[HN Gopher] Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away fr...
___________________________________________________________________
Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer
plans
Author : _pius
Score : 359 points
Date : 2020-04-22 16:38 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| alephnan wrote:
| > Citing COVID-19, CEO Rony Abovitz wrote in a blog post that the
| company needed to shift focus
|
| Right... because of Covid-19. As a counter example, Animal
| Crossing on the Nintendo Switch is doing phenomenal right now, in
| part due to Covid-19.
| save_ferris wrote:
| Nintendo is a well-established company with a solid platform
| for its Switch that sells millions of units. They've been doing
| this for a little while longer tbf.
|
| I get the sense that "shifting focus" means that Magic Leap
| were so focused on the hardware that they didn't really think
| concretely about bringing a viable platform to market, or
| something like that. I just don't understand how a company
| raises that kind of money and gets totally exposed during a
| financial crisis like this. Did they really raise that much
| money without a concrete go-to-market strategy?
| wpietri wrote:
| But nothing about the crisis changes fundamentals negatively
| for at-home entertainment. Covid-19 is a convenient excuse
| here.
|
| > Did they really raise that much money without a concrete
| go-to-market strategy?
|
| I'm sure they had a nominal strategy. But if you take the
| anthropologist-from-Mars perspective on Magic Leap, it looks
| like their real business was selling feelings of excitement
| to investors.
|
| This is a common phenomenon with build-it-and-they-will-come
| businesses. If you want to crate a good business, you need
| contact with reality early and often. You need to test your
| hypotheses on actual customers, because that's how you really
| learn to maximize delivered value.
|
| If you want gobs of investor money, on the other hand, it's
| often better to have _no proof_ at all. With $0 in revenue,
| investors just have to imagine the billions that await. But
| once you have $1 in revenue, suddenly projections get
| anchored to real data. Rather than reveling in dreams of what
| people _might_ do with, say, Segway or Google Glass, people
| insist on looking at the dreary reality.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Living off the money of "believer" investors seems to be a
| tried and true tech business strategy. Why sell hard tech
| to lots of customers when you can sell dreams to a handful
| of rich investors? One can argue that Silicon Valley is
| simply an enormous apparatus for transferring wealth from
| investors to landlords by way of tech employees.
| alephnan wrote:
| Nintendo's never competed with other gaming platforms on a
| technology basis, and they've shown novel experiences can be
| adapted from less edge bleeding technology. Thread from
| earlier this month:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22791300
| swebs wrote:
| >Nintendo's never competed with other gaming platforms on a
| technology basis
|
| Do you think the Wii was their first console or something?
| majormajor wrote:
| "Never" is a strong word. This article that popped up here
| recently is one counterexample:
| https://copetti.org/projects/consoles/nintendo-64/
| umvi wrote:
| It's an easy scapegoat. OneWeb blamed it for going bankrupt
| even though everyone knew they were in a precarious financial
| situation 6 months before covid-19 even existed.
| MattRix wrote:
| Patreon just laid off a ton of people under the guise of
| Covid-19 despite doing even better during this situation.
| cushychicken wrote:
| Never waste a good crisis!
| robocat wrote:
| Supply chain, production and delivery all affect producing and
| supplying hardware devices.
|
| Animal crossing is software, so not a fair comparison.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| Products consumers enjoy at home are getting a big bump,
| Startups relying utterly on the VC cash gravy train less so.
| alephnan wrote:
| My point is that the Magic Leap CEO made it seem like there
| is a lack of consumer demand for gaming / entertainment
| products, due to a lack of job / financial prospects during
| Covid-19.
| JakeTheAndroid wrote:
| While there is absolutely a consumer market for gaming and
| entertainment, Magic Leap has nothing to offer in that
| space. The apps store they offer is very limited and it's
| mostly tours of locations, or design tools for making stuff
| that works with the spacial dimensions.
|
| They do not have any real games to play that the public at
| large would find fun for more than an hour or so. Their
| apps are like PoCs for what you can do with Magic Leap. If
| FF7R was on Magic Leap, I bet they'd be selling a lot more
| units and it'd be a great time for them.
|
| Instead, you're better off getting the Oculus or Valves VR
| where you have tons of actual games to play and support for
| streaming apps.
|
| There is no way for Magic Leap to capitalize on the
| consumer purchasing right now, because they don't have a
| catalog that supports the hardware to any meaningful
| degree. And they can't suddenly churn those things out in
| the space of a month since we've been hit with quarantine.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| I've heard that VCs are doubling down on their portfolios and
| avoiding new company investing. Maybe Magic Leap was just not
| looking all that great to its VCs and they'd rather focus
| their resources on companies that are more likely to come out
| of this pandemic as big winners.
| mlazos wrote:
| This is the modus operandi of every startup. Consumer products
| look great and can really wow people until you realize all of the
| money is in enterprise. This is why enterprise is always the
| largest business segment of large software companies -
| corporations have way more money than individuals and will
| provide recurring revenue.
| [deleted]
| j2bax wrote:
| Makes me think of the Theranos funding scam, but more money and
| less health risks.
| [deleted]
| adamc wrote:
| For the ignorant amongst us (by which I mean me), what _are_ the
| enterprise applications of Magic Leap?
| coder543 wrote:
| Applications of Magic Leap would likely be similar to the
| industrial applications of HoloLens 2.
|
| Some examples:
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8c3pDKdHEc
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTuKcm8s4QQ
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loGxO3L7rFE
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pyiiO72ZwM
|
| If you search on youtube for "hololens industrial", you can
| find other demos. When HoloLens 2 was announced, I think
| Microsoft showed a number of demos of why companies would buy
| it for their employees to use on the job.
| [deleted]
| slg wrote:
| Does this officially place the Magic Leap's consumer device on
| the list of the biggest vaporware products in the history of the
| tech industry?
|
| I don't know whether there was some tech hurdle they could never
| get over or if they were just straight up selling a fantasy from
| the beginning, but this result has seemed to be the likely
| destination for years.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think it's less of a tale of "vaporware" (I mean, Magic Leap
| has something that actually exists, even if it's not
| successful) than yet another cautionary tale of startups taking
| WAAAYYY more money than they need.
|
| There was simply no reason for them to need this much cash
| before they proved market fit. I mean, has there _ever_ been a
| successful company that gorged on funding before they needed it
| that eventually became successful? So many of the Vision Fund
| companies are in the same boat here.
|
| If Magic Leap couldn't find at least good market fit with a
| couple hundred million, I don't see how they were going to get
| there with a couple billion.
| azinman2 wrote:
| The issue is the problems they were trying to solve required
| boiling the ocean. They did manage to boil a good bit of it,
| but didn't see it thru all the way -- their tech was very
| expensive and not that good in the end.
| [deleted]
| slg wrote:
| Do you remember the whale demo[1]? This isn't close to
| anything they released and I don't see how that is the result
| of taking too much money or not being able to find a market
| fit. This product simply didn't exist.
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbpqwUUfMAQ
| d_silin wrote:
| And this is what Magic Leap could actually do:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ7-F_vWUVE
| rvnx wrote:
| It looks like AR project first tutorial
| modeless wrote:
| This is exactly right. They have some impressive technology
| and if they had found some non-consumer niche applications
| they could have had a decent business while continuing to
| develop the display technology to something suitable for
| consumers, which is probably 10 years away.
|
| They were killed by too much ambition and too much money
| about 10 years too early.
| dustingetz wrote:
| Magic Leap was founded in 2010, it was a different market for
| capital back then. The market is the market, you can't fight
| it or it wipes you out, plus you don't ever have complete
| information until 5-10 years later.
| taurath wrote:
| Or: It doesn't matter how many billions you spend on a
| problem if the core technology isn't there. Scientific
| discovery advances based on curiosity and open
| experimentation. That even includes when we "know" how to do
| the things but its not miniaturized enough yet. Imagine being
| a company tasked with inventing the walkman 10 or 15 years
| before it was possible. You'd end up with some crazy designs.
| Bud wrote:
| See also: Apple Newton versus iPhone.
| bitL wrote:
| They have amazing software running on a supercomputer, but
| weren't able to fit it into a pocket (with their portable
| NVidia-based device). Maybe in 20 years?
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| My take always was that their long-term vision remains very
| hard to implement in practice, particularly in a consumer-
| friendly form factor. They should've kept working on it in a
| R&D capacity in the background, and pushed a more limited AR
| (or even VR..) product to build a brand, ecosystem and start
| generating some revenue. And, of course, figure out what the
| hell their product-market fit was going to be! The quarantine
| era, in theory, could be a golden age for AR/VR products that
| deliver a compelling experience.
|
| Which is also to say, the charismatic/ crazy founder with a
| reality distortion field is great and all, and can move
| mountains and often succeed - but sometimes reality hits with a
| thud. To some extent, their challenge was one grounded in
| physical limitations of our technological capabilities in the
| 2010s. In the 2030s though..
| jayd16 wrote:
| I don't know if that's really fair. Their devkit is
| subjectively on par or slightly better than the Hololens. Its
| not vapor but might just not be a hit.
| [deleted]
| geerlingguy wrote:
| There's something about using the word 'Magic' in your
| company's name [1]; great concept, likely amazing people, but
| in the end either vaporware or something that's way too ahead
| of its time.
|
| Maybe the 'Magic' is how they are able to get so much funding
| and attention for so little end result.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic
| soneca wrote:
| I remember a small delivery startup called _" Magic"_ too
| that had quite an impact here in HN, then I never heard about
| it again.
|
| Edit: Here it is the HN post:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819
|
| They are still around though https://www.getmagic.com
| Andrex wrote:
| Some names are just too perfect.
|
| Starcraft Ghost
|
| The Phantom (games console)
|
| Duke Nukem Forever (though it eventually did come out)
| iaw wrote:
| > Duke Nukem Forever (though it eventually did come out)
|
| Duke Nukem (took) Forever
| ModernMech wrote:
| My favorite was the Guns and Roses album "Chinese
| Democracy" which took like a decade to release. They used
| to say democracy would come to China before the album
| would.
