Comment by keenmaster
6 years ago
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.
Education and games seem sensible and I already said there may be some commercial uses (although I can't imagine them ever being good enough to want to use for 8 hours a day). Nothing else you listed there offers enough of an improvement over current phone and watch based alternatives.
Outside of education, games, and commercial uses, I don't think they will be able to overcome the glasshole factor.
It's going to be a big market, but I don't think it will ever be as big as cell phones are today.
> 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?
If you or I could answer that, we could probably raise Magic Leap levels of money to develop it.