- it does lighting effects from the planes headlights
- it does particle collisions with my furniture when it crashes
- it crashes by detecting i hit the wall
It really is amazing tech but it is very unpolished. But I am very hopeful they keep pushing and it gets cheaper and more people can experience it and develop for it.
This is like the amiga. We are at the infancy of AR.
I normally don't like to pile on with negativity, but I'd argue the video does do it justice. I played with one myself (the only one I ever saw in the wild and she only had one because her SO was one of the original investors) and it was similar to what the video shows. My first experience with VR was impressive, Magic Leap was a disappointment.
The background is dark, the occlusions are bad, the hardware is large, and the FOV is poor.
Magic Leap really burned a lot of good will imo by sucking up enormous amounts of AR funding having 'demo' marketing that was at best intentionally misleading if not just fraudulent.
I'm still bullish on AR being the next platform when the hardware is ready, but I'd bet on Apple or Oculus pulling that off, I wouldn't go near anything from Magic Leap.
Yeah. I'm kind of left feeling like I'd rather fly the plane in a better looking simulated environment, with a first-person perspective. It's more flexible and fun than being tied to flying it in the environment around you.
I still haven't seen a compelling use case for AR.
Took me less than 5 minutes to think of the following:
1. Educational aspects such as being able to copy choreography by watching a virtual expert do it and still be able to see your own body mimicking the actions which she would not be able to do in VR (this could include juggling patterns, martial arts, any kind of complex motion)
2. Overlaying any number of AR layers on top of physical hardware, think of the idea that you could look at a complex circuit board and immediately get tooltip pop-ups over each integrated circuit and how they work
3. Building things in the real world located at absolute GPS coordinates and having them persist so that other people who are on the same shared AR "layer" see them. You could create buildings wondrous castles creatures and effectively create new layers of existence, and these layers could stack and be as deep as you ever wanted them to be
4. Being able to do virtual reality in much larger spaces so you could take your AR glasses and walk out onto a soccer field and then project a game such as you fighting a bunch of storm troopers while moving around physically in a huge field
These are all nifty niche cases, not compelling use cases for an expensive piece of hardware which everyone would own.
Use case 1 seems to be a minor improvement over a video call on a decent monitor today, and this is assuming that the AR and other tech would advance hugely from where it is today, to actually be able to do realtime filming and rendering with high precision, perhaps even in 3D to get some real advantage.
Use case 2 seems more realistic, but will be limited by eye tracking precision, component idenficiaction precision, and occlusion issues. Input will also be an issue (choosing which tooltips to see).
Use case 3 seems worse than building things in VR, other than some fancy art installations. Why would I want a virtual object that I can't view from my own home? Also, interaction would be fantastically limited, making the whole thing disappointing.
Use case 4 suffers even worse from interaction issues, and it also seems like a downgrade from current technology, which allows me to play in huge virtual environments without even getting off my chair.
The use case is a virtual meta-layer for the real world where you can interact with stuff without needing to look at a small glass handheld display.
Things like, pulling up addresses of buildings you look at, names of people you've met, line on ground for gps, playing board games with people without needing a board or dealing with the rule book (software assisted), see meta information floating around devices (battery level, year, serial number), etc. etc.
The UX of phones is pretty good but it suffers from its form factor. If you could have a UX for the world you can really enable a lot more human abilities in a really intuitive way and you can get closer to something that feels like telepathy.
Coolest one I’ve seen is VR workspaces. Buying a $5k setup per head where they can work from space or the Grand Canyon with unlimited monitors, sit/stand/lay down, software upgrades (only a few pieces of hardware to replace), virtual meetings, building and modeling anything they want, etc
It’s still kinda clunky now, but the tech will get better. That’s a money saver (and a big improvement) with the main barriers being tech and familiarity, and those just come with time. Very bullish on that
There are hardware limits that will make this less compelling than you imagine. I'll give 3 reasons.
Note: Magic Leap specs are from a quick google search and may be out of date. Even improved they'll have the same issues to a slightly lesser degree.
First - field of view:
The horizontal field of Magic Leap is 40 degrees. My primary monitor, a 16x9 32" monitor at about 3 feet from my eyes, is 42 degrees. So this can't even show me 100% of that, and definitely can't show me a second monitor in my peripheral vision.