| arendtio wrote:
| The problem is, that they were never specific about their
| product. They just suggested that it would be far ahead of the
| competition which it wasn't.
|
| Nevertheless, I tend to agree that the product they were
| marketing did never materialize.
| tmh79 wrote:
| They weren't selling a fantasy, they were selling real tech.
| Their block has been "consumerizing" it.
|
| My understanding (from sources who have experienced the demo)
| is that their first demo was BONKERS. They projected light
| right onto the users eyes, so instead of having a AR heads up
| display, you had a light beam projecting images into your eye
| so they could add elements into your field of vision and make
| it look like they were naturally there. The issue is that they
| couldn't get that demo into any sort of a state where it could
| be commercialized. The rig was the size of a large room, the
| person hooked in was basically required to be stable for the
| duration of the experience. The eye-tracking for projecting was
| difficult and worked alright but not 100%. The funding they
| received was based on the demo of tech. After they realized
| they wouldn't be able to commercialize it, they transitioned to
| a more classic AR setup. The magic leap tech will work, but it
| will be 10-20 years until we are able to use it.
| Balgair wrote:
| > They projected light right onto the users eyes,
|
| > they couldn't get that demo into any sort of a state where
| it could be commercialized
|
| Dear Lord! I would hope that they couldn't get that out.
| Putting lasers directly into your eye sounds like a perfect
| recipe for large scale disaster. I don't care how many people
| say it's safe or how many papers there are out there on it,
| all it takes is a few microseconds of error just once in your
| whole life and it's _boom_ lights out forever.
| eximius wrote:
| Most new tech is of this form. https://www.bosch-
| sensortec.com/news/smartglasses.html uses something like
| <5uW or something crazy low. If the hardware caps out at a
| safe power, you'll probably be fine.
| prepend wrote:
| I think it's up there, but still Google Glass takes the cake
| (or maybe General Magic).
|
| Glass did release limited versions of stuff, unlike Magic Leap,
| but I think they spent way more money than Magic Leap. Magic
| Leap raised $2.6B [0]. Although I have no idea how much Google
| spent, I suspect it's more than this when you factor in the
| barges and rollout plan that they had and didn't use at all.
|
| [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-
| leap#section-l...
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Glass was killed by a single word: "glasshole" - I've never
| seen anything else so utterly destroyed so quickly.
| Fezzik wrote:
| I don't think that nomenclature had anything to do with
| glass failing as a consumer product - the glasses simply
| did not fulfill any need or desire that would lead to mass
| consumer adoption at their price point. When the iPad came
| out Apple was pilloried by the press and Twitter dummies
| for releasing a product that sounded like a feminine
| hygiene product. It didn't hurt the product at all.
| azinman2 wrote:
| It wasnt that word that killed glass...
| hirundo wrote:
| I would be glad to be a designated glasshole in return for
| a decent and affordable AR device to put on my face. Like,
| "shut up and take my money!" If you build it me and my
| fellow nerds will be waiting in line.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I don't think so. They just didn't find the tech ready for
| a useful experience yet.
| Crash0v3rid3 wrote:
| I'd hardly classify Glass as vaporware.
|
| They have an Enterprise product still being supported:
| https://www.google.com/glass/start/
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| This is such a weird company. They created big buzz over years
| and it seems they are just fading away quietly with nothing to
| show for the money they took in. Reminds me a little of Theranos
| (although not as criminal). Why do these investors keep pumping
| so much money into a company that has nothing to show? I thought
| they do due diligence.
| throwaway55554 wrote:
| > ... with nothing to show for the money they took in
|
| They made some Incredibles 2 style goggles.
| abhisuri97 wrote:
| It's just about taking a bet. I'm sure that magic leap must
| have had some demo (perhaps rehearsed) of a rudimentary alpha
| version they showed investors that was enough to convince
| people it was possible. From an investor standpoint, there
| isn't much downside outside of losing money. But the potential
| upside would have been huge.
| [deleted]
| gamegoblin wrote:
| I assume they must have had a killer demo.
|
| 1. Put the goggles on some investor's head (in a normal looking
| room, but with known lighting and spatial properties...).
|
| 2. Show them some flashy demo that has some limitations, but
| promise that with their investment, they will be able to remove
| those limitations.
|
| 3. Investors, who probably lack the deep knowledge of optics to
| know that those limitations aren't so trivial, throw money at
| them. Because if those limitations (e.g. FOV, opacity) were
| removed, it _would_ be world-changing tech.
| mattw815 wrote:
| I've had the opportunity to demo their product on 3 different
| occasions. Each time it was a clunky interaction, stopped
| working in the middle of the demo, and I left thinking my
| kid's Playstation VR could run circles around their tech.
| qppo wrote:
| they allegedly had an insane demo for investors only,
| before around 2016 (at least that's when I heard of it) you
| needed to sign an NDA to even get in the room to see it.
|
| The consumer product is quite lacking compared to what
| people said was a demonstration of game changing
| technology.
| raverbashing wrote:
| So: NDA, exclusive demo, controlled environment.
|
| It makes it sound to me more like a Seance (with its
| usual implications) than anything else. Or, for an easier
| to understand analogy, selling a Disney ride as if it was
| real.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Reminds me of Silicon Valley's fictional Keenan Feldspar and
| his VR demo (likely based on Magic Leap):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8MAV9jhf04
| creato wrote:
| Surely that was their take on Palmer Luckey and Oculus?
| jagannathtech wrote:
| Didn't seem Palmer had any reality distortion field.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Now with COVID-19, they really DO have a killer demo:
|
| 1. Put the goggles on some investor's head.
|
| 2. Investor catches COVID-19 and dies.
|
| Nobody wants to share VR or AR gear any more. The whole idea
| of location based VR / AR entertainment centers is deadly
| now.
|
| If it's so great you can't believe it without trying it
| yourself, and nobody wants to stick their head in a device
| that anybody else has been drooling and coughing and vomiting
| in, it doesn't matter how great it is, nobody's going to try
| it.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| > Nobody wants to share VR or AR gear any more. The whole
| idea of location based VR / AR entertainment centers is
| deadly now.
|
| There's a price range where I could see buying one to be
| shared by everyone in my house, but not one for each
| individual.
|
| For example, Valve Index is in that category for me.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Anytime I've seen public VR demos they had a disposable
| cover. A quick google search brings up [1] as one example,
| and I'm sure cheaper alternatives exist too.
|
| 1: https://www.amazon.com/Vive-Disposable-Hygiene-Cover-
| Starter...
| core-questions wrote:
| Don't be such a wuss. None of that is something a little
| Lysol can't fix, and these places should have always been
| using such (though I imagine they don't).
| VRay wrote:
| You can disinfect your electronics with rubbing alcohol
| and/or removable covers, but don't put Lysol or other
| harsh cleaning agents on them
| catalogia wrote:
| > _Don 't put lysol [on electronics]_
|
| Why shouldn't I? The exterior surfaces of "electronics"
| are just glass, plastic or aluminum and lysol seems to
| work fine on all three. It's sold in plastic bottles so
| it's not like it'd create nerve gas or something.
|
| Not that I generally take marketing claims seriously, but
| lysol advertises itself as appropriate for use on
| electronics: https://www.lysol.com/cold-flu/home/how-to-
| clean-electronics... If there were any real danger, I
| expect their lawyers might not let them do that.
| pnw_hazor wrote:
| We have been using lysol wipes on the iPhones at my house
| for 5+ weeks without any issues. (one old 6s and two
| newish XRs)
| vel0city wrote:
| Exterior surfaces for electronics are usually fine for
| stuff like Lysol. The fear is largely that if it gets
| inside on the electronic components it may leave behind
| conductive residues. Straight alcohol will entirely
| evaporate soon after application so a bit of ingress with
| the device powered off shouldn't cause any lasting
| effects, but who knows what makes up the fragrances and
| other ingredients in many cleaners.
| catalogia wrote:
| Just use common sense. Wet a paper towel with the cleaner
| and wipe down the electronics with that, rather than
| dunking your phone into a bucket of the stuff.
| netcan wrote:
| In some sense, if these things didn't ever happen then it would
| be a sign that VC is broken. They're not supposed to be
| investing in sure things.
| filoleg wrote:
| I am not sure if financials really work out the way i assume,
| so i could totally be talking out of my ass here. But i have a
| feeling it could work as a really nice money laundering vehicle
| for investors (even though i dont think it was fully the case
| here), and the company doesn't even need to be aware of it.
|
| You make X in dirty money, then invest it into a cool sounding
| company promising groundbreaking stuff that has a bunch of big
| known investors on board already. If the company does well, you
| take the clean money out with a nice profit on top. If it
| doesn't work out, hopefully you pulled out at a level where you
| lost some money but not much. And it still returns you clean
| money at the end, so the goal is accomplished.
|
| Typically, this kind of money laundering is done through retail
| businesses like restaurants and such, but it is way easier to
| just drop those money as an investment into another company,
| rather than maintaining your own retail business. Plus, the
| amount of money you could launder by investing is way higher,
| since it isnt as suspicious to drop a few hundred millions on a
| startup investment, as opposed to claiming that your small
| restaurant that is almost always empty is bringing you tens of
| millions per year.
| prepend wrote:
| I think that any funding source would still be subject to US
| money laundering rules and laws. If I try to invest $5M in
| Magic Leap, I have to be a qualified investor and the funding
| has to be received by some US bank. Also, it seems like
| having these holes in a company's books would be found by
| reputable investor's due diligence since it's a pretty huge
| risk that could impact the return.
|
| Not speaking from direct experience, only logical first
| principles. I think the money needs to be laundered before i
| vesting in US firms.
| aero142 wrote:
| Is there some exception to money laundering rules I'm not
| aware of where the government doesn't investigate the source
| of cash if it is invested in a company from overseas?
| filoleg wrote:
| Oh, if it is a foreign power, they arent laundering it to
| prevent the US government from discovering the source, they
| are doing it to prevent discovering the source from their
| own governments. Because those foreign actors wouldn't be
| running away from taxes from the US, since those money were
| never in the US in the first place.
