
| it at the Leap," which stated:
|
| >Hello Leapers:
|
| >My wife is starting a Google group outside of the Magic Leap
| locked domain.
|
| >It is called "Magic Leap spouses" and should be findable as
| such.
|
| https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/magic-leap-spouses
|
| >It is sort of a social meeting place for all the spouses that
| have been displaced, alone in the daytime and are new to the
| area, would like to have lunch with or just to have someone
| local to hang out with when their significant other is slaving
| away at work thru-out the 12-Hr day. Or are they just nagging
| you because you moved here?
|
| >Please forward this Email to your wife if she would like to
| get better acclimated to South Florida. The group is not public
| and is reasonably private (by email invite/accept) as to not
| accidentally disclose any Magic Leap secrets.
|
| >The gender-neutral reference to "spouses" notwithstanding,
| implicit in the subject line and the reference to "your wife"
| is the assumption -- which is not too far from wrong -- that
| all the employees were men with wives who didn't work outside
| the home and were "alone in the daytime."
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Or are you referring to the way Magic Leap picked up and ripped
| off so many other people's original designs and IP in their
| patent applications without giving the actual inventors credit,
| that tarnished Magic Leap's reputation?
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/30/7954611/magic-leap-augmen...
|
| >Magic Leap's futuristic patent art was copied from other
| artists' designs
|
| >When Google-backed augmented reality company Magic Leap
| quietly applied for a patent, it did so with dozens of pages of
| futuristic (and slightly creepy) scenarios: a social media
| charm bracelet, a gargoyle bursting out of a box in a store,
| gamified cucumber chopping...
|
| >Wait a second. That last one sounds familiar. Maybe that's
| because it's a line drawing of a shot from "Sight," a Black
| Mirror-esque short film about an augmented, sinister future. As
| it turns out, Magic Leap's patent art isn't so much its vision
| of the future as one created by various students and designers.
| Former Verge-r and current Gizmodo writer Sean Hollister was
| tipped off to a set of side-by-side comparisons that leave no
| doubt we're looking at copies.
|
| >If patents are about originality, does this mean Magic Leap is
| hurting its claims? Not really. A great deal of patent art just
| shows potential designs or uses for something, in order to make
| the actual, more abstract claims clearer. In this case, Magic
| Leap is patenting an optical system that has nothing to do with
| the interfaces displayed here. Even bringing a copyright claim
| would be hard and arguably pointless. "Images such as these are
| setting consumer expectations of VR and AR today," the company
| told Gizmodo. "We wanted to use the same images to demonstrate
| what our technology will enable."
|
| >The designers themselves seem ambivalent of their images'
| rebirth as patent art. Magic Leap appears to have neither
| contacted them nor credited them, but at the same time, it's
| showing the world how this futuristic design fiction could
| work. It's one thing to have someone rip off your art. It's
| another to have them actually make it real -- if Magic Leap can
| actually deliver on its ambitious promises.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/magic-leap-ripped-off-those-awesome-ui-c...
|
| >Magic Leap Ripped Off Those Awesome UI Concepts
|
| >Magic Leap is secretly building a headset that could blend
| computer graphics with the real world. Recently, we lucked into
| a treasure trove of illustrations from Magic Leap about what
| that future might hold. There's just one problem: Magic Leap
| didn't actually create all those awesome UI concepts. It copied
| them.
|
| >The images speak for themselves. On the left of each of these
| comparision shots, you'll see an illustration plucked directly
| from this Magic Leap patent application. On the right, you'll
| find a screengrab from an awesome UI concept invented by
| someone else.
|
| >Remember Sight, the incredible student film where a man with
| bionic eyes plays Fruit Ninja with a real cucumber that becomes
| part of his meal? Same cucumber. Same everything:
|
| >Or how about the Ringo Holographic Interface dreamt up by
| then-UI-design-student Ivan Tihienko in 2008?
|
| >Here's a augmented reality concept from interaction designer
| Joesph Juhnke called "The Future of Firefighting":
|
| >And below, one from designer Michael Harboun and his team
| called The Aeon Project. "What if you could travel to exotic,
| far-away destinations while being stuck in traffic?"
|
| >Lastly, two images from "Meditating Mediums - The Digital 3D,"
| which was the graduating thesis for Greg Tran at the Harvard
| Graduate School of Design. He now designs for Samsung.
|
| >This might also look familiar: [...]
