Comment by daenz
6 years ago
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.
I believe this is what you're referencing:
https://twitter.com/fernandojsg/status/1017411969169555457
Oh man I'd forgotten about that edit.
Cracks me up every time.
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Thank you for that link haha
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
Completely agree. The GM people were competent without being arrogant. They failed only because cellular data networks were not good enough at the time.
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you know that's not even the worst ted talk i've seen
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 have some VC friends tangentially related to the deal. Apparently the original demo was wild, like real magic bonkers. Everyone who tried became a believer. The projected light streams onto the user's eyes so instead of seeing an image overlayed in an intermediate layer as in most AR, the image was projected onto your retinas through this very advanced technology and optics. The issue is that the advanced technology demo used an entire room of computers and sensors for a single user, and it didn't allow the user to move around at all, just sit in a chair and have this thing projected onto your eyes. The goal was to scale this working crazy but impractacle thing into a consumer experience but they just weren't able to, so they pivoted to being another "smart glass" maker. Their tech and patents still actually work, they just aren't able to make a product out of it.
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> Magic Leap reminds me of Theranos.
Even if Magic Leap dies on the vine, I don't think they're anything like Theranos except for both being unsuccessful VC-funded companies. Theranos tried to sell fraudulent health care services. Magic Leap is trying (and failing) to build a real product. You can buy one and see what it does, and nobody's health is impacted if their experience just sucks.
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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.
Yeah, especially with the 87 million in 'quit quietly' money that Andy got for harassing his coworkers.
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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.
I was disappointed that the one I tried, I couldn't even get the UI to respond properly. Maybe it was just that unit but I could swear I recall reading of others have similar issues with the interface.
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.
I don’t think this was ever the case for Magic Leap. All threads were always full of ‘I think this is waaaay too much funding for something we haven’t even seem yet’.
I’m just confused how the press and investors were misled in such a miraculous way.
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Not everybody believed the hype. The first time I saw their original TedX video I knew for sure that Magic Leap was totally full of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY
Definitely not. HN is more pessimistic than any other forum I'm on besides Slashdot (the famous iPod burn, of course).
Are you forgetting Dropbox / "that's just rsync" and various other skeptics? No one likes anything here that seems flashy. And that's a good thing.
I think this is generally a good thing about Silicon Valley culture.
It’s the reason you get successes like Tesla or SpaceX and it’s generally good to bias towards optimism over pessimism - you get more people able to try more things and successes that have exponential returns make up for the failures.
Otherwise you get stagnation which ends poorly for everyone.
That said, optimism still requires a plan that makes sense and shipping a real product.
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.
This reads like someone who has had VR for a limited time. Yes, it’s very impressive at first, and people write posts like these. After a few years, many realize that the resolution is low, the headsets are uncomfortable, and the experiences are limited. It still has a long way to go. I do agree that it can happen, but it needs to be much better, similar to the state of AR,
> The boringness of having to "press the action button" instead of just reaching out and touch the thing I'm supposed to interact it.
but "reaching out" in VR equates to waving around a VR wand in space and pressing buttons on it, I'm not sure what's the difference?
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I'm glad to hear there are a few people happy with the current stuff. But I'll note that in the 1990s wave of VR there were people who would talk exactly like this. It was amazing; they loved it; the tech and content wasn't there yet, but surely in 10 or 20 years, we'd all be spending all our time immersed. And I'll note that James Cameron, director of Avatar, has essentially the same belief about 3D movies: https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2428530/the-problem-3d-has-...
I'm still unconvinced. And I'll note that plenty of people get the feeling of presence from novels, from comic books, from movies, from games. Getting lost in a world isn't a property of technology. It's something humans have been doing since we were telling stories around a campfire.
When we want that, that is. As you say, we just as often want distance from our experiences. And quite often we're indifferent to immersion; it's not material to the experience we seek. Movie tickets sales are down 25% since 2000. That might be in part because some people have fancy home theaters that are nearly as good, the at-home 100" screen with 7.1 sound. But I think it's mostly because people are happy watching things on laptops and tablets and phones. They mostly don't want to "be there", however much that horrifies the Martin Scorseses of the world.
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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.)
Yeah, I got to try the Quest as well, and it's what the experience should be like. No cables, no beacons, no markers, no nothing.
But the resolution and framerate is too weak right now. Needs 8K in 60fps, so it's just a matter of time.
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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"
Is there a gap there? I mean, sure, I see it conceptually, but I don't see a market gap.
Look at movies as an example. When sound came along, it basically destroyed the market for silent film. Same deal for color film. But 3D has come and gone at least twice, bumping along as a novelty in between.
I think it's going to be even more true of VR, in that doing good VR content is a) difficult, and b) a pretty different process than most non-VR content. One of the VR fans in this thread was bemoaning the lack of AAA VR content in particular. But nobody's going to be making that content unless the market is large enough to support it.
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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.
I don't think I would. I already have the experience of immersion with current screens. I don't think strapping screens to my face will improve anything. And given the metaphorical and literal headaches of trying to fool the human vision system, I don't expect that I'd enjoy anything in the facehugger category.
This might change for me if we could bypass the eyeballs and the limbs, of course.
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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
Fair point. I regret the error, and appreciate the correction.
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.
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.
You could make an occlusion shutter but I haven’t seen a small lcd with the requisite speed and resolution.
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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.
Notice that zero VR companies show you through the lens footage. This is not restricted to Magic Leap. You can find amateur attempts by owners to shoot through Magic Leap, Hololens, and various VR headsets if you go on Youtube and Twitter. But no company does this at all. Just another misunderstanding by people here who think they've found another reason to nitpick at Magic leap, but it's a widespread industry issue. VR is actually the worst about this because they only show straight from the PC output with none of the limitations you actually experience like FOV and screen door effect.
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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 :-)
A pedantic side note: analog TV broadcasts in America were 480i, not even 480p.
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.
It would at least show fidelity and detail. Instead they showed nothing so I assumed it was vaporware.
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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.
me too because people were raving about it. I wonder how much influence was peddled, given the billions invested.
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