Comment by fossuser
6 years ago
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.
Likewise. The same meme was also used for trashing the sorry state of No Man's Sky release in 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5jWtz3rzco
To their credit, the developers diligently kept working on the game and I've heard it's quite polished now. I kind of doubt we'll see the same turnaround story with Magic Leap, but who knows.
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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.
Bill Atkinson is the humblest, sweetest, most astronomically talented guy -- practically the opposite of Rony Abovitz! I think they're on very different drugs.
The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson, as told to Leo Laporte.
"In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California." ...
https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp...
Full interview with lots more details about the development of HyperCard:
https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=f...
Bill Atkinson's guest lecture in Brad Meyer's CMU 05-640 Interaction Techniques class, Spring 2019, Feb 4, 2019:
https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
Including polaroids of early Lisa development.
About PhotoCard:
http://www.billatkinson.com/aboutPhotoCard.html
PhotoCard by Bill Atkinson is a free app available from the iTunes App store, that allows you to create custom postcards using Bill's nature photos or your own personal photos, then send them by email or postal mail from your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.
Bill Atkinson, Mac software legend and world renowned nature photographer, has created an innovative application that redefines how people create and send postcards.
With PhotoCard you can make dazzling, high resolution postcards on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, and send them on-the-spot, through email or the US Postal Service. The app is amazingly easy to use. To create a PhotoCard, select one of Bill's nature photos or one of your own personal photos. Then, flip the card over to type your message. For a fun touch, jazz up your PhotoCard with decorative stickers and stamps. If you're emailing your card, it can even include an audible greeting. When you've finished your creation, send it off to any email or postal address in the world!
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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.
That makes sense. Because I heard on a podcast, this week in tech, I think, from a VC on the panel that was an investor and the rest of the panel was comparing it to Microsoft's ar product and he was adamant that he had seen things that he couldn't talk specifics about but that it was a total game changer.
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If I could get something like that as a desktop monitor replacement, I would be ecstatic. (Assuming appropriately high resolution and refresh rates - but if it's doing eye tracking that'd have to be the case)
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Miniaturization of multifocal projection-based technology seems inevitable. What's the best way to keep track of progress in that field, and do you know when it might hit the mass market?
I've had a similar demo a few years ago from some under-the-radar Israeli company, projecting image straight to the retina. It took only a single table, and they talked about how their tech was actually better than Magic Leap – but as most of Israeli high tech, they were looking to get silently acquired by some tech giant instead of developing a product themselves. Never heard of what happened to them later.
> 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.
Theranos failed to sell automatic blood testing machines to the military so they pivoted to providing services of questionable repute.
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.
Lets not forget Rubins own mini me Magic Leap by taking over control of CastAR https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/andy-rubin-backed-ar-hardw...
and burning it to the ground with brilliant 'lets drop $100K for cardboard box design' and buy a gaming studio management https://theamphour.com/394-jeri-ellsworth-and-the-demise-of-...
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.
The most convincing "argument" for them was "well, they fooled Google into giving them a half a billion dollars, so they must have something there."
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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.