|
| Also curious on how it would work. If a rich foreign
| national decides to invest into a random startup, i dont
| think US has the ability to look into where the money came
| from, unless that foreign national claims to have made
| those money in the US.
|
| Again, could totally be wrong here, so please someone
| correct me if that's the case.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The US has many levers with which to find out where a
| foreign national's money comes from, simplest being to
| tie them up in a review of them being a possible security
| risk or not. This might be applicable too:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Foreign_Invest
| men...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There's always exceptions to rules if you're sufficiently
| (politically) powerful, e.g. the tradeoff of going after
| someone causes an unacceptable loss to someone higher up in
| your own chain of command.
| ssully wrote:
| I feel like I have heard rumors about amazing closed door tech
| demos for Magic Leap for years now, so I always assumed that's
| how they got so much money. The question then is did they just
| have a really good pitch/canned demo, or do a good job of
| stirring up rumors and riding off that.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > Reminds me a little of Theranos (although not as criminal).
|
| More like Dean Kamen's launch of "Ginger" in 2001.
| swebs wrote:
| The Segway actually launched and sold and delivered on its
| technical promises. The problem was that most people didn't
| want to spend $3000 on one.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| And it's really not very useful.
| lgleason wrote:
| One of the early seed investors is close friends with the
| founders of Google. Needless to say it wasn't surprising when
| Google funneled a bunch of cash into it. After that, I'm sure
| it made it easier to get others to follow suit.
| gkoberger wrote:
| It's easy to say in hindsight, but investors were taking a bet
| based on the little bits of promising information they had a
| decade ago. Both sides knew the risks, and that's the whole
| point - VCs and the company both believed they could make
| something happen, and it seems they weren't able to, and that's
| just how this works.
| alephnan wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.
|
| So maybe similar reasons to WeWork.
| kick wrote:
| Palmer Luckey (Oculus founder) has repeatedly dragged them for
| cheating on their demos. Given how much faith some investors
| have had in them, I imagine that's what happened there, too, at
| least for the first batches.
| adam_fallon_ wrote:
| I sort of always knew it was the job of VCs to hype up their
| portfolio, but i've never seen it as bare faced as when Benedict
| Evans was shilling Magic Leap saying things along the lines of
| "Magic Leap was the coolest thing I'd seen since the iPhone. It's
| now much cooler than that." and "I've had the Magic Leap demo. It
| was worth going to Florida for."
|
| Well that looks a bit silly now doesn't it.
| baxtr wrote:
| His newsletter has ".. 135,000 subscribers, with a wide and
| senior audience in technology, media and finance."
| cmelbye wrote:
| Magic Leap _is_ really cool to use. That doesn 't mean it's a
| feasible product for the mainstream.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| It seems a bit like the home console version of the Neo Geo
| to me. Once upon a time, I'd gladly shove large numbers of
| quarters into Neo Geo arcade cabinets. But when they stuck
| the hardware into a consumer model, with its huge price tag,
| my thought was, "If a rich friend bought one, I would enjoy
| playing with it at their house."
|
| I suspect that the big difference here is, this being 1990,
| SNK didn't have nearly as much access to investment money
| from rich people who don't understand the what entertainment
| budgets look like for the other 99.99% of people. So it was
| never hyped as anything but a luxury product.
| jkestner wrote:
| I had that rich friend with the Neo Geo.
|
| Yeah, I wonder if Magic Leap had started small and luxury,
| installing that Beast contraption with the undiluted
| experience to rich people, it could've grown more like
| Tesla. Of course, the Roadster ran on all the same roads,
| while whole new experiences have to be created for AR, but
| make a few great ones and it'll be like having a bowling
| lane in your house--you don't play with it except to show
| off to visitors. (Oh, League Bowling was the one game I
| remember playing on my friend's Neo Geo. He wasn't bowling-
| lane rich.)
|
| Or Magic Leap could've licensed some Virtual Boy games.
| [deleted]
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Have you seen pictures of The Beast? The ergonomics and
| range of motion you get are about the same as what you
| have when using a phoropter. IIRC, it even has some of
| the same "positioning your head in the right place"
| hardware as is used by some piece of optometrist's
| equipment or other.
| vernie wrote:
| Not with its playing-card-sized FOV it isn't
| cpitman wrote:
| I tried it a couple years ago at PAX Unplugged, and that
| was exactly my reaction. I felt like I was putting a lot of
| attention into shifting around my direction to frame the
| AR, and searching for content, because I was looking
| through a pipe.
| sqs wrote:
| Counterpoint: I thought it was really, really cool when I
| tried it for a couple hours. I have no affiliation with
| Magic Leap. The Magic Leap unit I tried was a friend's (so
| it wasn't as though Magic Leap sent me a free unit to try
| out and therefore could have biased me).
| brundolf wrote:
| I tried out a HoloLens at a rich friend's house and had a
| similar experience, despite it also having a small FOV. It
| blew my mind and instantly registered as a really big deal.
| But as another commenter here pointed out, the hardware
| isn't there yet, and when it arrives it will require a
| vibrant software ecosystem. The difference is that
| Microsoft seems to understand that.
| three_seagrass wrote:
| It's the segway solution. Cool tech that solves a problem
| which doesn't really exist.
| iandanforth wrote:
| So mall-cops are all going to be using Magic Leap tech in a
| few years?
| adamc wrote:
| Kind of like VR for games? Which I have yet to meet anyone
| who uses...
| Kiro wrote:
| I don't recognize that at all. I know too many to count
| that have an Oculus Quest and quite many had regular VR
| headsets before that.
|
| Personally I play Beat Saber on a daily basis and pretty
| often other games as well.
| andybak wrote:
| That's funny. I know about half a dozen VR gamers - and
| that's people I already knew or met outside of the VR
| scene.
| BillinghamJ wrote:
| Apparently HL Alyx is exceptionally good, maybe will Mark
| a bit of a turning point
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Half Life Alyx is genuinely incredible. It's worth
| getting a VR system just for that one game, assuming you
| already have a gaming PC.
| three_seagrass wrote:
| Maybe. VR is more chicken-egg, like the Windows phone
| with apps. The more people with VR headsets, the more VR
| games get developed, but more people won't get VR
| headsets until there are more games developed.
| wpietri wrote:
| I think "vicious circle" might be closer here.
|
| Just to check things out, I rented a Quest over the
| winter holidays. There was very little content that was
| a) VR-specific, and b) so much better on VR that it was
| worth the hassle. After we sent it back, the kids never
| even mentioned it again; they're happy with their
| Switches and the PS4.
|
| Game designer Jesse Schell said "If Oculus Quest can't
| succeed we should just hang it up" [1] and I think he's
| right. The obvious technical problems have been fixed.
| It's technically very impressive, and it has a strong
| novelty rush at first. But if the current market isn't
| enough to drive the creation of must-have games, I expect
| it's a descending spiral from here.
|
| [1] https://uploadvr.com/jesse-schell-oculus-quest/
| driverdan wrote:
| Have you actually played any VR games? It's not perfect
| yet but it's good enough. They're quite fun. They're
| still niche because they require hardware and space.
|
| Many people, like you, don't get it until they try it.
| rvnx wrote:
| The segway has been technologically superseded by electric
| scooters
| [deleted]
| fumar wrote:
| Or the Onewheel. I use my Onewheel to get around in LA
| for short trips.
| three_seagrass wrote:
| They don't use gyroscopes so I'm not sure I'd say they
| superseded segweys technologically.
|
| I also would hesitate to say they solve a common problem
| because the current market glut seems to be trailing a
| recent hype bubble of electric scooter startups.
| catalogia wrote:
| Humans already have two "gyroscopes" in our ears, which
| for most people work well. It's really no surprise that
| bicycles are more popular than segways.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Well that looks a bit silly now doesn't it.
|
| It's not _silly_ to try some promising technology that
| ultimately doesn 't work out for business. It's easy to be
| nasty in hindsight, from the comfort of your home, isn't it?
| Not so easy to try making it work in the first place.
| adam_fallon_ wrote:
| What a vacuous comment. Granted in the early days you could
| give the benefit of the doubt that sure Magic Leap are trying
| to build some revolutionary AR - you could construe my
| comment as ill-natured.
|
| But go to Magic Leaps website now. Look at the promotional
| video that is being shown there. Now go and look at actual
| footage of the Magic Leap unit in action.
|
| The company are being entirely misrepresentative of what
| their product actually is. They are using that amazing video
| footage to sell a product TODAY that is nothing close to the
| quality shown there. Look at what the unit is capable of and
| compare it to that.
|
| Now sure, you can be given creative freedom to express the
| ideas of things that the Magic Leap lets you do. But then you
| remember the Whale video. They've been misrepresenting their
| product and trying to sell it using that misrepresentation
| for years at this point.
|
| When TechCrunch first released video of the little floating
| robot game I remember people being astounded at how asinine
| it was. This is what VCs have been raving about and pouring
| money into?
|
| So what are they trying to make work? Their promotional
| videos, ability to dupe VCs and probably their rock solid
| sales team - how long can should you give that benefit of the
| doubt for? They are 9 years old at this point!
| Reedx wrote:
| I don't know, those could be genuine feelings. Like the first
| time using VR.
|
| Now their TEDx talk on the other hand... speaking of silly.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY
|
| To me that was the moment both Magic Leap and TED (sadly)
| jumped the shark.
| dbmikus wrote:
| It is worth saying that TedX is a collaboration and the
| actual talks are not as directly tied to the TED
| organization.
|
| But I do think TED Talks have jumped the shark, probably
| before that talk.
| BossingAround wrote:
| What the hell did I just watch...
