The thing that got me about the Magic Leap is I couldn't find a reliable video of what it looked like through the lenses. Everything was clearly a CGI overlay or recreation. Reviewers claimed they were prohibited from showing video through the lenses.[0]
I can understand not wanting their product misrepresented, but all the secrecy and censorship about it makes me believe it is bad, and I'm not going to spend money on something I believe is bad.
There was a twitter video that comically showed their marketing demo of the whale and then the real life example of the product (with related music).
It appears to have been scrubbed from the internet though because I was trying to find it a while back to show someone and I searched for a while, but couldn't find anything.
Magic Leap seems like a case study of how not to release a product, but maybe they were more focused on raising money?
Either work on your thing in public, shipping units (Oculus/FB) or work on it entirely in secret (Apple), but don't loudly and continuously talk vaguely about how amazing your thing is with no real public examples for years. This plus all the fake marketing video demos - if you're going to do this you better be as good as you're pretending to be.
Someone that good probably wouldn't need to show marketing videos, they'd just show the product itself.
I finally did get to play with one (friend who personally knows an investor had one) and it was pretty disappointing. AR seems likely to be the next computing platform, but the hardware is not ready yet.
Magic Leap reminds me a lot of the General Magic documentary - crazy hype, right general idea, but too early and bad product.
I'm not sure if they have the same talent General Magic had though.
There was some overlap, and both had lots of "Magic" hype, but there were some really great people working at General Magic, and not nearly as high a level of narcissistic bullshit and self aggrandization and utterly dishonest marketing as from Magic Leap.
Magic Leap reminds me of Theranos. The companies with vaporware seem to have very similar playbooks that are pretty obvious with how in your face they are while never actually showing the product.
I don’t know if any are at Magic Leap, but other General Magic alumni include Andy Rubin (Android) and Tony Fadell (iPod) so at least some of them did ok eventually.
Google did the same thing with Glass. They had super slick concept video that went viral, and the real product couldn't be anything but a disappointment after that.
Apparently in actual product, the whale demo was liked by many incl. Adam Savage[1]. It seems, magic leap was able to map the windows in a room and was able to bring in the whale from outside via the window.
Yet everyone was so optimistic and believed the hype. And it happens again and again! Whenever some early stage company/product gets some traction on HN that looks like hype-ware, the default reaction always seems to be excitement and optimism, rather than doubt and skepticism. Nobody's learned from Theranos. It's like we all adhere to that X-files poster "I WANT TO BELIEVE" over and over.
But the basic summary is that since the 1850s, people keep coming up with exciting 3D innovations that sell lots of units for a while, but that never make much of a difference. Stereoscopic 3D is interesting and fun; we all loved our ViewMasters. But once the novelty wore off, we put it on a shelf and rarely picked it up again. The ViewMaster is basically a slinky for our eyeballs.
I've talked with quite a number of people who have bought VR systems, and I have yet to find one who uses it with the sort of frequency that people use their gaming consoles, PCs, laptops, or phones to play games. Maybe this wave of innovation will eventually take face-mounted VR from "novelty" to "daily driver", but it doesn't sound like it's here yet.
Well then you can come meet me and about 150 other friends.
I pretty much play VR only at this point. Any time I try a typical flat screen 3D game something is missing. The frustration of having a camera stick. The boringness of having to "press the action button" instead of just reaching out and touch the thing I'm supposed to interact it. And of course most of all the feeling of "presence". The Citadel on the horizon in HL2 (old reference sorry) is a pretty picture but nothing more. The volcano in Farpoint is 3 miles high with a 15 mile high plumb of smoke and I feel that as though I was there. It's like a picture of the grand canyon vs actually being at the grand canyon. They aren't comparable and I can't go back to not feeling like "being there".
This isn't a "gimmick" like 3D movies where they stick things in your face or throw stuff at you just show off the tech. It's qualitatively different.
If there was more content I was interested in I'd spent even more time in VR. Unfortunately there isn't that much AAA VR content and worse for me I can't take horror in VR, it's way to intense, so I probably won't be able to play the new VR Half Life coming out in March.
VR today is like an Apple Newton in 1993. Everyone laughed. Heck in 2007 PDAs where just for geeks. Then in 2008 Apple's PDA shipped, the iPhone, and now everyone has a PDA in their pocket to the point that's you'd be considered strange not to have one. It might be a while, it might even be another 15 years but VR will happen. It's just too compelling when it's good.
>I've talked with quite a number of people who have bought VR systems, and I have yet to find one who uses it with the sort of frequency that people use their gaming consoles, PCs, laptops, or phones to play games. Maybe this wave of innovation will eventually take face-mounted VR from "novelty" to "daily driver", but it doesn't sound like it's here yet.
I pretty much fully agree with your assessment, with the caveat that I've seen a lot of folks really getting in to their Oculus Quests in a way that never happened for the tethered unit. I'm certain many would spend even more time using it if there was a larger software library.
(And yes, the success of the Quest genuinely surprised me, too. Having now gotten to play with one, I have to say tetherless with good controllers is the biggest single improvement in VR since the first modern headset.)
You are confusing tech deficiency for the lack of interest. Imagine if the tech was available so you can see 3D content covering the entire human FOV in 8K resolution that with almost no weight on the head just for $500, would you not buy it and use it full time? Things have came long way and still long way to go but our biological construction demands 3D tech and it's not going to change anytime soon.
FWIW, I left the 3D turned on with my 3DS, but I recognize that I was in the minority. I liked the 3D well enough, but OTOH I don’t really miss it on the Switch.
VR looks shitty in video through the lenses too, but it's actually really cool. I wouldn't have been put off buying a Vive by lackluster video captures, because people were saying really good things about it (or, at least, a lot of the things I wanted to hear to convince me to be an early adopter).
I guess Magic Leap's problem is that their product is thoroughly meh. Nobody is raving about it (that I'm aware of), and nothing I've seen makes me feel like going out of my way to try one.
One major difference between VR and AR content is that VR can do blacks. Current AR is limited to overlaying more light onto a piece of your visual field. It has no way to make any spot more dark. This is fine for VR, since there should be no other light leaking in apart from what is produced by the unit. AR at the least needs a projector that can compete with the amount of light in the your scene already.
Overlayed content is sharp enough, not great. Ghostly opacity. Biggest blocker by far is field of view vertically. Images outside the "screen" get badly cropped and look very unnatural.
But the fact that they absolutely will NOT permit developers or reviewers to post a video through the lenses, and they tried to pawn off totally fake "artist conceptions" as live demos of actual software they run daily at the office, does tell you a hell of a lot about what the actual experience and the company itself is like.
Magic Leap originally lied about the concept video they posted to youtube, then retroactively white-washed it after they got caught by Time Magazine.
The most infamous misleading video that currently claims to be a "concept video" was originally deceptively titled "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap" and described as "This is a game we’re playing around the office right now". Only AFTER they got busted, did Magic Leap retroactively change the title and description so they were not so blatantly false and misleading.
Before they got busted and white-washed the lies, a skeptical Time magazine reporter didn't think it looked real, and asked Magic Leap about it directly. The official Magic Leap company spokesman mendaciously lied to him that "the video was authentic":
>It's unclear whether the video shows an actual game overlaid onto a real-world office space or just an artistic rendering of what the game might look like in the future. The way the gun rests so realistically in the gamer's hand certainly raises suspicions. Still, a company spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo that the video was authentic.
>"This is a game we’re playing around the office right now," Magic Leap wrote on its official YouTube account.
The "game they were playing around at the office" was actually called "lying to the public and investors".
It's going to tell you more than a CGI artist's impression nonsense.
People were able to film through the lenses for standard VR glasses. I can't find anyone that tried it for Hololens but given that they also cost several thousand dollars it's probably not that surprising. I have used the Hololens quite a bit and I can't see any reason why you couldn't film from the eye's point of view.
One of the funniest eras of advertising was the ads for HD TV broadcast on 480p TV. They’d always include all these video clips & that always made me laugh :-)
I'm torn on this, on one hand it's a bit shady, on the other I get why they're doing it. The only impressive bit about this piece of hardware is to actually experience virtual 3D objects projected onto the real world. If you capture a 2D video of this through the lens you're effectively left with very mediocre 3D models in a darkened environment. There's simply no way it can look good without cheating. It'll look like VR but worse.
I went to a magic leap developer event and tried the headset first hand. It was truly magical. It made me giggle. Now, at the current price point it’s too high for me to buy as a toy and I haven’t really been struck with any killer app ideas to buy it as a dev kit, but I really think it’s an extremely cool piece of kit.
I think they are pretty cool but I wear glasses. Not entirely uncommon amongst their target market. Lens inserts kill the share-ability of the thing and mean that it's basically tailored to my personal prescription.
They made a really myopic decision to exclude the short-sighted.
That's just how it goes with AR, you can find some amateur clips people have tried to shoot through the lens themselves but it's very difficult. Even Microsoft doesn't shoot through the lens and has gotten similar flack. Best they can do is composite imaging, which actually looks worse than through the lens.
When you're selling someone a dream, especially their own dream, fantasy always needs to be presented as reality.
Looks like they're making money from investors rather than customers, and the strongest marketing efforts are probably not focused on things which would appeal to ordinary buyers.
I thought the same thing. Even with VR people held cameras up to the displays, or projected what they saw onto a monitor. With magic leap it was sooo secret.
I assumed garbage. I'm still not sure what I would be supposed to do with them.
VR allowed the signal going to the headset to also be displayed onto a regular monitor since the signal was the full image. With AR, it's just overlaying something onto a lens you see through to be able to see the real world. That signal displayed onto a regular monitor would probably just show the object with a matte or essentially the object over a black background. Think of a transparent PNG but in motion. That's not very exciting.
TFA says that they've shipped around 6000 units so far, how come nobody has made an independent video of the product yet? Surely some of these early adopters have a Youtube channel?
Magic Leap One has been for sale for 6 months. At $2.6B in total funding, thats $433,333 per unit for 6,000 units. The sticker price is $2300 per unit.
By comparison the Nintendo VirtualBoy was for sale for one year at $180(in 1995/$300 in 2018) and sold 770,000 units[1].