Field of view is hard to improve as the optics are really close to your eyes and being head worn have limits of size and weight.
Second - Resolution:
The magic leap resolution is apparently 1280x960, significantly less than 1080p. That's not even close to the 4K monitor I'm typing this on. That low resolution has to cover the entire area of my monitor. More if I want to stretch the field of wider.
Picture yourself programming on a 1280x960 32" monitor. Just to see I set my system that way for a minute. PIXELS EVERYWHERE! Also, now I need to reset all my carefully curated windows.
It's hard to improve resolution. The displays are very small to keep size and weight down. HMD displays are generally about the highest of DPI that can be built.
Third - Brightness:
You can't draw black on a see-through HMD, all you can do is make the existing world brighter. The lenses are too close to the eye to be able to do any kind of masking or blocking of the ambient light.
So your display system won't be able to show much of an image over bright area; the text is either white over world color or background colored in a white field. It's not good for reading text and almost illegible at typical sizes in office lighting.
You can't improve brightness easily. These tiny displays make a lot of heat right near your head. Making them brighter means bigger heatsinks, taking weight and size, and more power with requires bigger batteries or shorter run time.
You can kinda cheat one a little with dark sunglass lenses to make the whole world darker. Or you can go to VR and just block the whole world and draw your interface over a video stream. The second option isn't really compelling because it for AR demos like Magic Leap shows.
I dunno, I still can't quite see the potential of that. And even if they did get it working perfectly, then they're following in the footsteps of other people who've already done this on headsets that are a fraction of the price (like Immersed or Virtual Desktop).
Even if they do manage to create mind-blowing hardware, they aren't exactly cornering a market here.
TBH that's better than I expected. I'd call the column masking "barely adequate" rather than "correctly" but it's at least making an attempt to reconstruct the scene and do additive composition in realtime.
Wasn't the real breakthrough meant to be to do with variable focus lightfield voodoo meaning that the rendered components looked like they 'fitted in' with the scene and could occlude as well as be occluded, rather than being additive CGI floating in front of it?
The magic leap os is some funky linux / android thing so I think it loses out to Hololens right there.
The ML seems to scan rooms better and "lock" things in space better but the HL seemed to have a better resolution (_not_ field of view) when using "normal" apps.
They are both competing on field of view now with the next generation of devices but the ML beats the first gen HL hands down on the larger FOV.
And yet ML had to raise almost $5B to get to around ballpark with the Hololens which I assure you Microsoft invested substantially less money into and already has tens of billions in government contracts committed to use the thing.
What they could do, if they figure out the right play, with the right hardware, is make this a really compelling active entertainment device. You already saw haw popular Pokemon Go was... I think locking eyeballs to locations has VC's interested.
Yes, but Pokemon Go was popular because it was on a phone you already had, because it was an extremely popular franchise, and because of the good luck of being a fad at the right time.
Nothing else took its place, and, while still being popular, it quickly faded from the status of global phenomenon.
It's a nice money making game, but not a hardware seller.
I have to say, I've been reading these comments who love or hate ML, treating them as just another internet argument
As someone who was following the public hype but never actually saw what they released. This is absolutely completely terrible. The promises they made when they raised half a billion dollars 7 years ago as a stealth company backed by tech geniuses.
If this is what they have today, what were they showing investors 7 years ago? and why did investors think this is going to revolutionize the world?
I saw it during an interview at Ft Lauderdale. I was interviewing for the optics metrology engineer position. It was as mind blowing as the op is stating. Absolutely stunning. This was 5 years ago. Signed a bunch of NDA papers so shouldn’t talk too much about it.
Allow us who haven't experienced it to highly doubt this. At the very best it looks like nifty tech that would be fun to play around with for a couple of hours until the novelty wears off, no more than that.
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain". If all you can show is 20 year old looking graphics that only somewhat match the scene they are in (while moving at a glacial pace), I am going to bet that the "experience" is way over hyped as well.
That didn't stop them from making fraudulent concept video demos that they falsely claimed to be actual existing games that they were already playing around the office, and that they promised much much more than they could actually deliver.
So if you can't reproduce the experience on a 2D screen, then fake it and lie, you're saying? That IS the whole point.