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Or are you referring to the ridiculous 12/12/2012 TEDX "talk"
| that Rony Abovitz performed at the Ringling College of Art, and
| all the FAKE and DECEPTIVE videos they posted and lied about on
| youtube, that tarnished Magic Leap's reputation?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY
|
| In my mind, they're not as reputable after having given Rony
| Abovitz a platform to perform that "fudge". Just watch the
| video, if you can stomach it, all the way through. And read the
| comments, like this one:
|
| >Nick Steele 2 years ago (edited)
|
| >This is a joke. Take it for what it is. They didn't want to
| say anything so they basically said "are you ready? READY? ...
| fuck you".
|
| >After a completely ridiculous intro which includes nano
| machines humping blood cells and two crack monkeys worshiping a
| massive block of "demented space fudge" which takes up 75% of
| the talk until 4:30, right after 30 seconds of literal silence,
| a spaceman says "greetings" and introduces today's "keyword"
| which is "fudge", then a guy plays terrible music out of tune
| and sings half-way into the mic. Then the lights suddenly go
| out and the crack moneys and space man simply walk away.
|
| >Keep in mind the audience thinks they are about to hear a
| billionaire explain his new "world changing" virtual/augmented
| reality technology, then they get this shit.
|
| >The best part is the audiences reaction at the end. :)
|
| Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
|
| https://www.theinformation.com/articles/dented-reality-magic...
|
| >Magic Leap had high hopes for sales of its augmented reality
| headset. Instead, the richly valued startup has seen slow sales
| of the device, recent layoffs and executive turnover. In the
| coming years, competition in AR will likely intensify as bigger
| tech companies enter the market.
|
| >[...] Magic Leap was founded in 2010 by Rony Abovitz, an
| eccentric, 47-year-old Florida native who once gave a TED talk
| in a spacesuit surrounded by people dancing to music in furry
| monster costumes. [...]
|
| And if that's not enough proof that Magic Leap is a fraud, then
| watch their completely fake demo, that they originally did not
| truthfully bill as a "concept video" but instead they falsely
| and deceptively titled it "Just another day in the office at
| Magic Leap" and described it with the blatantly false claim
| that "This is a game we're playing around the office right
| now". But since then, the title and description have been
| retroactively amended, AFTER they got busted.
|
| Magic Leap | Original Concept Video (originally titled: "Just
| another day in the office at Magic Leap" and described: "This
| is a game we're playing around the office right now"):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM
|
| Magic Leap is actually way behind, like we always suspected it
| was:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/8/13894000/magic-leap-ar-mi...
|
| Remember that amazing video of the whale leaping out the gym
| floor and splashing down? Yeah, it was BS. Magic Leap is
| neither magic nor leaping:
|
| https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/09/magic_leap_neither_...
|
| Magic Leap video may have involved more magic than tech:
|
| https://www.slashgear.com/magic-leap-video-may-have-involved...
|
| The reality of Magic Leap: fake demo videos and delayed
| technology:
|
| http://www.techspot.com/news/67342-reality-magic-leap-fake-d...
|
| Watch This New Virtual Reality Game Turn an Office Into a
| Robot-Infested Fight for Survival:
|
| http://time.com/3752343/magic-leap-video/
|
| That last Time article above was written BEFORE they got
| busted, and it cites a Magic Leap company spokesman (and I'm
| pretty sure it was a man) mendaciously lying to the rightfully
| skeptical (and eventually vindicated) Time reporter:
|
| >It's unclear whether the video shows an actual game overlaid
| onto a real-world office space or just an artistic rendering of
| what the game might look like in the future. The way the gun
| rests so realistically in the gamer's hand certainly raises
| suspicions. Still, a company spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo
| that the video was authentic.
|
| >"This is a game we're playing around the office right now,"
| Magic Leap wrote on its official YouTube account.
|
| The game that Magic Leap was playing (and still is) is called
| FRAUD.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > The game they were playing (and still are) is called FRAUD.
|
| I felt so from day one. People over invested into marketing
| usually don't have to show much for the product.
| [deleted]
| croes wrote:
| It's on the same level as the Hololens 1. So fraud seems the
| wrong word. Overhyped? Yes. Fraud? No.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Claiming about a fake concept video that "This is a game
| we're playing around the office right now," and confirming
| to Gizmoid that the video claiming that was authentic, then
| later retroactively editing the video title and description
| to say it was a concept video only AFTER they got caught
| and called out with lots of media coverage about the lie,
| is literally and intentionally fraud, yes.