The VB also makes me wonder if AR isn’t practically impossible for the foreseeable future since lots has changed since then, but not the vaporware of this stuff.
This number gets more mind-blowing the more you think about it.
It's small enough that one needs to start considering the units bought by management, employees, investors, suppliers, competitors, et cetera to say nothing of their friends and families.
Honestly, with high priced dev kits they just need to be given out for free like Valve did with the Vive. Magic leap has given out thousands just to get devs on board.
That’s not how funding works. If you believe the product is worth exactly what you pay that’s not funding, that’s buying. Funding is the belief that at some point the ownership will be worth the wait given the investment.
I heard all silicon valley gurus stating they were "bearish on VR, bullish on "AR". This proliferated as a mantra throughout the industry. I thought they were wrong then, and believed the opposite - because I had a working VR headset that was awesome, but had only heard somewhat meh things about existing AR prototypes.
Until great AR hardware comes out, I'm still sticking with the same opinion.
Interesting article. Here's Abrash's wry summary of the problems facing AR:
Leave aside the issues associated with tracking objects in the real world in order to know how to virtually modify and interact with them. Leave aside, too, the issues associated with tracking, processing, and rendering fast enough so that virtual objects stay glued in place relative to the real world. Forget about the fact that you can’t light and shadow virtual objects correctly unless you know the location and orientation of every real light source and object that affects the scene, which can’t be fully derived from head-mounted sensors. Pay no attention to the challenges of having a wide enough AR field of view so that it doesn’t seem like you’re looking through a porthole, of having a wide enough brightness range so that virtual images look right both at the beach and in a coal mine, of antialiasing virtual edges into the real world, and of doing all of the above with a hardware package that’s stylish enough to wear in public, ergonomic enough to wear all the time, and capable of running all day without a recharge. No, ignore all that, because it’s at least possible to imagine how they’d be solved, however challenging the engineering might be.
Fix all that, and the problem remains: how do you draw black?
It depends on your definitions. You don't need a headset for pretty interesting AR. If I could just point a phone at things and get genuinely useful information as an overlay, I'd consider that a pretty decent AR application. Sure, the same thing in a pair of stylish glasses might be even better but it's not strictly necessary.
I see phone AR as a pointless gimmick. Like comparing a 1970s video game to PS4 video game. Yes both can be fun but pong is not really comparable to GTA5. Phone AR is so far off from Black Mirror AR. I can imagine every teenage girl spending all their time playing with their friends in AR, having their friends appear in their bedroom instead of just on Facetime. With AR glasses, some future version where they are no more intrusive than normal reading glasses, I can't imagine them not doing it. I can imagine all the youtube AR cooking classes will just project directly on your kitchen counter where you can either stand directly beside the chef or cover the same space, have your friends appear on the sofa next to you for facetime, etc... When it actually gets there it will be compelling in the extreme and non-geeks will flock to it like they did to iPhone. Until then it will stay in the realm of Apple Newton.
I think this is actually why it's so hard. I can experience AR today without buying an expensive and clunky piece of hardware.
If I couldn't get a demo, it's a cool enough concept that I might be tempted and they would get revenue and also the refinement that mass usage can help fuel.
Agreed. I think that Google/Apple have the right idea here. I am especially fond of Google's applications of AR in maps and translations as those use cases are both common and useful.
I've tried Hololens and it is honestly pretty amazing. The field of view really sucks but I'm sure they'll improve that, and it doesn't actually matter quite so much for AR.
But it is still a less compelling proposition than VR. The main market is games where seeing the real world is kind of pointless. Good VR is much more immersive, and being taken to another world is much cooler than seeing some floating planets or fish or whatever in an office (even though that is cool).
Gaming is like the lowest on my list of applications for AR... At the top is some kind of AR desktop environment that makes spinning up and managing arbitrary virtual monitors/windows a snap.
I think good AR is most important if it can be sufficiently miniaturized. I can totally see myself wearing AR glasses if they don’t look like I’m wearing Godzilla on my head.
Isn’t it the exact opposite? Only with AR can you turn everyday spaces, like a home or an office, into games... with VR you’d be bumping into walls and tripping over things
What they are referring to more than likely is not the technology, but the business case. AR has more compelling / lucrative use cases than VR. While everyone is waiting for the killer Consumer VR app, Enterprise AR is blowing up.
This partially comes from the SV all-or-nothing attitude: you can have AR on all the time (and thus revenue stream all the time), but you can't do that with VR.
Also the potential markets affected. VR really only affects the games & entertainment market, which is big, but best case you're revolutionizing Hollywood. AR is applicable to a wide variety of B2B markets - surgery, piloting, hazardous waste removal, firefighting, the military, mining, tourism, deep sea exploration, science, space colonization, etc. - which collectively have much more money spent on them. Your total addressable market is basically the amount of money you can capture if everything goes perfectly, which is dictated by the amount spent on substitutes. AR has many more substitutes than VR.
Same reason cryptocurrency is hot - it threatens the financial/insurance/ownership industry, which as a $13T behemoth is currently the biggest economic prize on earth.
I think it's coming sooner than later but Magic Leap definitely coughed up their lead in the space and spent a ton of money in the process. Microsoft have an equivalent product and I think we'll see Apple Glasses in a year or so.
I bought one second-hand a couple months ago. It's neat and all, but between the poor software and the severe extent to which it darkens the rest of the world, it's a pretty resounding 'meh'. I still have hopes for using it for productivity, but it honestly doesn't hold a candle to the original Hololens. (Can't speak to the Hololens 2 yet; going to get one in a little while though, hopefully!)
I haven't gotten a chance to try Magic Leap myself, but if you think that Magic Leap doesn't hold a candle to the original Hololens, then in it is dead in the water imo. I was somewhat annoyed with how small the field of view was on Hololens, and overall it was a pretty janky experience that I wouldn't recommend to anyone except those who just want to try the first "real" AR headset product out here and attempt writing code for it.
Hololens 2 is already publicly available, and I had a chance to play with it for a bit. All I am going to say is, if you thought the original Hololens was decent enough, you will be blown away by Hololens 2. It is leaps ahead of the first version, both in terms of the UX and the tech. Even everything auxiliary about it just feels "right", stuff like the flippable visor, easier head mount, etc. It is the kind of a device that I would legitimately consider using occasionally at home to read news and do other stuff while lazying around doing other things.
It isn't at the original iPhone levels of "whoa, we are entering a new era of how people use their personal computing devices" yet, but the overall experience is such a large step up from the original Hololens, it is clear as day to me that AR is quickly getting closer to the point where it will be dominating personal computing niche currently occupied by smartphones.
How was the comfort level on the HL2? That and the low FOV were what killed the original for me, as my use case is replacing my screens. I'm actually getting ready to commit to working 100% through VR -- Quest -- and AR -- currently ML1, but seriously considering the HL2...
If I didn't have a toddler to watch while I work much of the time, I'd probably just go all-in on VR (I'm currently working 30-50% through the Quest), but being able to see the world is kind of essential for those times haha.
As someone who was a bit underwhelmed by the original Hololens, this assessment is utterly disappointing. Don't get me wrong, a lot about the Hololens was quite interesting, but clearly far from being ready for primetime.
The original Hololens was underwhelming in some regards, but they got a few things very right: text was crisp in most circumstances, the contrast was great, and the software mostly Just Worked (TM). All of these things are absent on the Magic Leap. The only advantages it really has are the controller (which is ... okay, I guess) and comfort.
The Information has been unlocking the occasional article for HN users for a while now. I asked if they'd do that for this one and they agreed. Thanks!
I'm not sure what "unlocking" the article, but assume that we should be able to see the full article. Currently, I can only see the two first paragraphs and the article ends with "with direct knowledge of the discussions" and then a "No subscription? You're missing out." ad. Seems to still be behind a paywall.
AR is really hard and anything that does it at all is impressive and could, believably, be the precursor to a revolutionary product.
All current AR tech is more expensive than seems sustainable for a consumer product. It's also difficult to develop for and has few (if any) compelling experiences. These things are endemic to early stage products, but it is also possible that they will endure long enough to cripple AR as a product in the foreseeable future.
Everyone in the AR industry is guilty of overhype. Moreso than early tech start ups in general. That said, Magic Leap seems to have behaved significantly worse than its peers.
Part of the effect of the hype machine is that it's hard to get any depiction of what it looks like to look through the lenses of the products. This comes, as far as I can tell, from the likely true idea that the experiential qualities of AR cannot be captured through 2D video and such video would be somewhat deceptive. To me, it seems like the practice of releasing visualization videos is more deceptive but reasonable people can disagree.
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It feels to me like a lot of AR discussion comes down to people asserting that one of these genres of view is true in response to someone else expressing a different one of these views.
To me, it feels like it's hard to talk usefully about the current state of the industry. The promise is very cool, the products are early stage. So many factors legitimately excuse current failings. Do people feel like we the tech is public or mature enough that we can talk about the real limits or likely arc of the tech at all, or are we trapped between hype and development?
He's underestimating (though not by a whole lot probably). The 6k numbers from the above article refer to the first 6 months sale. Guttag is talking about the last 18 months. Also doesn't account for the headsets that have been seeded to devs.
>“Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.” [2]
If you call your company magic then the product most likely is not just at the brink of your understanding but so far out that it is impossible to close the gap by hard work alone.
Steve Jobs mentioned in a very early interview somewhere that he wants to build a computer for everybody. He waited years and decades patiently until every duck was in line and he could launch the iPhone.
This thought doesn't lead to a meaningful point. I am just wondering why he and Apple (e.g. the A7[3]) got the timing right several times but many others push too soon or wait too long.
On Apple (as opposed to Magic Leap), I believe a lot of it is figuring out a customer need and audience that can be satisfied by a set of technologies that are just at the edge of mature, and then not shipping the product until it actually satisfies those needs. This means not shipping a technology as a product just because it may be useful in the future, and it means resetting a products at the prototype stage often.
Both are hard for startups to take on. The former because many of the founders are heavily focused on a technology they came up with and attempt to shoehorn it into products that don't quite make sense. The latter because it requires either very patient investors or a big bank account.