I am impressed they aren't defunct. After all they raised $3B[1] and their valuation is $2B so they are a long way away from making their investors whole. They did replace their entire top line management team it seems so maybe that helps?
A friend of mine who was approaching AR from a more theoretical point rather than a product point shared some of the physics of how many nits of brightness the display needs to produce to occlude the actual background and it is a lot. ML worked around some of that problem by shading the background think sunglasses with a 50% light reduction, which helps but then you're trying to match shading. Basically it is a really hard problem and had they not been so "out there" in their original claims I really don't think they would be so challenged in their marketing now.
It somewhat amuses me to see the parallels with Google Glass in this regard. I worry the enterprise market may already be quite crowded, though, and there are ample niche vendors specializing in AR for different use cases (construction, manufacturing, medicine/surgery, etc). I don't know that Magic Leap isn't a year late and a dollar short.
But in all seriousness, even if they could ship something meaningful, one wonders if the brand is tarnished such that it makes sense to re-launch with fresh branding.
“Magic Leap” does not conjure up positive images in my mind. Why swim against the current unnecessarily?
Most people don’t know the name Magic Leap. HN is a (relatively) small bubble. The only place where the name might have a bad effect would be in hiring or raising money. But, really changing the name would be worse in that regard as it would signal that they (Magic Leap) also thought the name was tarnished.
The point is that the name Magic Leap IS extremely and deeply tarnished, in so many ways, and Magic Leap pretending it's not just makes them look more laughably delusional than they already are (which is extremely), just like Trump still believing that he won the election.
I just posted citations and quotes about just the most obvious three ways Magic Leap tarnished their own reputation from the start:
1) the sex discrimination lawsuit and nepotistic sexist bro culture,
2) blatantly ripping off other people's ideas without credit in the patent applications,
3) the ridiculous TEDX talk and fraudulent claims on the fake video "demos".
But that's just the tip of the iceberg, not even touching on the flaws and shortcomings and fraudulent claims about the hardware and software itself. Magic Leap's terrible reputation has been well covered in many tech and mainstream publications, and is known quite widely both inside and outside of HN.
Here's a starting point if you really don't already know about Magic Leap's well established terrible reputation:
Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses:
>Magic Leap had high hopes for sales of its augmented reality headset. Instead, the richly valued startup has seen slow sales of the device, recent layoffs and executive turnover. In the coming years, competition in AR will likely intensify as bigger tech companies enter the market.
For enterprise I am not sure this kind of name branding makes sense anyway. Surely the user experience is going to depend massively on the deployed app and whoever develops that. Better for another company to slap their brand on it and sell it as part of a wider solution. My guess is that consultancy and services is where the money is rather than hardware. $10k per user per year to solve a business problem can be easier to sell than $2000 for a device.
Or are you referring to the ridiculous 12/12/2012 TEDX "talk" that Rony Abovitz performed at the Ringling College of Art, and all the FAKE and DECEPTIVE videos they posted and lied about on youtube, that tarnished Magic Leap's reputation?
In my mind, they're not as reputable after having given Rony Abovitz a platform to perform that "fudge". Just watch the video, if you can stomach it, all the way through. And read the comments, like this one:
>Nick Steele 2 years ago (edited)
>This is a joke. Take it for what it is. They didn't want to say anything so they basically said "are you ready? READY? ... fuck you".
>After a completely ridiculous intro which includes nano machines humping blood cells and two crack monkeys worshiping a massive block of "demented space fudge" which takes up 75% of the talk until 4:30, right after 30 seconds of literal silence, a spaceman says "greetings" and introduces today's "keyword" which is "fudge", then a guy plays terrible music out of tune and sings half-way into the mic. Then the lights suddenly go out and the crack moneys and space man simply walk away.
>Keep in mind the audience thinks they are about to hear a billionaire explain his new "world changing" virtual/augmented reality technology, then they get this shit.
>The best part is the audiences reaction at the end. :)
Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
>Magic Leap had high hopes for sales of its augmented reality headset. Instead, the richly valued startup has seen slow sales of the device, recent layoffs and executive turnover. In the coming years, competition in AR will likely intensify as bigger tech companies enter the market.
>[...] Magic Leap was founded in 2010 by Rony Abovitz, an eccentric, 47-year-old Florida native who once gave a TED talk in a spacesuit surrounded by people dancing to music in furry monster costumes. [...]