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Might turn out to be about as silly as believing in and
| investing in General Magic.
|
| They may have failed but their impact is felt everywhere.
| wpietri wrote:
| I don't trust Evans at all, but I'm going to partially defend
| that here. There's a long history of technology being
| absolutely amazing the first time you use it and then not
| mattering at all. E.g., the Segway was going to revolutionize
| transport.
|
| The 3D space is particularly prone to this. I count at least 5
| waves of 3D innovation going back to the Great Exhibition in
| 1851. 3D movies were going to revolutionize things twice, in
| the 1950s and a decade ago. Over and over, this stuff is
| absolutely amazing for a hot minute and then nobody cares.
|
| Of course, Evans is sold as a brilliant pundit and now VC
| genius, so if anybody should understand that novelty doesn't
| equal a business model, it's him. But as you suggest, Upton
| Sinclair's quote applies here: "It is difficult to get a man to
| understand something when his salary depends on him not
| understanding it."
| jjeaff wrote:
| While I agree with your point, did anyone except the inventor
| and the marketing team think Segway was going to
| revolutionize anything? I seem to remember all the revolution
| talk coming from Segway people before they had even unveiled
| the thing. It was just a big hyped secret that would
| "revolutionize" the world.
|
| I remember being extremely underwhelmed when they unveiled
| it. It seemed like one of those things that had never been
| invented before, because why would you invent that.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| I remember the media regurgitated the marketing for the
| Segway without questioning it. IIRC it was on the cover of
| Time or Newsweek, for example
| jkestner wrote:
| Definitely not Jobs and Bezos. Jobs said what you say from
| a different angle--if this thing is revolutionary, why does
| it look so banal? Bezos pointed out the basic flaw that
| bedevils personal transportation to this day--will you be
| allowed to ride it? Guess that's what they mean by
| 'revolutionary'--you'd have to throw a bunch of established
| systems out the window to take over.
|
| https://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/steve-jobs-and-jeff-bezos-
| meet...
| tozeur wrote:
| I've had that exact opinion of him for years.
| ahupp wrote:
| To be fair to the Segway, there's a remarkable number of
| self-balancing one wheel scooters on the street in SF these
| days (well, a few months ago). And I think you can trace all
| of those back to Segway. Sometimes v1 doesn't quite do it.
| semerda wrote:
| Unlike Magic Leap, wasn't Segway the first personal
| transporter with self balancing technology? Ie. Setting a
| new bar. Hence others followed from that new standard. I'm
| not aware of Magic Leap setting any new bars.
| ericd wrote:
| From what I've heard, the Beast did set some new bars.
| _jal wrote:
| Those are toys. Back in the day, Kamen was going on about
| redesigning cities around them.
| jsight wrote:
| I think tools like this can be much more than toys:
| https://www.ewheels.com/product/new-gotway-msuper-x-
| msx-1600...
|
| 60 miles of range!
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Those are toys.
|
| If you're referring to electric unicycles e.g. SoloWheel,
| they are probably the perfect compliment to mass transit.
| throwawaybbqed wrote:
| Your comment raised the hair on back. I was a naive
| student in those days. Kamen's build up to the
| announcement and some of the posts of people who had
| tried "it" - they broke my heart and took away some of my
| innocence. You reminded me of all the hype pre-
| announcement. I couldn't sleep because of it.
|
| I still respect Kamen but take every pre-announcement I
| hear with a strong degree of skepticism.
| vikramkr wrote:
| They're toys that a lot of people use as their primary
| methods of transport, along with other micro mobility
| solutions like electric scooters amd good old fashioned
| bikes. In a way, the future took the path of least
| resistance and redesigned micromobility around cities
| instead. And we might still end up redesigning cities
| around some of those options
|
| The segways itself doesnt make much sense to me though. I
| dont remember too much about the hype when it was
| released, but like, I'm still unclear about what it was
| supposed to be able to do that an electrified scooter or
| bike couldn't.
| mikestew wrote:
| _I 'm still unclear about what it was supposed to be able
| to do that an electrified scooter or bike couldn't._
|
| When the Segway was released? It could do this one cool
| trick: actually exist. Electric bikes and scooters (at
| least at any sort of scale) were at least ten years off.
|
| There were other factors. Ungodly expensive for what it
| was, and poor enough range that I questioned whether it
| could get the six-ish miles from the house to Microsoft's
| main campus with that WA-520 hill to contend with. Now my
| Boosted Rev scooter can _almost_ do the 7.5 mile _round
| trip_ to work, with that same WA-520 hill, and for 1 /3rd
| the price the original Segway was going for.
|
| EDIT: oh, wait a minute, the max speed on the original
| Segway was like 20kph/12mph, right? Yeah, the Rev would
| easily make the 15 mile round trip if I were riding it
| _that_ slowly.
| intopieces wrote:
| I know the market is small but the Segway was a fantastic
| upgrade for some people with limited mobility. A
| classmate of mine in college (2007 or so) who has
| cerebral palsy got one and it totally changed her ability
| to get between classes. More maneuverable than a
| wheelchair, faster than walking with crutches.
| closetohome wrote:
| I finally got to try one around 2002, and I have to say
| it completely changed my opinion. The price didn't
| matter, the wacky overhyped introduction didn't matter,
| self-balancing was such a revolutionary technology that I
| immediately saw where it was going.
|
| Now I ride a Onewheel.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| It let you stand up, and it wouldn't fall over.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Unless your last name is Bush.
| kd5bjo wrote:
| > I'm still unclear about what it was supposed to be able
| to do that an electrified scooter or bike couldn't.
|
| Segways have much better low-speed handling
| characteristics than bicycles, which makes them safer to
| intermix with pedestrians: Travelling at a slow amble
| speed in a crowded environment is extremely difficult on
| a bicycle, but no big deal for a Segway (or similar)
| mumblemumble wrote:
| The primary fault that causes bikes to mix poorly with
| pedestrians occurs between the handlebars and the helmet.
| Bikes are, in fact, super easy to operate in close
| proximity to and at the same speed as people who are on
| foot. The trick is to not have it between your legs.
| wongarsu wrote:
| That may still happen. The trend is very recent and
| cities aren't redesigned in a day.
| Fricken wrote:
| Urban planners are still all about micrcomobility
| wpietri wrote:
| Is the number remarkable? I would be very surprised if
| those were more than 1% of traffic.
| ahupp wrote:
| Entirely possible that they are just more memorable than
| a regular bike. But they are definitely way more popular
| than a Segway.
| cguess wrote:
| Perhaps they're big in SF, but they exist basically nowhere
| else in numbers that matter in any way (aside from those
| super weird Segway tours in like D.C.). Sometimes the tech
| itself just isn't that good, and sometimes it's a bad idea.
| servercobra wrote:
| I have a feeling Magic Leap will be to AR what Segway is to
| Bird/Jump/etc: right idea, wrong implementation (time/form
| factor/business model/etc).
| valuearb wrote:
| The main reaction to the Segway unveiling was "huh? This is
| what you were prattling about?"
|
| No one except their PR interns thought it was going to
| revolutionize anything.
| Nition wrote:
| > There's a long history of technology being absolutely
| amazing the first time you use it and then not mattering at
| all.
|
| Most of these, certainly including Segway and Magic Leap,
| fall apart as soon as you ask ten random non-tech people if
| they'd actually buy one though.
| mbesto wrote:
| > I don't trust Evans at all
|
| Anyone that follows him closely on Twitter Should know this.
| He's the type of person that just throws predictions
| everywhere so he can say "I told you so", but never owns up
| the ones that don't crystallize.
| catalogia wrote:
| The segway at least found a niche with cops and tourists.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| And in a slightly different form factor / price point
| presaged the mass usage of Lime, etc.
| wpietri wrote:
| Presaged in the sense that there was also a lot of VC-
| driven hype that didn't work out, sure. I'll admit
| there's a slightly higher chance that scooter rental
| still might turn into a real business. But it's
| definitely not a given.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| A little bit early to portray Lime and the like as
| anything other than VC throwing tons of money at an idea
| adamc wrote:
| Right, but it _was_ a niche, not a revolution.
| jfim wrote:
| The first airplanes were a niche, and so were the first
| cellphones. Facebook was this social network for ivies.
|
| Just because a technology is currently in a niche
| position doesn't mean that in the long term it won't be a
| revolution or won't become mainstream.
| catalogia wrote:
| As far as I've seen, Magic Leap doesn't even have a
| niche. I can think of plausible niches for some
| hypothetical future AR tech, but none for what Magic Leap
| has managed to create.
| wpietri wrote:
| Oh, sure! But those who didn't live through the hype may
| not know that it was expected to revolutionize
| transportation. "Venture capitalist John Doerr predicted it
| would reach $1 billion in sales faster than any company in
| history, and that it could be bigger than the Internet."
| [1]
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/2015/01/well-didnt-work-segway-
| technol...
| jiofih wrote:
| I remember the hype being so strong that people were
| (seriously) theorizing some kind of gravity-defying
| device.
| blululu wrote:
| Yes, and there are also plenty of solid niche applications
| of 3d displays. The point is that both the Segway and the
| MagicLeap were pitched as being the next mobile phone or
| automobile (something everyone has at all times).
|
| Of course personal electric vehicles seem to be having a
| renaissance at the moment (scooters) but the buzz:use ratio
| of modern scooters is much-much lower than the original
| segway era from 20 years back.
| fossuser wrote:
| Supposedly the magic leap demo was actually cool and used
| different technology than the eventually crappy hardware they
| ended up sort of shipping.
|
| I think they couldn't get it to a place where it could be small
| enough to be useful?
|
| Hopefully when Apple ships AR hardware for real it'll be what
| it should be. Magic leap will be kind of like General Magic or
| the creative nomad jukebox - right idea but too early with
| hardware and not a great product.
|
| Their constant advertising with no details for years really
| bothered me though so I probably have an unfairly negative
| perception of them.
|
| Either build what you're doing in public like Facebook/Oculus
| or do it in secret like Apple, but don't loudly advertise in
| public when you don't have anything to show for it.
|
| ###
|
| (I played with the magic leap hardware that shipped for an hour
| or so and found it disappointing, a lot less interesting than
| when I had played with VR hardware for the first time. I think
| AR as the next computing platform has huge potential, but the
| hardware isn't there yet and it needs a strong
| platform/ecosystem behind it. I think Apple has been preparing
| this for years.)