Both are also hard for established, mature companies to take on. The former because they seem to believe that innovation for innovations sake is a useful thing to do, and for whatever reason the tech press seems to encourage them. The latter because they are focused on delivering quarterly results over building long term platform and ecosystem value, and because politically a cancelled project can be career ending.
I didn’t even know they had gotten beyond vaporware!
Why would someone spend $2,300 on this equipment other than as a developer kit? I assume there is virtually no compelling content or services available to make a consumer interested in shelling out that amount of money, or even 1/10th that amount of money.
The tech they were hyping (FSD) never materialized and is very much vaporware. Every one following got disappointed when they pivoted to hololens-like stuff...
Same. The only times I've ever heard Magic Leap substantially discussed, including user experience, was on HN. I was under the impression it was still in something like a closed beta.
It's likely selling to developers. You'll probably see Magic Leap experiences get demos at conferences or popup events. And maybe some niche use cases in industry.
There's a lot of discussion here of how this was predictable given the absence of a visible prototype for so long, and the over-the-top secrecy of the project. However, for me this was a predetermined failure when I first read an interview with the founder. Classic Super-Visionary snake-oil salesman. He could say nothing about the product, except for how it would change the world more than the world had ever been changed in the history of world changes. Sure, ok. I don't remember Larry and Sergey being like that (because they had a real product). Or Bezos, etc.
Frankly, I'm shocked at how the investors couldn't see past this CEO.
Well, I don't have all the data points, but it seems to me that snakeoiler should stand out as an anti-pattern. Maybe VCs see it differently. Maybe they'd inform me that the snakeoil CEOs are sometimes frauds, but the non-snakeoil CEOs always fail (not enough energy, not charismatic enough to attract talent, etc).
I was very skeptical about this company, but I actually got to demo the technology a few nights ago, and I have to say my mind was blown. There are definitely a lot of kinks to work out, but I would say that the experience was not too far off from the whale video they used to have on their homepage, probably better. In the demo I saw, you are immersed in a sort of coral reef, but it's all within the confines of your living room. It basically looks like you're living room has turned into a fish tank. It feels real enough that I wanted to reach out and touch the fish swimming around in front of me. Yes, it wasn't perfect at mapping the room, but the technology was much more impressive than I imagined. And the fact that it is augmented reality rather than virtual reality made things much more interesting, because you're interacting with the real world and the virtual world at the same time.
And as if blatantly ripping off other people in the industry wasn't enough, then there was also the sexist company culture and blatant nepotism of Abovitz hiring his old high school buddy Eric Akerman as vice president of IT, who is but one of the many people they have to thank for the lawsuit about the hostile sexist work environment, and the fact that their leadership, design team, marketing material, and target demographic excluded and insulted women:
$2300 is an expensive experiment, one that might not be for me.
You want to get developers to bet on new tech, to innovate, then get the cost way down. Make me as an individual developer willing to take the risk that I might not have the time or the mindset to follow through.
I can't imagine that the cost of production is more than $500... start selling them at that price point.
I strongly suspect $2300 was at or below their breakeven cost, even not including amortization of R&D, NRE, or CapEx. They are presumably well aware that building a platform dependent on applications requires network effects that can only come into play if you have a large install base of units. I don't imagine they attempted to sell the hardware at a profit, which would work against that.
As other commenters have noted though, the problem is not so much the price as not having a real target use case or audience. Hololens is similarly expensive, but Microsoft cleverly did a late pivot before launching the first one to an audience that actually had a need for it.
In theory a lot of this funding should've been spent securing sales so they wouldn't be producing the items on a bespoke scale but instead would've been able to get the cost per unit down. I'm sort of amazed at the funding this has received when it seems to be performing like an underwhelming kickstarter.
The original Microsoft HoloLens was $3000-$5000 and sold 50,000 units in two years. Now the US Army is paying them $480 million for 100,000 units. The problem isn't the price IMO, but the fact that Magic Leap hasn't been able to make a case for what exactly it should be used for. Random enthusiasts aren't going to shell out thousands of dollars, but a company or government definitely will.
The problem is that it doesn't work, it's bad. You can make a bad product with a company with a "valuation" in the billions, we need to start to understand that. And there's good alternatives to the product that actually do work better at a similar price point.
This is not a "product market fit" problem, this is bad tech being pushed down the pipes until it makes it out of a fucked up company.
Maybe they don't want to sell very many yet? If the software is rough the last thing they want is a lot of unhappy developers complaining about the state of things.
I wouldn't panic just yet. I bet for every order of magnitude they reduce the price they will increase sales by an order of magnitude. Get it under $100 and the will sell millions of units.
Even worse they had a $2300 headset that they're selling to developers and they weren't showing real footage anywhere. I'm a be enthusiast and I watched all the videos and "news" on it and was thinking "show me the money". Turns out he had money it's the product they said they had that they didn't.
I agree that $2300 is a steep price for an experiment but I'm not sure you would want to base your price on the cost of production - why is that any better than any other arbitrary price?
The very big disappointment comes from that they promised (kind of) that they would get Fiber Scanning Displays working. What I gather is they had a sort of, more or less working, giant machinery prototype (The Beast) that was very impressive for the few who got to try it. But they never actually managed to make the tech viable in a headset form factor. Also unclear if they had more than one color... Still very curious about what they managed to accomplish on that front but I now doubt we will ever know.
Exactly. We never got the Magic Leap. I remember reading that surgeons were already using the tech so it 100% existed and just needed to be productized. I figured google-ers had taken a close look and had a pretty good idea about how to productize it. Maybe it is worth a billion, I thought to myself. What we got was a Hololens clone. It should be called the Magic One because there's no technological Leap in it.
I shot a video with Tom Furness from the UW a few years ago. He was totally burned by the UW on the patents sold to magic leap and didn't get a dime. Then in the interview Tom called the product total BS because they will never never ship the true waveguide system.
The demo in lab was shown to the investors. They were sold a bill of goods because the technology simply does not scale down to a headset size with proper heat dissipation and power needs. Ever hear of Microvision?
The bottom line? Magic Leap was completely arrogant and gave Devs the run-around. Then they hyped up the market with the fail whale videos that we're all CGI and served no practical need showcasing the technology helping to save time or fix a problem.
The dev kits shipped did showcase a lot of hard problems that needed to be solved and integrated. A cool glimpse of the future. However the waveguide system that they hyped investors on was never shipped in the dev kits. They used smoke and mirrors to fool people.
Magic leap is really based off of old Microvision hype with the great backroom demo for investors that will not manifest into a real product anytime in the near future.
Microsoft's going to own the Enterprise in this space with integrated cloud scale systems powering the headset.
I've tried the Magic Leap, HoloLens, helped launch the Gear VR, and was early in the old Valve VR room. Remember kids, don't believe the hype.
This is way overblown. They have at least a Hololens equivalent, and if you value occlusion, they're ahead. And that's without Microsoft's reach. Equating them to vaporware isn't fair at all.
Mind that the advertised technology relied on Fiber Scanning Displays and extensive computing power – and I'm not aware of this having been refined to a producible and marketable item.
Is anything else expected out of it? I mean, the way the company has rolled on, starting with a lot of in fighting, then releasing a bunch CGI videos about experience and never actually releasing any real use cases. They ended up launching the product without really showing anyone what the experience will be. People want to see what it is before spending an obscene amount on it. I fully expected it to fail.
AR is a somewhat difficult sell, particularly with limited software available for it. Just imagine playing the interactive games they promoted in their demo videos, it would cost $10,000 in gear alone to get a 4 player game going.
To me, AR sounds great when you are mobile and apps can supplement reality with useful information. Playing Minecraft or some kind of space invaders game in my kitchen isn't that much more appealing than playing a game in a full virtual environment.
AR for games is an even harder sell IMHO because it's very hard for the game developer to make use of your space in a compelling way since they have no idea what it might look like, at least for home use.
I could see it as a carnival or arcade attraction where the AR application is tightly coupled with the space it is in, but this is a niche application.
>Employees started receiving free headsets earlier this year, with some managers telling staffers it was because the company couldn’t sell enough and had extra inventory, said multiple people.
I applied for their developer grant program, and got offered a consolation prize of a free headset - that they wanted to send me a 1099 for the full price! Would have had to pay $600-1000 in taxes on it, so had to reject. Nice tax write-off opportunity with a bonus of good PR!
Well, the crazy thing is, the underlying technology that ML was originally based on (i.e. U. Of Wahington's HIT lab VRD), is absolutely a leading approach in the path to AR. I personally think it's what will ultimately make AR the medium for applications people actually want (dare I say, need) to use every day. Ronny got that part right. Where he failed was in not investing that $2B+ fully into the glasses development and solving hard AR software problems like real time occlusion. Instead, this guy hired "story tellers" to design content for a technology that he didn't have yet.
For the second mistake, let me say only that people in AR marketing demos should not be smiling. If they are, you're introducing the wrong product.
The core idea was on the right track, but the conductor let the train derail very early on.
Isn't it more a classic case of a company underestimating the challenges of bringing a prototype to market? Didn't magic leap's tech demo work on like a supercomputer strapped to the user's back?
Yes, but I argue that's the same thing. The end user defines the product. They could've developed and sold the original technology is a different way (stationary entertainment, movies, etc) and be far more successful.
I won a unit from Twilio conference. I haven't touched it in a year but I often think about turning it back on. I really hope they get more content for it.
Curious if the quoted 100k-unit estimate was for the so-called "Creator Edition" (clearly targeted at devs and early adopters), or if it was supposed to include a more mass-market unit that hasn't shipped.
The main problem with ML is that they don't have enough apps, that could practically be usable with AR technology. They marketed with Whale and GoT app, which is nothing compared to the spatial awareness and real world tracking they could have presented.
Imo, they are not really trying for the Consumer market right now, and these units are aimed at Developers, who are needed to create content for the platform. Kinda big point that was skipped over in the article, but it still paints ML into a corner.
Am I going to drop $2300 sight unseen? No. I’d be willing to go to a Microsoft store or Apple store to try one out. The technology might be great, but they need to work on their marketing.
Magic Leap is proof that first mover advantage is fictional (or at least it's not an iron law that guarantees success). They spent large sums of money to put out the least half-baked AR product on the market. They would be in better shape now if they hadn't grown so fast.