|
| Microsoft has never made such unsubstantiated false claims
| or published fraudulent demos about the Hololens. So no,
| they're not anywhere near the same level of deceptive
| business practices.
| 7952 wrote:
| For enterprise I am not sure this kind of name branding makes
| sense anyway. Surely the user experience is going to depend
| massively on the deployed app and whoever develops that. Better
| for another company to slap their brand on it and sell it as
| part of a wider solution. My guess is that consultancy and
| services is where the money is rather than hardware. $10k per
| user per year to solve a business problem can be easier to sell
| than $2000 for a device.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| > Our recent round of funding (500M) and new valuation of roughly
| $2 billion
|
| Crunchbase says total money raised is $3B. Is it common for
| companies to reach a negative valuation compared to money raised?
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| It's default, not just common. Anyone investing in research
| startup knows that there is slim chance that the company will
| be positive in valuation, just that the upper limit for
| valuation is very high.
| [deleted]
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| The very name is an oxymoron. Magic Leap 2? Because the first
| leap wasn't magical or a leap enough.
| krolley wrote:
| Magic Leap too?
| stanlarroque wrote:
| I can't believe VCs put another 500M$ in this (even at the same
| last valuation).
|
| If only we could have that money for our Lynx[0] headset...
|
| [0] https://lynx-r.com
| drclau wrote:
| You can't believe it, because you think there's a rational
| process involved in investment decisions. After watching how
| things go for some time, I came to believe that who you are and
| what connections you have is far more important.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It is a rational process. The mistake is in thinking that
| anyone involved cares about technology or value delivered to
| customers as anything but an afterthought.
| 6nf wrote:
| Raising more money are they?
| OneTimePetes wrote:
| ".. thus we pivoted to projecting directly into the eye, while
| able to darken the background, away from purely additive drawing,
| making ML2 useful for outdoor and light-strong environments."
|
| Okay
| idontwantthis wrote:
| Does anyone here work with super expensive "enterprise" VR/AR? My
| gut instinct is that they try to make something good, realize the
| tech to fulfill their dream is incredibly expensive, then pivot
| to "enterprise" to get more funding. Am I being cynical?
| tootie wrote:
| My last company tried really hard to pitch AR/VR projects.
| Using headsets, phones even the Bose sunglasses. It was a huge
| struggle to find anything compelling to do with AR even when it
| worked. We ended up selling a few nifty marketing experiences
| and artsy installations but they were like 30 second
| experiences and not useful for anything. The tech "works", it's
| just not very compelling.
|
| Think about phone AR which works very smoothly and Apple/Google
| have been investing in hardware upgrades to enhance AR
| experiences yet it's been 5 years since Pokemon Go and no one
| has figured out another interesting thing to do with it.
| Matrixik wrote:
| Here example of enterprise Varjo XR3 (full version cost 6000$
| plus 1500$ subscription) from someone only testing consumer VR
| headsets till now. In short: it's way better than best consumer
| headsets.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOk_M1Ib5F0
| idontwantthis wrote:
| I know the tech is a lot better, but is it really being used
| in enterprise?
| tmcw wrote:
| At least in earlier stages, Magic Leap's marketing and
| communications were fun and accessible. This blog post is pure
| corporate jargon - "engaged a number of strategic partners to
| further bolster our support," "accelerated the organization's
| pivot to enterprise, brought our industry-leading capabilities to
| new customers," "our core business objectives remain focused on
| enterprise solutions, there continues to be intense interest in
| the application of Magic Leap's technology in the consumer space"
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Yes, this is definitely a "wtf do you actually mean" post. I
| can usually glean these from the first paragraph and close the
| tab.
| listless wrote:
| Whenever I read "pivot to enterprise" from a startup, I read
| "we're out of ideas". In my own personal experience, startups
| who pivot to the enterprise are dying stars and that statement
| is a hallmark.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| It sounds more like a recognition that headset-based AR has
| no future as a consumer product with current form factors.
| listless wrote:
| That's a much better phrasing.
| Whitehead06 wrote:
| Thanks for the information, I will try to figure it out for more.
| Keep sharing such informative post.
|
| https://www.mybalancenow.page/
| rsynnott wrote:
| ... Huh. I had no idea they still existed; I was expecting this
| to be a historical artifact.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-10-12 23:02 UTC)