| bitL wrote:
| > than when I had played with VR hardware for the first time
|
| AR is 1-2 orders of magnitude more demanding than VR, so if
| we get to acceptable screen-door-effect-less VR on 30TFlops
| hardware, we might need like 1 Petaflop for the same with AR.
| That won't fit into a pocket anytime soon, but we can build
| such experiences on beefy demo rigs.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I saw the magic leap demo in person at their Florida office.
| It was quite something.
|
| Imagine minecraft, but in real life. They had blocks you
| could put on walls, dinosaurs roaming around on the ground,
| knights fighting the dinosaurs, and all of it was
| controllable.
|
| It was in a small-ish room, roughly ... 15x15 feet? a few
| meters by a few meters.
|
| It had couches in the room, and pictures on the walls. It
| didn't look special. But in retrospect the room may have been
| part of the demo in some way.
|
| (I went through their interview process, and one of the
| benefits was getting to see the ML in action. Supposedly they
| also had an "AI assistant" demo or something like that -
| Cortana? - but it wasn't available on that day.)
|
| If I were an investor, I would probably invest based on the
| strength of that demo. It was enough to make you question the
| reason we're all staring at laptop screens. The device was
| comfortable, and I could imagine myself sitting at a desk
| typing into thin air (because goggles) rather than typing
| into a computer screen.
|
| Of course, it looks like I would have lost my money if I were
| an investor. But how could we know it would play out this
| way? All they had to do was build a strong developer
| ecosystem. The lame demo-style apps we see are a direct
| result of inconvenient APIs and SDKs.
|
| In fact, they were actively hostile to developers. I remember
| getting a C&D just for publishing their SDK's manual on a
| personal website. No idea how they even found the link.
|
| The premise is real - in the same way the Vive was in many
| ways superior to Oculus, I think the next "Magic Leap" will
| be superior and more affordable than what we see here. If you
| are looking for an investment opportunity, the AR scene is
| still a strong bet over the next decade or so.
|
| (If that seems unlikely, think about how many major advances
| worked out after seeming so unlikely: deep learning in AI;
| consumer-grade VR; voice controlled devices; the list goes on
| and on.)
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Interesting experience! Do you know if what you saw was the
| same as the product that shipped (magic leap one)? If not,
| what were the differences?
| sambroner wrote:
| Could you talk more about what made the demo so great?
| Groxx wrote:
| It's not just software though, the viewing hardware they
| eventually shipped is extremely similar to the hololens,
| but 2 years later and with a slightly larger viewport. And
| worse hand tracking, from my experience. Cheaper though.
|
| What you and other early-people seem to describe appears to
| be something else entirely, in which case yea - original
| plan fell through completely and they pivoted to their
| current thing. But was it actually different?
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| >But how could we know it would play out this way?
|
| For anybody who hadn't seen the demo, the company always
| looked like typical SV smoke selling pitch. "This is the
| best thing ever", "It will change the world", "We have
| great stuff but we can't show them in public because
| reasons".
|
| The whole "demo in a closed, secret room and then you can't
| tell anybody about it" reminds me too much of the carnival
| fair fortuneteller experience. You get shoved in a mystery
| room, get shown a bunch of smoke and mirrors, and then
| you're out before you can't think too much about what
| happened.
| gibolt wrote:
| Actually putting on a headset and getting the experience
| is not equivalent to smoke and mirrors, even if it is
| optimized for that one room
| jonplackett wrote:
| I think the thing you missed from the 'all they had to do'
| list, was make a product that a large audience could
| afford.
|
| I think Zuckerberg said at the last FB conference their aim
| with the Quest was to get 10,000,000 sold because that's
| the tipping point to a self sustaining app ecosystem.
|
| Software is worth making, so hardware is worth buying, so
| software is worth making... etc
|
| They had zero chance of achieving this at their price
| point.
| russdill wrote:
| When you can control every element: lighting, view angle,
| distance, background, etc, you can hide a ton of fatal flaws.
| leeoniya wrote:
| > Supposedly the magic leap demo was actually cool and used
| different technology than the eventually crappy hardware they
| ended up sort of shipping.
|
| i think that technology was CGI:
|
| https://hothardware.com/news/magic-leap-admits-outrageous-
| au...
| CydeWeys wrote:
| That's not even a demo of the actual physical product
| though, that was just a video that was posted online that
| purported to show what the experience would look like (but
| actually was not). It's not like you would've seen that had
| you actually been looking through the glasses.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| That was the concept video which was different from the
| demo, but you are correct and they did a horrible job
| conveying that that was a concept and not the actual
| product.
| CerealFounder wrote:
| Did they? They raised a billions of dollars to try to
| basically try to drag reality to this demo. It feels like
| a bigger version of a regular venture story.
|
| "Gimme a ton of money to run this experiment. If I'm
| right you'll be rich"
| fossuser wrote:
| That would have been fine if they said that, but they
| pretended the concept videos were real.
|
| Even this post is another example of the continued
| dishonesty I'd expect from them. This pivot is obviously
| not about COVID-19.
| fossuser wrote:
| I'm not talking about their fake demo ads they put
| everywhere, I think they actually had an impressive in
| person demo using some different technology they couldn't
| miniaturize.
| nogabebop23 wrote:
| WHy wouldn't they push the narative "Look at this - now
| we'll make it smaller" vs. "it's awesome - trust us and
| wait"?
|
| Even snake oil salesmen have a demo if they're good;
| these guys suck at being phonies.
| fossuser wrote:
| I'm not a marketing person, but constantly alluding to
| something amazing without revealing details is a hack
| that stirs up a lot of curiosity and people discussing
| what it could be.
|
| If you reveal the thing then that dies down (or worse
| knowledgeable people know that what you're dong isn't
| possible), but if you keep it secret while giving
| content-free little hints about it you can keep it going
| longer (and maybe raise more money by letting people in
| on the secret?).
|
| I have a strong dislike for this kind of thing, but that
| doesn't mean it's not effective.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| They got to series E funding and raised over a billion
| dollars. If they were phonies, they were phenomenal ones.
| TylerE wrote:
| Tharanos raised almost a billion, and look how that ended
| up
| papa_bear wrote:
| They had a few-hundred-pound cart-bound prototype called
| The Beast that was supposedly mind blowing to use, and
| that's what convinced a lot of engineers to drop
| everything and move to Florida to work on it. I agree
| pushing that technical narrative would have sounded much
| better.
| moron4hire wrote:
| What's really crazy about that video--while it's
| _technically_ possible to make something _mostly_ like that
| with current hardware[0]-- is that, if you have any
| experience with AR at all, you know that most of those UIs
| would be terrible to use.
|
| [0] The FOV is accurate, given we're looking through a
| narrow camera lens, but gives the wrong impression that it
| fills what the user could see because it fills the video
| frame. The graphics wouldn't be "solid", they'd be
| transparent, but a pre-setup room can definitely do
| occlusion effects with foreground furniture. The physical
| gun controllers _could_ be done, though nobody would fork
| out the money for it. And all the hand gestures and UI
| pinning stuff _could_ be done, though the software support
| on Magic Leap does not help you in the least.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - even the fake demo use case isn't that compelling
| to me.
|
| This is the kind of thing that I think the real AR value
| will be from: https://twitter.com/st8rmi/status/124995087
| 9807045633?s=21
|
| Basically a meta-layer for the real world that you can
| interact with outside of a screen. This would let you do
| things like interact with a lightswitch from across the
| room by looking at it, get metadata about most object
| states by looking at it, anchor big displays to white
| walls, etc.
|
| I think there's huge potential for this kind of
| interface, but I suspect the hardware isn't possible yet.
| samatman wrote:
| My guess at the killer app for AR is airplane
| maintenance.
|
| Imagine a physical checklist where areas get highlighted,
| arrows to direct you to the next step, and a little red
| icon that goes green when you're done.
|
| I think this could shave real time (maybe a third?) off
| airframe downtime while keeping the very high accuracy
| requirement. That would save actual money.
| moron4hire wrote:
| This already exists
| moron4hire wrote:
| The hardware can do this, it's just that you can't get
| any funding for anything interesting. You're basically
| stuck with hobby apps and marketing demos developed via
| consultoware. The hobbiests can't afford the tech or the
| lack of reach and the consultoware shops have exactly
| zero imagination (I know, I worked at one).
|
| I personally define VR vs AR as "who provides the context
| in which we are working? The app (VR), or the user (AR)".
| A lot of extant "AR" apps don't do anything particularly
| interesting with your surrounding environment.
|
| If your AR app needs me to clear out a space in my
| livingroom to give you room to drop some 3D models that
| _maybe_ bounce off my walls, you 've not actually made an
| AR app, you've just made a crappy VR app instead.
| Facebook could release an update to the Quest any day now
| that auto-scans your room to set the boundary and then
| you'd have exactly the same experience in an occluded
| headset, but with twice the FOV and better input.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Reminds me of this Magic Leap - Expectations vs Reality
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ7-F_vWUVE
| semerda wrote:
| As funny as this sounds I must agree. If they had something
| cool & innovative they could have shown the world and been
| upfront about the challenges to make it smaller. That could
| in turn bring new talent to help them. Instead we now see a
| drowning company.
|
| In some way this reminds me of Theranos.
| simonh wrote:
| I think Apple are shipping their AR hardware, mostly anyway.
| The iPhone and iPad are it, modulo enhancements like LIDAR. I
| really don't see Apple bringing out a headset. I'm not even
| sure it's a technology problem. People just don't want to
| walk around with cameras and LIDAR and goofy goggles on their
| faces, not at Apple scale anyway, possibly ever. It's a
| fundamentally flawed concept. Specialist applications sure.
| Mainstream, one in every home? I don't see it.
| fossuser wrote:
| I think they're definitely working on something:
| https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/apple-glasses/
|
| No idea when it will be a viable product in a nice enough
| hardware package, they're working on the ecosystem and
| platform in the mean time via iOS/iPadOS, but AR via those
| devices is a lot less compelling.
|
| Doing this in a real way would be big if the hardware is
| possible, but it may be a ways out.
| simonh wrote:
| Interesting link, thanks. It looks like all their
| acquisitions and hires, at least the ones linked there,
| are on the capture, interface and authoring tools side.
| The only actual mention of a headset were of glasses with
| a camera, presumably for environment scanning, but using
| a phone as the display. I really could be wrong, but
| every time I start writing something where I hedge my
| bets it just doesn't feel right. My gut persistently says
| no, VR/AR headsets are niche tech.
| threeseed wrote:
| They are absolutely building a headset.
|
| They acquired Akonia Holographics in 2018 who specialise
| in holographics for an AR headset. And they already have
| many patents:
|
| https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-
| apple/2019/11/apple-w...
| dtnewman wrote:
| I got to demo their consumer product and it really is pretty
| cool. Perfect? Far from it. But it's good enough that you put
| it on and say "wow" for the next 15 minutes.
|
| In the demo I saw, you get immersed into a coral reef and
| walk around. It's very cool, but I'm not gonna buy a unit
| just for that. So you need lots of content before it makes
| sense to buy one of these things, and then you have a chicken
| and egg problem. Who is going to spend massive amounts of
| money to create content when there isn't already a big
| audience for it?