That being said, AR truly is the future. In a few years there will be multiple digital universes overlaid onto our world. Magic Leap should be commended for their technical accomplishments, but can they stay solvent until their dream of the future is realized? I honestly hope they pull through.
First mover is an advantage, but it can't overcome the problem of releasing a product before its underlying technology is ready. It's not first mover so much as the company that moves at just the right time.
Magic Leap smells a bit like the Apple Newton. Too far ahead of its time to be a market success, even with so much effort behind it.
> In a few years there will be multiple digital universes overlaid onto our world.
I think applications like HUD displays on car windshields is an obvious place where it will be big for regular consumers. There are a bunch of interesting applications for commercial use too. Other than that, I have a hard time seeing much interest in regular people until they can eliminate the need for glasses or goggles.
There are many applications that, together, may make it worthwhile to wear AR glasses:
- Laptop monitor replacement or augmentation
- Indoor and outdoor navigation
- Identifying an available self-driving cab and dropping a waypoint for it to navigate to
- Immediate POV recording + sharing of ephemeral events (many people will like this, even if the HN crowd won't)
- Shared viewing of footage, large 3D graphics, or news items with your friends no matter where you are
- "Digitalized" brick and mortar fashion stores where you can easily identify clothes that fit you or that are in your price point. An enhanced view would show additional information, such as online reviews of each item.
- All the filtering features of the digital world can be brought into real life, including filtering out of advertisements
- Games games games. It sounds comical to say, but Pokemon will become real. People will run around with poke balls that release increasingly intelligent digital creatures. In Harry Potter AR, people will be able to cast digital spells by waving their wand in a certain way and saying the right thing. WOW or Runescape players could dawn their achievement capes irl
- Aesthetic landscape transformation. I imagine there will be a "default view," "modified view," and "off view" of the world. If you go to Times Square and enable the default view, you would be immersed in a digital world curated by the brands that advertise there. If you use a modified view, you can see whatever you want, whether that's anarchist graffiti or cyberpunk renderings. In the off view, all advertisements and all screens would be rendered invisible
- Usable IKEA instructions
- Non-boring meetings at work with interactive holographic renderings of enterprise projects
- Remote guidance and instruction (enabling emergency plant maintenance by people who have no clue how to repair a broken pipe)
- Digitally enhanced classrooms. Imagine a physics lab with a 3D rocket or roller coaster sim overlaid with force diagrams.
- Multilingual digital tour guide bots that can explain every nook and cranny of a city for free
- Guided construction of elaborate, ML-generated Lego structures
That's just the beginning. There are probably use cases we couldn't even imagine yet, kind of like how some technologies that are out today seemed like science fiction 10 years ago.
What is the other option? Implanting projectors in our eyeballs? Having some drone flying in front of your face that projects stuff right onto your eyeballs?
I work at a 3d company that's starting to land some contracts for AR. I don't think you're going to see consumer reasons for a while; instead look to colleges and other training platforms. AR and VR are gonna be huge in the medical fields - learning from a 3d model is so much easier than a textbook image.
>He still personally signs off on new hires, who are told that it’s harder to get a job at Magic Leap than it is to be accepted into Harvard
I doubt that. South Florida isn't crawling with engineering talent, we all left. Having known, studied, and worked with several people who work(ed) there, I sincerely doubt they can claim to have such a deep bench of talent.
South Florida doesn't need to have all that talent. Pretty much none of the people I know who were considering offers from Magic Leap, with some eventually accepting them, were from Florida at all.
I have a feeling this comment will be linked on HN eventually (in about a decade) the same way people link that one infamous comment about Dropbox being an unnecessary thing that no one needs or wants. Or the same way people in 2019 mock those from a couple of decades ago who were saying that internet was "just a fad" that will go away sooner rather than later.
AR has been around since 1990. VR decades before so times ticking on what a fad is and you have to make a case why this decade AR will start?
Plus I did premise it on full AI to understand the world to augment. Technically we already augment with the 100 year old phone allowing us to talk to someone far away anywhere-ish.
Your case why in a decade we want AR which is a overlayed response and a camera that can analyse the world using real technology. What will it do? Sci Fiction movies struggle to come up with more than ads or more intrusive notifications ;) Magic Leap made beautiful whales that looked pretty, cost a fortune to produce and would have worked equally well in a movie which is how everyone viewed it, in a 2D advertisement. There was no reason to AR it even if you could afford to do it in the wild.
Most museums, a place of high structure and high value struggle to even create simple voice overlays of art work.
The thing that got me about the Magic Leap is I couldn't find a reliable video of what it looked like through the lenses. Everything was clearly a CGI overlay or recreation. Reviewers claimed they were prohibited from showing video through the lenses.[0]
I can understand not wanting their product misrepresented, but all the secrecy and censorship about it makes me believe it is bad, and I'm not going to spend money on something I believe is bad.
0. https://youtu.be/TfzlU7nW23Y?t=34
There was a twitter video that comically showed their marketing demo of the whale and then the real life example of the product (with related music).
It appears to have been scrubbed from the internet though because I was trying to find it a while back to show someone and I searched for a while, but couldn't find anything.
Magic Leap seems like a case study of how not to release a product, but maybe they were more focused on raising money?
Either work on your thing in public, shipping units (Oculus/FB) or work on it entirely in secret (Apple), but don't loudly and continuously talk vaguely about how amazing your thing is with no real public examples for years. This plus all the fake marketing video demos - if you're going to do this you better be as good as you're pretending to be.
Someone that good probably wouldn't need to show marketing videos, they'd just show the product itself.
I finally did get to play with one (friend who personally knows an investor had one) and it was pretty disappointing. AR seems likely to be the next computing platform, but the hardware is not ready yet.
Magic Leap reminds me a lot of the General Magic documentary - crazy hype, right general idea, but too early and bad product.
I'm not sure if they have the same talent General Magic had though.
I believe this is what you're referencing:
https://twitter.com/fernandojsg/status/1017411969169555457
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There was some overlap, and both had lots of "Magic" hype, but there were some really great people working at General Magic, and not nearly as high a level of narcissistic bullshit and self aggrandization and utterly dishonest marketing as from Magic Leap.
I mean, come on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY
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Magic Leap reminds me of Theranos. The companies with vaporware seem to have very similar playbooks that are pretty obvious with how in your face they are while never actually showing the product.
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I don’t know if any are at Magic Leap, but other General Magic alumni include Andy Rubin (Android) and Tony Fadell (iPod) so at least some of them did ok eventually.
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Google did the same thing with Glass. They had super slick concept video that went viral, and the real product couldn't be anything but a disappointment after that.
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Apparently in actual product, the whale demo was liked by many incl. Adam Savage[1]. It seems, magic leap was able to map the windows in a room and was able to bring in the whale from outside via the window.
[1]https://youtu.be/0N2HqCdsSGM?t=387
Yet everyone was so optimistic and believed the hype. And it happens again and again! Whenever some early stage company/product gets some traction on HN that looks like hype-ware, the default reaction always seems to be excitement and optimism, rather than doubt and skepticism. Nobody's learned from Theranos. It's like we all adhere to that X-files poster "I WANT TO BELIEVE" over and over.
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Another dimension to consider: if it's good, how long is it good for?
I just got done writing a long thread on the history of 3D as a novelty: https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1203074623232851970
But the basic summary is that since the 1850s, people keep coming up with exciting 3D innovations that sell lots of units for a while, but that never make much of a difference. Stereoscopic 3D is interesting and fun; we all loved our ViewMasters. But once the novelty wore off, we put it on a shelf and rarely picked it up again. The ViewMaster is basically a slinky for our eyeballs.
I've talked with quite a number of people who have bought VR systems, and I have yet to find one who uses it with the sort of frequency that people use their gaming consoles, PCs, laptops, or phones to play games. Maybe this wave of innovation will eventually take face-mounted VR from "novelty" to "daily driver", but it doesn't sound like it's here yet.
Well then you can come meet me and about 150 other friends.
I pretty much play VR only at this point. Any time I try a typical flat screen 3D game something is missing. The frustration of having a camera stick. The boringness of having to "press the action button" instead of just reaching out and touch the thing I'm supposed to interact it. And of course most of all the feeling of "presence". The Citadel on the horizon in HL2 (old reference sorry) is a pretty picture but nothing more. The volcano in Farpoint is 3 miles high with a 15 mile high plumb of smoke and I feel that as though I was there. It's like a picture of the grand canyon vs actually being at the grand canyon. They aren't comparable and I can't go back to not feeling like "being there".
This isn't a "gimmick" like 3D movies where they stick things in your face or throw stuff at you just show off the tech. It's qualitatively different.
If there was more content I was interested in I'd spent even more time in VR. Unfortunately there isn't that much AAA VR content and worse for me I can't take horror in VR, it's way to intense, so I probably won't be able to play the new VR Half Life coming out in March.
VR today is like an Apple Newton in 1993. Everyone laughed. Heck in 2007 PDAs where just for geeks. Then in 2008 Apple's PDA shipped, the iPhone, and now everyone has a PDA in their pocket to the point that's you'd be considered strange not to have one. It might be a while, it might even be another 15 years but VR will happen. It's just too compelling when it's good.
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>I've talked with quite a number of people who have bought VR systems, and I have yet to find one who uses it with the sort of frequency that people use their gaming consoles, PCs, laptops, or phones to play games. Maybe this wave of innovation will eventually take face-mounted VR from "novelty" to "daily driver", but it doesn't sound like it's here yet.
I pretty much fully agree with your assessment, with the caveat that I've seen a lot of folks really getting in to their Oculus Quests in a way that never happened for the tethered unit. I'm certain many would spend even more time using it if there was a larger software library.
(And yes, the success of the Quest genuinely surprised me, too. Having now gotten to play with one, I have to say tetherless with good controllers is the biggest single improvement in VR since the first modern headset.)
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> I have yet to find one who uses it with the sort of frequency that people use their gaming consoles, PCs, laptops, or phones to play games.
Part of the problem the industry has with VR is unrealistic measures of success.
Does VR really have to be used with the same frequency we use consoles and have sales as high as smart phones to be considered not a novelty?
There's a huge gap between "another duffer like 3D TV" and "the new iPhone"
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You are confusing tech deficiency for the lack of interest. Imagine if the tech was available so you can see 3D content covering the entire human FOV in 8K resolution that with almost no weight on the head just for $500, would you not buy it and use it full time? Things have came long way and still long way to go but our biological construction demands 3D tech and it's not going to change anytime soon.
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Hey wait, I thought "Goofy Droopy Glasses" were a slinky for our eyeballs.
http://www.houseofrave.com/goofy-slinky-eyeball-glasses.html
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A lot of people complain about it but I like the 3D effect on the (new) Nintendo 3DS a lot, even after using it for quite a while.
FWIW, I left the 3D turned on with my 3DS, but I recognize that I was in the minority. I liked the 3D well enough, but OTOH I don’t really miss it on the Switch.
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VR looks shitty in video through the lenses too, but it's actually really cool. I wouldn't have been put off buying a Vive by lackluster video captures, because people were saying really good things about it (or, at least, a lot of the things I wanted to hear to convince me to be an early adopter).
I guess Magic Leap's problem is that their product is thoroughly meh. Nobody is raving about it (that I'm aware of), and nothing I've seen makes me feel like going out of my way to try one.
One major difference between VR and AR content is that VR can do blacks. Current AR is limited to overlaying more light onto a piece of your visual field. It has no way to make any spot more dark. This is fine for VR, since there should be no other light leaking in apart from what is produced by the unit. AR at the least needs a projector that can compete with the amount of light in the your scene already.
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Overlayed content is sharp enough, not great. Ghostly opacity. Biggest blocker by far is field of view vertically. Images outside the "screen" get badly cropped and look very unnatural.
The problem is that a video through the lenses isn't going to tell you anything about the experience of actually wearing one of these things.
But the fact that they absolutely will NOT permit developers or reviewers to post a video through the lenses, and they tried to pawn off totally fake "artist conceptions" as live demos of actual software they run daily at the office, does tell you a hell of a lot about what the actual experience and the company itself is like.
Magic Leap originally lied about the concept video they posted to youtube, then retroactively white-washed it after they got caught by Time Magazine.
The most infamous misleading video that currently claims to be a "concept video" was originally deceptively titled "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap" and described as "This is a game we’re playing around the office right now". Only AFTER they got busted, did Magic Leap retroactively change the title and description so they were not so blatantly false and misleading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM
Before they got busted and white-washed the lies, a skeptical Time magazine reporter didn't think it looked real, and asked Magic Leap about it directly. The official Magic Leap company spokesman mendaciously lied to him that "the video was authentic":
http://time.com/3752343/magic-leap-video/
>It's unclear whether the video shows an actual game overlaid onto a real-world office space or just an artistic rendering of what the game might look like in the future. The way the gun rests so realistically in the gamer's hand certainly raises suspicions. Still, a company spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo that the video was authentic.
>"This is a game we’re playing around the office right now," Magic Leap wrote on its official YouTube account.
The "game they were playing around at the office" was actually called "lying to the public and investors".
Neither is an artist's conception.
I think that this is inevitably going to be a serious problem for selling a product like this to a generation that still remembers Virtual Boy.
It's going to tell you more than a CGI artist's impression nonsense.
People were able to film through the lenses for standard VR glasses. I can't find anyone that tried it for Hololens but given that they also cost several thousand dollars it's probably not that surprising. I have used the Hololens quite a bit and I can't see any reason why you couldn't film from the eye's point of view.
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One of the funniest eras of advertising was the ads for HD TV broadcast on 480p TV. They’d always include all these video clips & that always made me laugh :-)
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I'm torn on this, on one hand it's a bit shady, on the other I get why they're doing it. The only impressive bit about this piece of hardware is to actually experience virtual 3D objects projected onto the real world. If you capture a 2D video of this through the lens you're effectively left with very mediocre 3D models in a darkened environment. There's simply no way it can look good without cheating. It'll look like VR but worse.
I went to a magic leap developer event and tried the headset first hand. It was truly magical. It made me giggle. Now, at the current price point it’s too high for me to buy as a toy and I haven’t really been struck with any killer app ideas to buy it as a dev kit, but I really think it’s an extremely cool piece of kit.
I think they are pretty cool but I wear glasses. Not entirely uncommon amongst their target market. Lens inserts kill the share-ability of the thing and mean that it's basically tailored to my personal prescription.
They made a really myopic decision to exclude the short-sighted.
Same. I tried it in 2016 during an interview and it was incredible... but I don’t have a use case for it and so can’t justify.
That's just how it goes with AR, you can find some amateur clips people have tried to shoot through the lens themselves but it's very difficult. Even Microsoft doesn't shoot through the lens and has gotten similar flack. Best they can do is composite imaging, which actually looks worse than through the lens.
When you're selling someone a dream, especially their own dream, fantasy always needs to be presented as reality.
Looks like they're making money from investors rather than customers, and the strongest marketing efforts are probably not focused on things which would appeal to ordinary buyers.
it's a bit better than the hololens, but it's a much less slick piece of hardware.
I thought the same thing. Even with VR people held cameras up to the displays, or projected what they saw onto a monitor. With magic leap it was sooo secret.
I assumed garbage. I'm still not sure what I would be supposed to do with them.
VR allowed the signal going to the headset to also be displayed onto a regular monitor since the signal was the full image. With AR, it's just overlaying something onto a lens you see through to be able to see the real world. That signal displayed onto a regular monitor would probably just show the object with a matte or essentially the object over a black background. Think of a transparent PNG but in motion. That's not very exciting.
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I'd love to know how close the shipping product is to what Kevin Kelly and other journalists were shown under NDA before release.
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Its not bad but it wouldn't make sense really. Microsoft built a custom camera rig to show off the Hololens which they could have done.
This is why we always said “shot through the glasses” at CastAR.
TFA says that they've shipped around 6000 units so far, how come nobody has made an independent video of the product yet? Surely some of these early adopters have a Youtube channel?
There are plenty of independent videos available. Here's Tested's in-depth review from last year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrq2akzdFq8
Magic Leap One has been for sale for 6 months. At $2.6B in total funding, thats $433,333 per unit for 6,000 units. The sticker price is $2300 per unit.
By comparison the Nintendo VirtualBoy was for sale for one year at $180(in 1995/$300 in 2018) and sold 770,000 units[1].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Boy
Man, a Virtual Boy comparison is just the deftest diss one could possibly offer here.
The VB also makes me wonder if AR isn’t practically impossible for the foreseeable future since lots has changed since then, but not the vaporware of this stuff.
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> 6,000 units
This number gets more mind-blowing the more you think about it.
It's small enough that one needs to start considering the units bought by management, employees, investors, suppliers, competitors, et cetera to say nothing of their friends and families.
A friend worked for them and (if I recall correctly) employees got a free unit. Not sure if that’s included in this number.
Honestly, with high priced dev kits they just need to be given out for free like Valve did with the Vive. Magic leap has given out thousands just to get devs on board.
That’s not how funding works. If you believe the product is worth exactly what you pay that’s not funding, that’s buying. Funding is the belief that at some point the ownership will be worth the wait given the investment.
That’s not how funding works, but it is how profit works.
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That sounds like buying with extra steps. I agree its a flawed comparison but still interesting
Let this be a lesson:
Working prototypes trump all theory.
I heard all silicon valley gurus stating they were "bearish on VR, bullish on "AR". This proliferated as a mantra throughout the industry. I thought they were wrong then, and believed the opposite - because I had a working VR headset that was awesome, but had only heard somewhat meh things about existing AR prototypes.
Until great AR hardware comes out, I'm still sticking with the same opinion.
I still think this write up by Michael Abrash (from 2012) is still the best argument about why AR is hard: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-...
Though there has been some progress since then.
Interesting article. Here's Abrash's wry summary of the problems facing AR:
Leave aside the issues associated with tracking objects in the real world in order to know how to virtually modify and interact with them. Leave aside, too, the issues associated with tracking, processing, and rendering fast enough so that virtual objects stay glued in place relative to the real world. Forget about the fact that you can’t light and shadow virtual objects correctly unless you know the location and orientation of every real light source and object that affects the scene, which can’t be fully derived from head-mounted sensors. Pay no attention to the challenges of having a wide enough AR field of view so that it doesn’t seem like you’re looking through a porthole, of having a wide enough brightness range so that virtual images look right both at the beach and in a coal mine, of antialiasing virtual edges into the real world, and of doing all of the above with a hardware package that’s stylish enough to wear in public, ergonomic enough to wear all the time, and capable of running all day without a recharge. No, ignore all that, because it’s at least possible to imagine how they’d be solved, however challenging the engineering might be.
Fix all that, and the problem remains: how do you draw black?
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It depends on your definitions. You don't need a headset for pretty interesting AR. If I could just point a phone at things and get genuinely useful information as an overlay, I'd consider that a pretty decent AR application. Sure, the same thing in a pair of stylish glasses might be even better but it's not strictly necessary.
I see phone AR as a pointless gimmick. Like comparing a 1970s video game to PS4 video game. Yes both can be fun but pong is not really comparable to GTA5. Phone AR is so far off from Black Mirror AR. I can imagine every teenage girl spending all their time playing with their friends in AR, having their friends appear in their bedroom instead of just on Facetime. With AR glasses, some future version where they are no more intrusive than normal reading glasses, I can't imagine them not doing it. I can imagine all the youtube AR cooking classes will just project directly on your kitchen counter where you can either stand directly beside the chef or cover the same space, have your friends appear on the sofa next to you for facetime, etc... When it actually gets there it will be compelling in the extreme and non-geeks will flock to it like they did to iPhone. Until then it will stay in the realm of Apple Newton.
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> If I could just point a phone at things and get genuinely useful information as an overlay, I'd consider that a pretty decent AR application.
Layar [0] was an attempt at that a decade ago on Android. Seems to be completely dead now though.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2009/10/layar-android-hands-on/
I think this is actually why it's so hard. I can experience AR today without buying an expensive and clunky piece of hardware.
If I couldn't get a demo, it's a cool enough concept that I might be tempted and they would get revenue and also the refinement that mass usage can help fuel.
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Agreed. I think that Google/Apple have the right idea here. I am especially fond of Google's applications of AR in maps and translations as those use cases are both common and useful.