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Have you tried one of the other VR systems? If so, could
| you comment on how the experience compared?
| fossuser wrote:
| I'm not the person you're asking, but imagine looking
| through dark sunglasses through a little window at a
| faded image sitting on the table in front of you.
|
| For me the illusion of it sitting on the table didn't
| even feel like it was really on the table because of how
| dark the glasses were and how faded the image was.
|
| VR was like being in a different place with a real sense
| of perspective and your hands in VR felt like a part of
| you. Sure it was low resolution, moving was strange, and
| the sides were letter boxed a bit but it was an
| impressive thing.
| jnsie wrote:
| > creative nomad jukebox
|
| Holy crap, the memories. I had the creative nomad jukebox and
| for years convinced myself if fit in the pockets of my
| jeans...it did...but it didn't. The folly of youth!?
| firndbxisns wrote:
| Actually, back in those days I was wearing Jnco jeans and
| you could fit a laptop in the pockets if you wanted to. I
| made a throwaway username for this comment because I don't
| want people to know I wore Jnco jeans.
| russh wrote:
| In it's defense, mine still works.
| adamcharnock wrote:
| Wow! I think mine broke about 4 times. Kept taking it
| back and getting a replacement, teenage me must have cost
| them a fortune.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I had one of these too. It was so _nearly_ good. So so
| close. That tiny track pad was just too sensitive, or was
| in insensitive, or both?
| tomcam wrote:
| Hey, Florida is a pretty interesting place!
| notJim wrote:
| Yeah, Florida is nice! Good weather, nice beaches. They even
| have bioluminescent organisms there!
| flyinglizard wrote:
| The product exists. Their intention was never to do vaporware or
| deceive anyone - Rony's a good hearted fellow - but they had too
| much money, so much that they thought they'd bend reality.
| Francis Ford Coppola famously said of producing Apocalypse Now:
| "We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access
| to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we
| went insane". This is really what Magic Leap felt like from the
| inside. So much money, so many famous people on board (and on
| _the_ board), all these dreams of creating not new means of
| consuming content but _all-new content_ and all-new use cases.
| Making this functional and beneficial to your everyday was not
| enough, Rony wanted a full on sci-fi universe right here and now.
|
| This company could snub reality for a long time and I'm honestly
| surprised it lived for this long.
|
| That said:
|
| 1. There absolutely exists a product and putting it on for the
| first time is a pretty exhilarating experience. Unfortunately
| Magic Leap failed to provide an convincing reason to put it on
| for the second and third time.
|
| 2. The company had very good talent. Unfortunately its management
| turned more awkward as you climbed the ranks - professional
| corporate survivors which needed to bridge reality between Rony's
| dreams for the next year and what's possible in the next 10 with
| their modest skillset.
|
| It was a bit of Hunger Games up top.
|
| 3. AR hardware startups need money, and lots of it. I estimate
| Magic Leap had about 50% overhead, meaning that given better
| management and direction - and a bit of hindsight no doubt - it
| could have been done with $1bn. It's _still_ $1bn.
|
| 4. Consumer AR will come in a minimalistic form, such as Intel's
| deceased Project Vaunt (ironically enough, many of its Swiss
| optics team were brought on to Magic Leap following its
| termination in Intel). Minimal, stylish, useful - not something
| to wow you once over but to provide day in, day out value. An
| Apple watch rather than an Oculus.
|
| Source - I was there for few years, running some parts of their
| engineering. I don't regret a second of it.
| gregjw wrote:
| Doubling down on corporate uses of AR.
| chadlavi wrote:
| Magic Leap is like the story of overhyped, over-priced tech
| vaporware investments in the 2010s all embodied in one company.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| The Magic Leap device at least worked and had a wow factor even
| though it didn't have a market fit. I prefer Juicero. That's
| really a prime example of overhyped and overpriced tech
| investments.
| NonEUCitizen wrote:
| Juicero actually worked. It just didn't work as well as using
| your bare hands.
| chadlavi wrote:
| Cripes, I forgot about that crazy scam.
|
| Magic Leap is at least a tech product, though. And even
| though they had some actual device, the thing they marketed
| was complete fiction, they never brought the promise from
| that whale demo to market.
| eagsalazar2 wrote:
| This is approaching Theranos levels of sham and has already
| passed Juicero a long time ago.
| drewbeck wrote:
| Imo enterprise and military were always going to be the first
| successful applications for this tech. Smart money will stay in
| those lanes until the tech is mature.
| npunt wrote:
| Magic Leap made one of the classic mistakes that other before-
| their-time products make: they tried to create a general purpose
| product because they didn't have a killer app that could focus
| their efforts.
|
| When you're building a product without a focused use case, you
| are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means
| focusing on __fidelity __, embodied in high resolution, wide
| field of view visuals, powerful processing, and compelling input
| methods.
|
| The real question in AR is what use cases can you hit _without_
| great fidelity? What sort of value can you unlock with a low-res
| postage stamp overlay and slow processor instead of full FOV?
| That 's where the go-to market effort needs to be placed.
|
| A similar example of this overreach was in multifunction pen
| devices of the 90s (General Magic, Newton, EO Personal
| communicator). A great counter example is Apple Watch, which
| didn't chase the 'smartphone on your wrist' everything device,
| and instead picked a few key use cases, established a beachhead,
| and slowly added capabilities as the technology allowed.
|
| When a category-defining product has yet to emerge on the market,
| there are going to be a lot of people making predictable mistakes
| like this - mistiming ideas, scoping the wrong set of features,
| getting too excited about the wrong technologies, not leveraging
| their assets.
|
| If you're a product person interested in understanding more about
| these factors, I wrote an essay on the subject recently:
| https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/
| zhoujianfu wrote:
| Two bad signs:
|
| 1. They were founded by a well-connected VC-type, in a hyped new
| industry. These companies always raise a lot of money (because of
| the connections and the hype) but rarely (never?) work out well.
| (See also 21.co for "blockchain".)
|
| 2. A few years ago they contracted with my friend's company to
| make some swag, it was a chromed 3D paperweight of their logo
| guy. I saw a prototype of it, and it was really nice and pretty
| cool. Then I heard magic leap had rejected it because they didn't
| like some way the chrome plating came together at the point it
| was dipped or something? It was insane to me, that thing was
| pretty cool and totally professional, and I knew if that was
| emblematic of how they did business they were screwed..
| duxup wrote:
| The sheer volume of cash and talent thrown into something that
| hadn't yet found a market is sort of amazing / seemed like a huge
| amount of cart before the horse.
|
| It seems generally like they decided to do X, Y, Z but needed to
| invent A, B, C before they could get there, let alone know if
| anyone wanted X, Y, Z.....
| qppo wrote:
| I don't want to doxx myself so I'm intentionally leaving out
| details, and you can take this comment as rumor and baseless.
|
| But based on the people I know (personally) who work there -
| there wasn't a lot of talent being thrown at the product. I
| think their organization is incapable of bringing a product to
| market, even if that market existed.
| duxup wrote:
| Maybe that was part of the issue. They had a large volume of
| guys like me, unremarkable folks... trying to do remarkable
| things.
|
| Not a good recipie talent wise.
| qppo wrote:
| To use startup lingo, they were a unicorn turning into a
| zombie because they never hired people who knew how to run
| their organizations as a cockroach. A lot of the people
| that I know who went there were basically fresh out of
| college or academia, because there was no one else in
| Florida and ML operated in stealth for way too long. That's
| not a bad thing (who among us hasn't been a fresh, doe eyed
| engineer at a startup?), but when you throw a couple
| billion dollars at them before they've learned how to build
| anything... might not work out.
| TheSoftwareGuy wrote:
| Jesus Christ. I personally know two people that started working
| there right around when the lockdowns were starting to get put in
| place. They've probably been there less than a month.
| SSchick wrote:
| Yup, friend of mine started working there about 2 months ago.
| He was meant to move to work at their offices but then corona
| happened, now he has to deal with half his team being purged
| while working remotely and let's not talk about his morale
| right now.
| dragosmocrii wrote:
| Happened to me to with a company within my trial period. It's
| amazing how many things you can learn about a company in times
| of difficulty, in my case leaving the company was happening
| with or without the layoff.. I hope your friend can find a
| replacement soon.
| xiaolingxiao wrote:
| They're exploring a sale valued at $10B, but it's doubtful who
| would have the appetite to buy it at this valuation. Google
| declined a follow on round recently, Apple has been developing
| their own tech for years, and Facebook has quietly stepped away
| from AR/VR.
|
| Magic Leap is reminiscent of another company with "Magic" in its
| name: General Magic
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic). They both made a
| product that evangelize the form factor in the public's (or some
| subset of it) eye, but alas is way ahead of its time in terms of
| tech, and content.
|
| It's easy to hate on Magic Leap and its self aggrandizing
| marketing. Although I personally never bought into the hype of
| Magic Leap in particular, they did inspire a whole generation of
| developers in a way that hasn't been done since the release of
| the original iPhone.