I've tried Hololens and it is honestly pretty amazing. The field of view really sucks but I'm sure they'll improve that, and it doesn't actually matter quite so much for AR.
But it is still a less compelling proposition than VR. The main market is games where seeing the real world is kind of pointless. Good VR is much more immersive, and being taken to another world is much cooler than seeing some floating planets or fish or whatever in an office (even though that is cool).
Gaming is like the lowest on my list of applications for AR... At the top is some kind of AR desktop environment that makes spinning up and managing arbitrary virtual monitors/windows a snap.
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I think good AR is most important if it can be sufficiently miniaturized. I can totally see myself wearing AR glasses if they don’t look like I’m wearing Godzilla on my head.
Isn’t it the exact opposite? Only with AR can you turn everyday spaces, like a home or an office, into games... with VR you’d be bumping into walls and tripping over things
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What they are referring to more than likely is not the technology, but the business case. AR has more compelling / lucrative use cases than VR. While everyone is waiting for the killer Consumer VR app, Enterprise AR is blowing up.
> Enterprise AR is blowing up
citation?
The units i've used have worked reasonably well. but nobody is paying $2300 for them.
This partially comes from the SV all-or-nothing attitude: you can have AR on all the time (and thus revenue stream all the time), but you can't do that with VR.
Also the potential markets affected. VR really only affects the games & entertainment market, which is big, but best case you're revolutionizing Hollywood. AR is applicable to a wide variety of B2B markets - surgery, piloting, hazardous waste removal, firefighting, the military, mining, tourism, deep sea exploration, science, space colonization, etc. - which collectively have much more money spent on them. Your total addressable market is basically the amount of money you can capture if everything goes perfectly, which is dictated by the amount spent on substitutes. AR has many more substitutes than VR.
Same reason cryptocurrency is hot - it threatens the financial/insurance/ownership industry, which as a $13T behemoth is currently the biggest economic prize on earth.
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I think it's coming sooner than later but Magic Leap definitely coughed up their lead in the space and spent a ton of money in the process. Microsoft have an equivalent product and I think we'll see Apple Glasses in a year or so.
I think we will most likely see a true first generation AR device the next year or so. Apple Glasses will at the very least be 4 to 5 years out imo.
I bought one second-hand a couple months ago. It's neat and all, but between the poor software and the severe extent to which it darkens the rest of the world, it's a pretty resounding 'meh'. I still have hopes for using it for productivity, but it honestly doesn't hold a candle to the original Hololens. (Can't speak to the Hololens 2 yet; going to get one in a little while though, hopefully!)
I haven't gotten a chance to try Magic Leap myself, but if you think that Magic Leap doesn't hold a candle to the original Hololens, then in it is dead in the water imo. I was somewhat annoyed with how small the field of view was on Hololens, and overall it was a pretty janky experience that I wouldn't recommend to anyone except those who just want to try the first "real" AR headset product out here and attempt writing code for it.
Hololens 2 is already publicly available, and I had a chance to play with it for a bit. All I am going to say is, if you thought the original Hololens was decent enough, you will be blown away by Hololens 2. It is leaps ahead of the first version, both in terms of the UX and the tech. Even everything auxiliary about it just feels "right", stuff like the flippable visor, easier head mount, etc. It is the kind of a device that I would legitimately consider using occasionally at home to read news and do other stuff while lazying around doing other things.
It isn't at the original iPhone levels of "whoa, we are entering a new era of how people use their personal computing devices" yet, but the overall experience is such a large step up from the original Hololens, it is clear as day to me that AR is quickly getting closer to the point where it will be dominating personal computing niche currently occupied by smartphones.
How was the comfort level on the HL2? That and the low FOV were what killed the original for me, as my use case is replacing my screens. I'm actually getting ready to commit to working 100% through VR -- Quest -- and AR -- currently ML1, but seriously considering the HL2...
If I didn't have a toddler to watch while I work much of the time, I'd probably just go all-in on VR (I'm currently working 30-50% through the Quest), but being able to see the world is kind of essential for those times haha.
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As someone who was a bit underwhelmed by the original Hololens, this assessment is utterly disappointing. Don't get me wrong, a lot about the Hololens was quite interesting, but clearly far from being ready for primetime.
The original Hololens was underwhelming in some regards, but they got a few things very right: text was crisp in most circumstances, the contrast was great, and the software mostly Just Worked (TM). All of these things are absent on the Magic Leap. The only advantages it really has are the controller (which is ... okay, I guess) and comfort.
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The Information has been unlocking the occasional article for HN users for a while now. I asked if they'd do that for this one and they agreed. Thanks!
(The submitted URL was https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/06/report-magic-leaps-early-d..., which made sense while the original source was behind a hard paywall. Changed now.)
Thanks dang! I specifically used the TechCrunch article for that reason and am glad you were able to get a hole cut in the paywall.
That's nice! I noticed a modal but I closed before reading it. I could parse (not in time to avoid closing) that it was welcoming HN users.
I am curious now what it was saying.
EDIT: Got it again, it says:
"Welcome Hacker News Readers
Before you quickly exit out of this popup, consider subscribing for $10/month for your first 3 months"
I was quicker than they expected lol
Welp, at least my copy was on point.
I'm not sure what "unlocking" the article, but assume that we should be able to see the full article. Currently, I can only see the two first paragraphs and the article ends with "with direct knowledge of the discussions" and then a "No subscription? You're missing out." ad. Seems to still be behind a paywall.
Odd, I can definitely see the full thing. You're definitely clicking through from here on HN, right?
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I think all of these things are true:
AR is really hard and anything that does it at all is impressive and could, believably, be the precursor to a revolutionary product.
All current AR tech is more expensive than seems sustainable for a consumer product. It's also difficult to develop for and has few (if any) compelling experiences. These things are endemic to early stage products, but it is also possible that they will endure long enough to cripple AR as a product in the foreseeable future.
Everyone in the AR industry is guilty of overhype. Moreso than early tech start ups in general. That said, Magic Leap seems to have behaved significantly worse than its peers.
Part of the effect of the hype machine is that it's hard to get any depiction of what it looks like to look through the lenses of the products. This comes, as far as I can tell, from the likely true idea that the experiential qualities of AR cannot be captured through 2D video and such video would be somewhat deceptive. To me, it seems like the practice of releasing visualization videos is more deceptive but reasonable people can disagree.
-----
It feels to me like a lot of AR discussion comes down to people asserting that one of these genres of view is true in response to someone else expressing a different one of these views.
To me, it feels like it's hard to talk usefully about the current state of the industry. The promise is very cool, the products are early stage. So many factors legitimately excuse current failings. Do people feel like we the tech is public or mature enough that we can talk about the real limits or likely arc of the tech at all, or are we trapped between hype and development?
On the other hand the more modest AR in Pokemon Go has been a huge hit.
Is pretending to be something that you're not really "modest"?
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Karl Guttag estimated in the same range last month: https://www.kguttag.com/2019/11/10/all-magic-leap-patents-ha...
His whole blog is a pretty compelling read on the current and near future state of AR.
He's underestimating (though not by a whole lot probably). The 6k numbers from the above article refer to the first 6 months sale. Guttag is talking about the last 18 months. Also doesn't account for the headsets that have been seeded to devs.
Haven't they learned from General Magic [1]?
>“Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.” [2]
If you call your company magic then the product most likely is not just at the brink of your understanding but so far out that it is impossible to close the gap by hard work alone.
Steve Jobs mentioned in a very early interview somewhere that he wants to build a computer for everybody. He waited years and decades patiently until every duck was in line and he could launch the iPhone.
This thought doesn't lead to a meaningful point. I am just wondering why he and Apple (e.g. the A7[3]) got the timing right several times but many others push too soon or wait too long.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21704954
On Apple (as opposed to Magic Leap), I believe a lot of it is figuring out a customer need and audience that can be satisfied by a set of technologies that are just at the edge of mature, and then not shipping the product until it actually satisfies those needs. This means not shipping a technology as a product just because it may be useful in the future, and it means resetting a products at the prototype stage often.
Both are hard for startups to take on. The former because many of the founders are heavily focused on a technology they came up with and attempt to shoehorn it into products that don't quite make sense. The latter because it requires either very patient investors or a big bank account.
Both are also hard for established, mature companies to take on. The former because they seem to believe that innovation for innovations sake is a useful thing to do, and for whatever reason the tech press seems to encourage them. The latter because they are focused on delivering quarterly results over building long term platform and ecosystem value, and because politically a cancelled project can be career ending.
I didn’t even know they had gotten beyond vaporware!
Why would someone spend $2,300 on this equipment other than as a developer kit? I assume there is virtually no compelling content or services available to make a consumer interested in shelling out that amount of money, or even 1/10th that amount of money.
The tech they were hyping (FSD) never materialized and is very much vaporware. Every one following got disappointed when they pivoted to hololens-like stuff...
Fiber scan display in hi res would’ve required moving at 14× speed of sound: https://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-fiber-scanning...
It's still vaporware. I want whatever it is they were suggesting with the whale-in-a-gymnasium demo.
Same. The only times I've ever heard Magic Leap substantially discussed, including user experience, was on HN. I was under the impression it was still in something like a closed beta.
It's likely selling to developers. You'll probably see Magic Leap experiences get demos at conferences or popup events. And maybe some niche use cases in industry.
There's a lot of discussion here of how this was predictable given the absence of a visible prototype for so long, and the over-the-top secrecy of the project. However, for me this was a predetermined failure when I first read an interview with the founder. Classic Super-Visionary snake-oil salesman. He could say nothing about the product, except for how it would change the world more than the world had ever been changed in the history of world changes. Sure, ok. I don't remember Larry and Sergey being like that (because they had a real product). Or Bezos, etc.
Frankly, I'm shocked at how the investors couldn't see past this CEO.
I think it's pretty common for investors to see someone as a Snakeoil-salesman but still invest. It only matters if they think they'll get a return.
Well, I don't have all the data points, but it seems to me that snakeoiler should stand out as an anti-pattern. Maybe VCs see it differently. Maybe they'd inform me that the snakeoil CEOs are sometimes frauds, but the non-snakeoil CEOs always fail (not enough energy, not charismatic enough to attract talent, etc).