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| Not sure if Facebook is stepping away from AR/VR. Oculus/
| Facebook reality labs is still hiring plenty of folks in the
| optics/ photonics world.. even making announcements over the
| last week on open positions.
| Rochetshipz wrote:
| This is an uninformed opinion yeah. Facebook is recruiting
| HEAVILY and appears to have the published state-of-the-art
| research in the field. They also recently acquired a hot
| startup in the field, Scape based in London, and kickstarted
| Facebook Reality Labs in London which is hiring. They are
| also hiring in Seattle.
|
| If someone wants to look how Microsoft is also doing from a
| engineering PoV, watch this cool video from Marc Pollefys
| from ETH Zurich/Microsoft. It was made for a technical-minded
| scene and shows the behind-the-scene, some potential issues
| (privacy) and where it is going next
| https://vimeo.com/380218937
| floren wrote:
| Based on job postings I've seen in biomedical science-related
| fields, I think Facebook is pushing for AR contact lenses.
| bitmover wrote:
| Do you have a source for Facebook stepping away from AR/VR? I
| hadn't heard that.
| istorical wrote:
| If you look at any of Mark Zuckerberg's statements, it's clear
| he still believes in pushing more and more funding to AR/VR,
| not sure where you're getting your info.
| atulvi wrote:
| Facebook has not stepped away from VR. Oculus and Valve are the
| industry leaders right now. Please stop spreading
| misinformation.
| SahAssar wrote:
| > inspire a whole generation of developers in a way that hasn't
| been done since the release of the original iPhone.
|
| I don't really think this is true. Most of what I've heard
| about magic leap from developers has been skepticism, while the
| hype seems to have been from VCs and journalists.
|
| Any particular examples of the enthusiasm you've seen?
| tanilama wrote:
| Will be surprised to see someone would even buy them with
| 1B...They are basically worthless at this moment.
|
| And what good has this inspiration brings to the economy then?
| It is funny to even call it an inspiration since for a very
| long period of time it is just rendered CG for marketing.
| microtherion wrote:
| > They're exploring a sale valued at $10B, but it's doubtful
| who would have the appetite to buy it at this valuation.
|
| One of the sentences in the article that leapt out at me from
| the article was "Magic Leap is one of the most well-capitalized
| consumer hardware startups ever, having raised more than $2.6
| billion from investors":
|
| * "most well-capitalized" sounds very awkward.
|
| * How much they _raised_ is hardly indicative of how well-
| capitalized they are at the moment (in the sense of runway),
| without knowing how much of it they _spent_ already.
|
| * The article makes it sound like huge investments are all
| upside. But they carry a significant downside as well, because
| all those investors wanting to see a return will significantly
| increase the price tag if the company wants to sell itself.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Neither "most well-capitalized" nor "best-capitalized" sounds
| particularly awkward to me. I'd probably use them
| interchangeably. (American English native speaker)
| blueboo wrote:
| > Although I personally never bought into the hype of Magic
| Leap in particular, they did inspire a whole generation of
| developers in a way that hasn't been done since the release of
| the original iPhone
|
| What on Earth is this claim? What XR developer was inspired by
| Magic Leap in any way other than the encouragement to bilk VCs
| out of their money?
| cfontes wrote:
| Oculus Quest has been a major hit, do you have any info on
| facebook walking away from VR?
|
| I just don't think they are with the amount of work they are
| doing on the Oculus ecosystem atm.
| bredren wrote:
| Yes, a quick survey of posts in /r/virtualreality revealed
| this thread [1] asking about a "missing" media blitz on the
| Quest.
|
| The reaction was that the demand for the device so outpaces
| supply Facebook shouldn't advertise it.
|
| But the OP points out something I hadn't though of, which is
| that VR represents a potential opportunity in the times of
| social distancing.
|
| If Coronavirus becomes like the normal flu, where seasonal
| vaccines offer only partial coverage[2]--social distancing
| will become something people get very good at and want to
| maximize the bounds of experience in.
|
| Thus, if anything Facebook would want to increase its
| investment and accelerate roadmaps for the technology.
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/fqk3dd/f
| ace...
|
| [2] This hypothesis is based on this report from late
| yesterday and is currently not yet getting media attention:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22941012
| the_duke wrote:
| > VR represents a potential opportunity in the times of
| social distancing.
|
| I always assumed that Facebook is playing the long game
| with VR, with the end goal being a re-imagined Second Life.
|
| They need to wait until the technology is cheap/mature
| enough though, which is probably 5-10 years out.
| jjeaff wrote:
| 5-10 years? They are selling the standalone Oculus quest
| for $400 right now. At least, they would be if they could
| keep it in stock.
|
| Seems cheap enough for mainstream. Considering the game
| console price point.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| > If Coronavirus becomes like the normal flu, where
| seasonal vaccines offer only partial coverage[2]--social
| distancing will become something people get very good at
| and want to maximize the bounds of experience in.
|
| There's no way that social distancing or shelter in place
| becomes a seasonal norm of any kind. Maybe some people will
| wear masks more often and we'll shake hands less. That's
| about it.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Ya, I don't think Facebook is stepping away from VR at all,
| or even AR for that matter. Quest has been a huge hit during
| quarantine, too bad they've been hard to get ahold of.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Every Quest was sold out during the holiday season and was
| being sold for double the price on eBay/Amazon during
| Christmas. It's an incredible hit.
| lilSebastian wrote:
| > It's easy to hate on Magic Leap and its self aggrandizing
| marketing
|
| You mean the fake video demos they distributed?
| e-_pusher wrote:
| Not sure why you are claiming that Facebook has stepped away
| from AR/VR. I know that Facebook is still hiring quite heavily
| in the Seattle area for AR/VR HW roles.
| skilesare wrote:
| I use my quest every day and my kids love it.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Facebook/Oculus is also heavily recruiting in Zurich.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| I guess "heavy" is subjective. But they're also recruiting
| in LA.
| willis936 wrote:
| My rift CV1 just got a firmware update this week.
| sytelus wrote:
| Oculus was sold for $2B in 2014. Adjusting for S&P, I think it
| would have been sold for $4B today. MagicLeap has much more
| difficult and stronger tech so $10B seems reasonable. On back
| of the napkin, I would estimate ~500 people working for 4-5
| years to build something like MagicLeap. So if a company wants
| to do this, they should be prepared to foot the bill of
| approximately $1B and wait for that many years.
|
| The problem, however,is this. AR tech is simply not there yet.
| Glasses are becoming smaller but resolution sucks and we don't
| know if headaches will ever go away for more than an hour
| usage. I would estimate another 10 years of intense development
| before they are ready to compete with 6X cheaper 4K monitors in
| rendering quality. It's a long game and doesn't work without
| determined leader like Zuck willing to drain billions on it.
| cbsks wrote:
| > Facebook has quietly stepped away from AR/VR
|
| Has Facebook de-prioritized Oculus? I haven't heard any news,
| but I'm also not following it closely.
| Kiro wrote:
| Not at all. xiaolingxiao is simply wrong or didn't know
| Oculus is Facebook.
| draw_down wrote:
| I don't think it needs to be a matter of "hate" to observe that
| I've heard about this company so much but they haven't shipped
| hardly anything. I don't need to hate them (or anyone) to say
| that.
| devindotcom wrote:
| They did? I'm not a developer myself so I may have missed out
| on this, but I never sensed any enthusiasm about the platform.
| ARKit certainly brought a few people into that world, but I've
| never felt that Magic Leap inspired anything but skepticism
| practically since launch.
| Impossible wrote:
| Facebook is one of the most active players in the space, Oculus
| Quest is the best selling VR hardware outside of PSVR and
| continues to sell out regularly. Facebook is also working on
| new VR applications and new VR hardware. Not sure where you got
| the impression that they've quietly stepped away when they are
| actively working on new products... Maybe the marketing feels
| reduced?
| spullara wrote:
| The problem for AR is that there are no killer apps that aren't
| deeply privacy invading. What people want is something that
| basically googles the world around you giving you all the
| relevant information it can find. We are very quickly going down
| the path to making that entire use case illegal, especially for
| people. Without that use case, I'm really not sure there is much
| outside of things like How To instructions.
| braythwayt wrote:
| A little perpendicular to the subject, but this kind of thing
| always brings my mind back to iPhone. Apple had AT LEAST four
| kicks at the can with mobile devices.
|
| They had the "Knowledge Navigator" vaporware in 1987, twenty
| years before iPhone.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_navigator
|
| They started working on realizing the KN concept in 1987, and
| shipped Newton in 1993, fourteen years before iPhone. Alas, the
| state of tech was not up to their ambition.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
|
| They shipped iPod in 2001, six years before iPhone. In
| conjunction with iMacs that could rip CDs, they had a massive
| hit!
|
| https://www.apple.com/ipod/
|
| Then they shipped iPhone in 2007. The greatest hit in product
| history.
|
| What made it possible to have so many kicks at the can was, of
| course, having a successful(ish) business selling Macs.
|
| With VC funding, you strip all the legacy/cash cow business out
| of the equation. In exchange, you get tremendous financial
| leverage for founders, but you also have a very limited window in
| which to ship a hit.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Apple had AT LEAST four kicks at the can with mobile
| devices._
|
| Another interesting Apple mobile device "kick":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Rokr
| Jerry2 wrote:
| Rokr had nothing to do with Apple. Motorola just licensed
| iTunes compatibility. That was not Apple's device.
| pfranz wrote:
| I always saw it testing a business relationship with the
| cellular industry rather than any serious effort. The
| iPhone wasn't successful in a vacuum; Apple Stores,
| relationship to a carrier, deployment of iTunes all
| contributed to getting traction. I'm sure Rokr had more
| influence than Knowledge navigator did.