("Huckster"... that's the word I was looking for)
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The hype, overfunding, bust is very Segway.
I was very skeptical about this company, but I actually got to demo the technology a few nights ago, and I have to say my mind was blown. There are definitely a lot of kinks to work out, but I would say that the experience was not too far off from the whale video they used to have on their homepage, probably better. In the demo I saw, you are immersed in a sort of coral reef, but it's all within the confines of your living room. It basically looks like you're living room has turned into a fish tank. It feels real enough that I wanted to reach out and touch the fish swimming around in front of me. Yes, it wasn't perfect at mapping the room, but the technology was much more impressive than I imagined. And the fact that it is augmented reality rather than virtual reality made things much more interesting, because you're interacting with the real world and the virtual world at the same time.
This 2015 story did already sent the wrong message, blatantly ripping off other people in the industry.
Magic Leap Ripped Off Those Awesome UI Concepts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8974976
And as if blatantly ripping off other people in the industry wasn't enough, then there was also the sexist company culture and blatant nepotism of Abovitz hiring his old high school buddy Eric Akerman as vice president of IT, who is but one of the many people they have to thank for the lawsuit about the hostile sexist work environment, and the fact that their leadership, design team, marketing material, and target demographic excluded and insulted women:
>This is an action for hostile environment sex discrimination and retaliation brought by Tannen Campbell ("Campbell" or "plaintiff"), former Head of Strategic Marketing and Brand Identity and, later, Vice President of Strategic Marketing and Brand Identity, against her former employer, Magic Leap, Inc. (“Magic Leap” or “defendant”).zer00eyz
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>"Eric Akerman, vice president of IT, is a high school buddy of Abovitz. He is a loud and outspoken and several misogynistic comments have emanated from his department and from him."
>"Vice president of IT Akerman, on Nov. 8, 2016, told a large group of people who asked why he voted for Trump that it was 'because Melania is hot.'"
>Campbell, one of whose responsibilities was to help Magic Leap with the “pink/blue problem,” had to endure hostile environment sex discrimination while proposing ways, not only to make Magic Leap’s product more woman friendly, but also to make the workplace more diverse and inclusive. Campbell was terminated after (and because) she, like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who blurted out that the Emperor was naked, challenged Magic Leap’s CEO, Rony Abovitz, to acknowledge the depths of misogyny in Magic Leap’s culture and take steps to correct an gender imbalance that negatively affects the company’s core culture and renders it so dysfunctional it continues to delay the launch of a product that attracted billions of investment dollars. Campbell also raised concerns that what Magic Leap showed the public in marketing material was not what the product actually could do—admonitions ignored in favor of her male colleagues’ assertions that the images and videos presented on Magic Leap’s website and on YouTube were “aspirational,” and not Magic Leap’s version of “alternate facts.”
>Campbell met September 28, 2016 with Magic Leap CFO Henry and Head of Operations Tina Tuli for a conference call with the CFO and leadership team at R/GA, an award-winning international advertising agency that was Magic Leap’s advertising agency of record. During the call, Henry said of the product under development, “I’m sitting here between two beautiful ladies. They’re not going to want to put a big ugly device over their pretty faces. And I have an office with glass doors, I don’t want people to see me with these beautiful girls with ugly things on their faces.” Later, one of the male R/GA executives on the call asked Campbell if Henry frequently made sexist comments like he had made. A female executive at R/GA also was offended by Henry’s remarks.
>As an example of more egregious comments, Campbell told Abovitz of the “Three Os” incident and Vlietstra’s lack of any meaningful discipline in response. As an example of unconscious bias, she told him of an IT employee who was helping Campbell a new logo into the email system. Cognizant that she was taking up a lot of the employee’s time with minor changes to get the logo “perfect,” Campbell apologized for taking up so much of the employee’s time, to which he responded, “Oh, don’t worry, I get it. You’re a woman and you care that things look pretty. I’m a man. I just get the work done.”
>Euen Thompson, an IT Support Lead, on November 16, 2016, gave a tutorial to a group of seven new hires, including two women, how to use Magic Leap’s IT equipment and resources. One woman asked Thompson a question in front of the group and Thompson responded, “Yeah, women always have trouble with computers.” The women in the group, in apparent disbelief, asked Thompson to repeat what he said and Thompson replied, “In IT we have a saying; stay away from the Three Os: Orientals, Old People and Ovaries.”
> During Campbell’s last four months at Magic Leap, Abovitz—who always had been pouty and prone to temper-tantrums, began to dig his heels in even more in the face of dissenting ideas and to explode ever more frequently into child-like fits of rage, threatening retribution when he didn’t get his way, felt betrayed or was portrayed publically in an unfavorable light.
>[...] the “Wizards Wanted” section of its website. Indeed, given that a “wizard” generally is defined as “a man who has magical powers,” and virtually without exception images of wizards are male, Magic Leap’s recruiting verbiage contains a not-so-subtle “women-need-not-apply” message.
>Senior Engineer Eric Adams sent out an email December 4, 2015 through a company email list serv for social activities for Magic Leap employees and their families, which email bore the subject line, “Board (sic) Wives at home while you are loving it at the Leap,” which stated:
----
Hello Leapers:
My wife is starting a Google group outside of the Magic Leap locked domain.
It is called “Magic Leap spouses” and should be findable as such.
For as cool as this is, cost is the problem.
$2300 is an expensive experiment, one that might not be for me.
You want to get developers to bet on new tech, to innovate, then get the cost way down. Make me as an individual developer willing to take the risk that I might not have the time or the mindset to follow through.
I can't imagine that the cost of production is more than $500... start selling them at that price point.
I strongly suspect $2300 was at or below their breakeven cost, even not including amortization of R&D, NRE, or CapEx. They are presumably well aware that building a platform dependent on applications requires network effects that can only come into play if you have a large install base of units. I don't imagine they attempted to sell the hardware at a profit, which would work against that.
As other commenters have noted though, the problem is not so much the price as not having a real target use case or audience. Hololens is similarly expensive, but Microsoft cleverly did a late pivot before launching the first one to an audience that actually had a need for it.
>I can't imagine that the cost of production is more than $500... start selling them at that price point.
You can't imagine that the cost of custom bleeding-edge hardware produced in four-digit-volume runs is more than $500?
In theory a lot of this funding should've been spent securing sales so they wouldn't be producing the items on a bespoke scale but instead would've been able to get the cost per unit down. I'm sort of amazed at the funding this has received when it seems to be performing like an underwhelming kickstarter.
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The original Microsoft HoloLens was $3000-$5000 and sold 50,000 units in two years. Now the US Army is paying them $480 million for 100,000 units. The problem isn't the price IMO, but the fact that Magic Leap hasn't been able to make a case for what exactly it should be used for. Random enthusiasts aren't going to shell out thousands of dollars, but a company or government definitely will.
The problem is that it doesn't work, it's bad. You can make a bad product with a company with a "valuation" in the billions, we need to start to understand that. And there's good alternatives to the product that actually do work better at a similar price point.
This is not a "product market fit" problem, this is bad tech being pushed down the pipes until it makes it out of a fucked up company.
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Maybe they don't want to sell very many yet? If the software is rough the last thing they want is a lot of unhappy developers complaining about the state of things.
I wouldn't panic just yet. I bet for every order of magnitude they reduce the price they will increase sales by an order of magnitude. Get it under $100 and the will sell millions of units.
Even worse they had a $2300 headset that they're selling to developers and they weren't showing real footage anywhere. I'm a be enthusiast and I watched all the videos and "news" on it and was thinking "show me the money". Turns out he had money it's the product they said they had that they didn't.
I agree that $2300 is a steep price for an experiment but I'm not sure you would want to base your price on the cost of production - why is that any better than any other arbitrary price?
Why not follow the model used by consoles and cell phones? Sell the hardware at a loss and take a 30% cut of software sales.
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The very big disappointment comes from that they promised (kind of) that they would get Fiber Scanning Displays working. What I gather is they had a sort of, more or less working, giant machinery prototype (The Beast) that was very impressive for the few who got to try it. But they never actually managed to make the tech viable in a headset form factor. Also unclear if they had more than one color... Still very curious about what they managed to accomplish on that front but I now doubt we will ever know.
Exactly. We never got the Magic Leap. I remember reading that surgeons were already using the tech so it 100% existed and just needed to be productized. I figured google-ers had taken a close look and had a pretty good idea about how to productize it. Maybe it is worth a billion, I thought to myself. What we got was a Hololens clone. It should be called the Magic One because there's no technological Leap in it.
I shot a video with Tom Furness from the UW a few years ago. He was totally burned by the UW on the patents sold to magic leap and didn't get a dime. Then in the interview Tom called the product total BS because they will never never ship the true waveguide system.
The demo in lab was shown to the investors. They were sold a bill of goods because the technology simply does not scale down to a headset size with proper heat dissipation and power needs. Ever hear of Microvision?
The bottom line? Magic Leap was completely arrogant and gave Devs the run-around. Then they hyped up the market with the fail whale videos that we're all CGI and served no practical need showcasing the technology helping to save time or fix a problem.
The dev kits shipped did showcase a lot of hard problems that needed to be solved and integrated. A cool glimpse of the future. However the waveguide system that they hyped investors on was never shipped in the dev kits. They used smoke and mirrors to fool people.
Magic leap is really based off of old Microvision hype with the great backroom demo for investors that will not manifest into a real product anytime in the near future.
Microsoft's going to own the Enterprise in this space with integrated cloud scale systems powering the headset.
I've tried the Magic Leap, HoloLens, helped launch the Gear VR, and was early in the old Valve VR room. Remember kids, don't believe the hype.
> integrated cloud scale systems
a computer?
How are we even surprised. They are the Theranos of AR. They pushed the 'fake it until you make it' mantra a bit far, and now reality is biting hard.
Hopefully they will still trigger a revolution of some sort... but this was predictable.
This is way overblown. They have at least a Hololens equivalent, and if you value occlusion, they're ahead. And that's without Microsoft's reach. Equating them to vaporware isn't fair at all.
Also, from the reviews that I have read their software seems to be pretty good, at least when it comes to spatial awareness and surface detection.
Most reviews are positive but main problem seems to be the price and the fact that the overall end-to-end experience still feels pretty rough.
Have you used one?
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The difference is their product works (to some degree) as opposed to being total vaporware like Theranos.
Mind that the advertised technology relied on Fiber Scanning Displays and extensive computing power – and I'm not aware of this having been refined to a producible and marketable item.
The original product is still vaporware.
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Is anything else expected out of it? I mean, the way the company has rolled on, starting with a lot of in fighting, then releasing a bunch CGI videos about experience and never actually releasing any real use cases. They ended up launching the product without really showing anyone what the experience will be. People want to see what it is before spending an obscene amount on it. I fully expected it to fail.
AR is a somewhat difficult sell, particularly with limited software available for it. Just imagine playing the interactive games they promoted in their demo videos, it would cost $10,000 in gear alone to get a 4 player game going.
To me, AR sounds great when you are mobile and apps can supplement reality with useful information. Playing Minecraft or some kind of space invaders game in my kitchen isn't that much more appealing than playing a game in a full virtual environment.
AR for games is an even harder sell IMHO because it's very hard for the game developer to make use of your space in a compelling way since they have no idea what it might look like, at least for home use.
I could see it as a carnival or arcade attraction where the AR application is tightly coupled with the space it is in, but this is a niche application.
>Employees started receiving free headsets earlier this year, with some managers telling staffers it was because the company couldn’t sell enough and had extra inventory, said multiple people.
I applied for their developer grant program, and got offered a consolation prize of a free headset - that they wanted to send me a 1099 for the full price! Would have had to pay $600-1000 in taxes on it, so had to reject. Nice tax write-off opportunity with a bonus of good PR!
Well, the crazy thing is, the underlying technology that ML was originally based on (i.e. U. Of Wahington's HIT lab VRD), is absolutely a leading approach in the path to AR. I personally think it's what will ultimately make AR the medium for applications people actually want (dare I say, need) to use every day. Ronny got that part right. Where he failed was in not investing that $2B+ fully into the glasses development and solving hard AR software problems like real time occlusion. Instead, this guy hired "story tellers" to design content for a technology that he didn't have yet.
For the second mistake, let me say only that people in AR marketing demos should not be smiling. If they are, you're introducing the wrong product.
The core idea was on the right track, but the conductor let the train derail very early on.
This is an early beta product for wealthy tech-savvy trend-following early-adopting VR-wanting consumers. That's a tiny market.
Classic case of a company having no idea what they're selling and who they're selling it to but expecting billions just for existing.
Isn't it more a classic case of a company underestimating the challenges of bringing a prototype to market? Didn't magic leap's tech demo work on like a supercomputer strapped to the user's back?
Yes, but I argue that's the same thing. The end user defines the product. They could've developed and sold the original technology is a different way (stationary entertainment, movies, etc) and be far more successful.
It’s expensive, and it’s incredibly difficult to convey in video what it’s like to wear one.
If you get a chance to try one, I HIGHLY recommend it. It’s an incredible experience. Even just the demos.
I won a unit from Twilio conference. I haven't touched it in a year but I often think about turning it back on. I really hope they get more content for it.
It's too expensive.
$2300? Yikes.
Curious if the quoted 100k-unit estimate was for the so-called "Creator Edition" (clearly targeted at devs and early adopters), or if it was supposed to include a more mass-market unit that hasn't shipped.
The main problem with ML is that they don't have enough apps, that could practically be usable with AR technology. They marketed with Whale and GoT app, which is nothing compared to the spatial awareness and real world tracking they could have presented.
They need to start advertising like Occulus is doing, buying up literally all the ad slots on Youtube.
By comparison, I haven't seen a single ad for Magic Leap anywhere on the internet. People aren't buying it b/c they've never heard of it.
Imo, they are not really trying for the Consumer market right now, and these units are aimed at Developers, who are needed to create content for the platform. Kinda big point that was skipped over in the article, but it still paints ML into a corner.
> They need to start advertising like Occulus is doing, buying up literally all the ad slots on Youtube.
Not everyone has the money of Facebook behind them. ;)
Am I going to drop $2300 sight unseen? No. I’d be willing to go to a Microsoft store or Apple store to try one out. The technology might be great, but they need to work on their marketing.
>He then told employees to “stay the course” and “protect the company” by keeping confidential information “under lock and key.”
Classic. Instruction to team to not leak info get leaked.
Ok I knew it was bad, I didn't know it was that bad.
Lesson for the day, these guys have an excellent team when you need to fundraise, not so much when it comes to execution.
it's always worse than you think
Magic Leap is proof that first mover advantage is fictional (or at least it's not an iron law that guarantees success). They spent large sums of money to put out the least half-baked AR product on the market. They would be in better shape now if they hadn't grown so fast.
That being said, AR truly is the future. In a few years there will be multiple digital universes overlaid onto our world. Magic Leap should be commended for their technical accomplishments, but can they stay solvent until their dream of the future is realized? I honestly hope they pull through.
First mover is an advantage, but it can't overcome the problem of releasing a product before its underlying technology is ready. It's not first mover so much as the company that moves at just the right time.
Magic Leap smells a bit like the Apple Newton. Too far ahead of its time to be a market success, even with so much effort behind it.
> In a few years there will be multiple digital universes overlaid onto our world.
I think applications like HUD displays on car windshields is an obvious place where it will be big for regular consumers. There are a bunch of interesting applications for commercial use too. Other than that, I have a hard time seeing much interest in regular people until they can eliminate the need for glasses or goggles.
There are many applications that, together, may make it worthwhile to wear AR glasses:
- Laptop monitor replacement or augmentation
- Indoor and outdoor navigation
- Identifying an available self-driving cab and dropping a waypoint for it to navigate to
- Immediate POV recording + sharing of ephemeral events (many people will like this, even if the HN crowd won't)
- Shared viewing of footage, large 3D graphics, or news items with your friends no matter where you are
- "Digitalized" brick and mortar fashion stores where you can easily identify clothes that fit you or that are in your price point. An enhanced view would show additional information, such as online reviews of each item.
- All the filtering features of the digital world can be brought into real life, including filtering out of advertisements
- Games games games. It sounds comical to say, but Pokemon will become real. People will run around with poke balls that release increasingly intelligent digital creatures. In Harry Potter AR, people will be able to cast digital spells by waving their wand in a certain way and saying the right thing. WOW or Runescape players could dawn their achievement capes irl
- Aesthetic landscape transformation. I imagine there will be a "default view," "modified view," and "off view" of the world. If you go to Times Square and enable the default view, you would be immersed in a digital world curated by the brands that advertise there. If you use a modified view, you can see whatever you want, whether that's anarchist graffiti or cyberpunk renderings. In the off view, all advertisements and all screens would be rendered invisible
- Usable IKEA instructions
- Non-boring meetings at work with interactive holographic renderings of enterprise projects
- Remote guidance and instruction (enabling emergency plant maintenance by people who have no clue how to repair a broken pipe)
- Digitally enhanced classrooms. Imagine a physics lab with a 3D rocket or roller coaster sim overlaid with force diagrams.
- Multilingual digital tour guide bots that can explain every nook and cranny of a city for free
- Guided construction of elaborate, ML-generated Lego structures
That's just the beginning. There are probably use cases we couldn't even imagine yet, kind of like how some technologies that are out today seemed like science fiction 10 years ago.
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> eliminate the need for glasses or goggles
What is the other option? Implanting projectors in our eyeballs? Having some drone flying in front of your face that projects stuff right onto your eyeballs?
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Occlusion is cool and all but Microsoft ate their lunch.
microsoft ate my lunch too
I’m actually surprised they’ve sold any. Are there any practical uses/games/anything useful or enjoyable you can do with them?
All these talks on AR VR and I still haven’t seen a single killer app that would make me want to buy it.
I work at a 3d company that's starting to land some contracts for AR. I don't think you're going to see consumer reasons for a while; instead look to colleges and other training platforms. AR and VR are gonna be huge in the medical fields - learning from a 3d model is so much easier than a textbook image.
I hope so, medical field is in a major need for innovation.
>He still personally signs off on new hires, who are told that it’s harder to get a job at Magic Leap than it is to be accepted into Harvard
I doubt that. South Florida isn't crawling with engineering talent, we all left. Having known, studied, and worked with several people who work(ed) there, I sincerely doubt they can claim to have such a deep bench of talent.
South Florida doesn't need to have all that talent. Pretty much none of the people I know who were considering offers from Magic Leap, with some eventually accepting them, were from Florida at all.
Lol at "Dented Reality". I would prefer "Demented Reality" though.
It will likely become the next WeWork
AR fundamentally can't work.
To work, it has to understand the world around us. It needs to be full AI.
There's also no reason why we would want it. Nothing. As we develop ways to augment our world a simple phone can deliver the info.
VR has a use case for entertainment. It has no business or education case.
Work is done by reducing dimensions and abstracting things not adding dimensions and unabstraction.
But at least entertainment will propel the VR industry forward so we can see if anything else pops out.
Magic Leap faked all use cases from day one. It was obvious on multiple levels it was vaporware
I have a feeling this comment will be linked on HN eventually (in about a decade) the same way people link that one infamous comment about Dropbox being an unnecessary thing that no one needs or wants. Or the same way people in 2019 mock those from a couple of decades ago who were saying that internet was "just a fad" that will go away sooner rather than later.
AR has been around since 1990. VR decades before so times ticking on what a fad is and you have to make a case why this decade AR will start?
Plus I did premise it on full AI to understand the world to augment. Technically we already augment with the 100 year old phone allowing us to talk to someone far away anywhere-ish.
Your case why in a decade we want AR which is a overlayed response and a camera that can analyse the world using real technology. What will it do? Sci Fiction movies struggle to come up with more than ads or more intrusive notifications ;) Magic Leap made beautiful whales that looked pretty, cost a fortune to produce and would have worked equally well in a movie which is how everyone viewed it, in a 2D advertisement. There was no reason to AR it even if you could afford to do it in the wild.
Most museums, a place of high structure and high value struggle to even create simple voice overlays of art work.
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I kind of called it 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13972212
I saw this coming long ago. I wrote this on June 7th 2018: https://arccompute.com/blog/why-augmented-reality-is-not-rea...