| braythwayt wrote:
| Very insightful!
| braythwayt wrote:
| Oh Gawd, I remember that. I believe that Apple _never_ had
| any intention of making that successful, and were planning on
| backstabbing Motorola no matter how the Rokr turned out.
| mikestew wrote:
| "Planning"? Apple released the iPod Nano the same day the
| Rockr was announced. Mid-level candy bar phone with not
| much capacity to store said "tunes", or a cute little music
| player with 2-4 times what the Rockr would hold? The Rockr
| seemed to me to be one of those products that was only
| released because of inertia. Or released because Apple
| blind-sided Motorola with that announcement and, "well, the
| ad spend is already spent, so..."
| pfranz wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the Rokr had an artificial cap of 100
| songs for whatever reason.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| If you go back and see the original launch of the ROKR,
| though, you can see Steve Jobs barely masking his disgust at
| what Motorola was able to come up with. IIRC the iPhone was
| well underway from a product dev perspective when the ROKR
| shipped, and he knew it was going to kill anything the phone
| makers could envision.
| rxhernandez wrote:
| I had a ROKR. I also had several windows mobile phones. I'd
| find it hard to believe that Jobs thought the ROKR was what
| he had to compete with; from a usability perspective, the
| iPhone didn't come close to windows mobile; it lacked even
| basic MMS functionality for quite a while.
| samatman wrote:
| Yeah, I've heard a few people (more common around the debut)
| say "the iPad is Jony Ive's Apple Newton"
|
| I always reply "As it happens, the Apple Newton was Jony Ive's
| Apple Newton..."
|
| It was his first product for Apple, the Bondi Blue iMac was
| just his first successful product.
| tempsy wrote:
| So many startups seem to be blowing up right now. Amazing how
| fragile the whole ecosystem was.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been
| swimming naked."
| [deleted]
| peter303 wrote:
| Niantic Pokeman Go is one of the few hits so far in AR.
| lostgame wrote:
| This is unfortunately not a surprise. Magic Leap is now an
| example of why companies should 'under promise and over deliver'.
|
| I don't think the product could've ever lived up to the hype
| train.
| xwdv wrote:
| What a cowardly way to lay off a bunch of people. Waiting for a
| crisis that requires you to push people to work from home, then
| quietly fire them with a curt email and cite difficulties from
| COVID-19.
|
| The respectable way is to get them in person, look them dead in
| the eye and admit to the failures of the company and product
| vision, and then let them go, apologizing profusely for your
| incompetence.
| the_hoser wrote:
| Ah, the death step of every failed VR/AR company. "Focus on
| enterprise customers" just means "draw out our demise for as long
| as possible in the hopes of drumming up some more VC before we
| file for bankruptcy."
|
| Hopefully someone competent buys them before that happens.
| xenospn wrote:
| Will VR/AR join 3D TV in the consumer tech hall of shame?
| modeless wrote:
| VR is doing fine in gaming. The headsets are sold out
| everywhere and there are a lot of great games available. It
| won't overtake 2D gaming anytime soon but there's a healthy
| market.
| monkeydust wrote:
| Think VR has business applications. Training for example for
| manual, complex work. Data analysis possibly (exploring this
| at work).
| nprz wrote:
| Are there other companies making progress in the augmented
| reality space? I've tried the Hololens v1 and was completely
| underwhelmed. The field of view is far too small and not
| impressive or immersive at all. Is the v2 much better? When will
| we get what Magic Leap was initially promising?
| filoleg wrote:
| Hololens V2 is still not average-consumer-ready, but it is
| leaps and bounds closer to it than v1.
|
| I tried both myself, and the biggest improvements in v2, in my
| opinion, are:
|
| * Field of view. That's the biggest one, as it felt like just a
| staring into a small rectangle with v1. With v2, I was actually
| able to read a NYT article in a web browser rather comfortably,
| moving the web browser around the room and such, with no
| significant field of view limitations felt. The limitations are
| still there, but you rarely ever hit them, while with v1 it was
| more like "almost the whole time you are using the device". And
| it felt really annoying.
|
| * UI/UX. Everything is much more intuitive and smooth to
| operate. After the initial 5-10 mins, i didnt feel any
| jankiness and was able to perform all operations with no
| struggle. Also, v2 works without that annoying clicker/pointer
| device (that was pretty much a must for v1) rather well, just
| by tracking hands. And i would say it is even more precise
| without that device than v1 was WITH the device.
|
| * Ergonomics. The headset is lighter, feels more comfortable,
| doesn't require as much fiddling around to get it sit well on
| your head. The flip up/down visor is such a great quality of
| life improvement, I am baffled that current consumer VR devices
| like Oculus or Vive haven't implemented it. Especially since it
| would provide way more utility for VR than AR, because VR
| completely blocks out the real world.
| istorical wrote:
| As with all VR/AR products, we feel like we're on the verge of
| something great within the next 1-2 years and something
| revolutionary within the next 3-5, but at least now there's
| Focals https://www.bynorth.com/ and Apple's expected product
| (hiring posts, acquisitions, and leaks point to a large team at
| work on something) as well as the Hololens team still
| iterating, and to me the most interesting stuff is actual
| software applications. FB/Oculus showed some interesting stuff
| in their last conference: Work on 'social teleportation' aka
| scanning the environment and bringing it into mixed reality /
| VR in order to 'call' someone in mixed reality and teleport to
| their living room and sit with them in 3D space, better and
| better face-scanning tech to create digital reproductions of
| your face with facial expressions mirrored to avatars:
|
| https://youtu.be/ybhYJ87U2Gs?t=523
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbRvARuCoRU&ab_channel=Oculu...
| nogabebop23 wrote:
| "Because COVID" is a new generation's "Because 9-11"
| rationalization for otherwise indefensible behaviour.
| angry_octet wrote:
| What a lost opportunity to pivot from the inachievable (cinematic
| fully immersive VR) to the desperately needed (face to face
| equivalent interactions and entertainment). Time for the board to
| find new management.
| trollied wrote:
| Wow, they burned billions.
|
| Karl Guttag has blogged about them for years, debunking their
| technology. Hi blog is a good read for all things in the AR/VR
| space https://www.kguttag.com/
| tootie wrote:
| Their tech is actually pretty decent. It's as good as anything
| else on the market. Their biggest mistake has been setting sky
| high expectations and just not coming close. If you got a cold
| demo of Magic Leap you'd probably be blown away. If you watch
| their simulated demo from however many years ago, then try on
| the headset you'll be sorely disappointed.
| fastball wrote:
| Obligatory:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ7-F_vWUVE
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm having trouble thinking of times when I felt more
| demoralized as a developer than when the sales team has made
| promises that simply defied the laws of information theory,
| and then wondered why we couldn't just work harder to fix the
| problem.
|
| I mean, technically, capital I Innovation often comes in
| finding a way to do something _without_ violating the laws of
| physics, but that 's how company origin stories are written.
| You don't schedule that on the project roadmap "And then a
| miracle occurs" style.
|
| During a particularly memorable instance of this situation, I
| recall reading a story by someone suggesting that you can
| close this feedback loop with peer reviews across functional
| units. Marketing reviewed product management, product
| management reviewed development, development reviewed QA, and
| QA reviewed...
|
| And this is the kicker: QA reviewed marketing. So if
| marketing sold something that was undefinable and thus
| untestable, they got an earful from QA. No bonus for you.
|
| I fantasized about that over countless cups of coffee with
| coworkers for the next year or two.
| Twirrim wrote:
| > I'm having trouble thinking of times when I felt more
| demoralized as a developer than when the sales team has
| made promises that simply defied the laws of information
| theory, and then wondered why we couldn't just work harder
| to fix the problem.
|
| Years ago, when "Web 2.0" was only just taking off as a
| buzz word ('07-'08?), Marketing came to my team to demand
| we make sure our shared web hosting platform be "Web 3.0",
| so that we were ahead of the curve. That was a super fun
| conversation, in a "hitting your head against a brick wall"
| way. You'd think that people in marketing would understand
| the concept of a buzz word.
| daeken wrote:
| > It's as good as anything else on the market.
|
| I've owned and extensively tested nearly every AR device
| that's been on the market in the last 10 years. I can
| conclusively say: the Magic Leap is garbage for anything more
| than short-term entertainment. Between the extremely dim
| visuals, the horrible rainbow effects on every bit of text
| you display, and the awful resolution, it's not just bad for
| anything other than games; it's nigh unusable.
|
| If I could go back and stop myself from spending the money on
| an ML1, I absolutely, without question would do so.
| tootie wrote:
| I've played with the ML and HoloLens and they are
| comparable. As someone who was raised on 8-bit games, it's
| mind-blowing. But really none of them are sharp enough to
| make you suspend disbelief that you're seeing something
| that isn't there. And I haven't seen any remotely
| compelling use case that would make them worth spending
| even $500 on. VR is much further ahead. Not quite
| mainstream, but it's got a real consumer niche and some
| really fun games and commercial uses.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I think the Oculus Quest is mainstream. It's relatively
| cheap. Easy to use. Completely standalone. And most
| importantly it has at least one game that it's actually
| worth buying it for (Beatsabre). Nothing on the Hololens
| made me think "yeah I want to do that again".
| kkotak wrote:
| Sounds like Theranos of Tech.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Waiting for Star Citizen to use Coronavirus to finally admit
| they'll never finish the game.
| joefourier wrote:
| Theranos was already the Theranos of tech. Magic Leap is just
| an overhyped product that promised more than it could
| deliver, not an outright fraud that jeopardised the health of
| its users.
|
| Or if by tech you mean "purely software (preferably Internet-
| based) company", Magic Leap does not fit into that category
| any more than Theranos does, both being primarily hardware
| companies.
| gridlockd wrote:
| Proper move. Consumers care less about AR than even VR. For AR to
| be interesting, the reality needs to fit.
|
| That is possible in an amusement park where you can roam in an
| environment, but if you want to make a livingroom interesting,
| might as well cut out reality completely.
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