And if that's not enough proof that Magic Leap is a fraud, then watch their completely fake demo, that they originally did not truthfully bill as a "concept video" but instead they falsely and deceptively titled it "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap" and described it with the blatantly false claim that "This is a game we’re playing around the office right now". But since then, the title and description have been retroactively amended, AFTER they got busted.
Magic Leap | Original Concept Video (originally titled: "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap" and described: "This is a game we’re playing around the office right now"):
That last Time article above was written BEFORE they got busted, and it cites a Magic Leap company spokesman (and I'm pretty sure it was a man) mendaciously lying to the rightfully skeptical (and eventually vindicated) Time reporter:
>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 that Magic Leap was playing (and still is) is called FRAUD.
Claiming about a fake concept video that "This is a game we’re playing around the office right now," and confirming to Gizmoid that the video claiming that was authentic, then later retroactively editing the video title and description to say it was a concept video only AFTER they got caught and called out with lots of media coverage about the lie, is literally and intentionally fraud, yes.
Microsoft has never made such unsubstantiated false claims or published fraudulent demos about the Hololens. So no, they're not anywhere near the same level of deceptive business practices.
Or are you referring to the way Magic Leap picked up and ripped off so many other people's original designs and IP in their patent applications without giving the actual inventors credit, that tarnished Magic Leap's reputation?
>Magic Leap's futuristic patent art was copied from other artists' designs
>When Google-backed augmented reality company Magic Leap quietly applied for a patent, it did so with dozens of pages of futuristic (and slightly creepy) scenarios: a social media charm bracelet, a gargoyle bursting out of a box in a store, gamified cucumber chopping...
>Wait a second. That last one sounds familiar. Maybe that's because it's a line drawing of a shot from "Sight," a Black Mirror-esque short film about an augmented, sinister future. As it turns out, Magic Leap's patent art isn't so much its vision of the future as one created by various students and designers. Former Verge-r and current Gizmodo writer Sean Hollister was tipped off to a set of side-by-side comparisons that leave no doubt we're looking at copies.
>If patents are about originality, does this mean Magic Leap is hurting its claims? Not really. A great deal of patent art just shows potential designs or uses for something, in order to make the actual, more abstract claims clearer. In this case, Magic Leap is patenting an optical system that has nothing to do with the interfaces displayed here. Even bringing a copyright claim would be hard and arguably pointless. "Images such as these are setting consumer expectations of VR and AR today," the company told Gizmodo. "We wanted to use the same images to demonstrate what our technology will enable."
>The designers themselves seem ambivalent of their images' rebirth as patent art. Magic Leap appears to have neither contacted them nor credited them, but at the same time, it's showing the world how this futuristic design fiction could work. It's one thing to have someone rip off your art. It's another to have them actually make it real — if Magic Leap can actually deliver on its ambitious promises.
>Magic Leap is secretly building a headset that could blend computer graphics with the real world. Recently, we lucked into a treasure trove of illustrations from Magic Leap about what that future might hold. There's just one problem: Magic Leap didn't actually create all those awesome UI concepts. It copied them.
>The images speak for themselves. On the left of each of these comparision shots, you'll see an illustration plucked directly from this Magic Leap patent application. On the right, you'll find a screengrab from an awesome UI concept invented by someone else.
>Remember Sight, the incredible student film where a man with bionic eyes plays Fruit Ninja with a real cucumber that becomes part of his meal? Same cucumber. Same everything:
>Or how about the Ringo Holographic Interface dreamt up by then-UI-design-student Ivan Tihienko in 2008?
>Here's a augmented reality concept from interaction designer Joesph Juhnke called "The Future of Firefighting":
>And below, one from designer Michaël Harboun and his team called The Aeon Project. "What if you could travel to exotic, far-away destinations while being stuck in traffic?"
>Lastly, two images from "Meditating Mediums - The Digital 3D," which was the graduating thesis for Greg Tran at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He now designs for Samsung.
The whole point of the lawsuit was all about how Magic Leap's company culture and product plans and demos and self image all revolved around adolescent male egos and sexist fantasies, and excluded women.
Tannen Cambell, who filed the lawsuit, was actually hired for the express purpose of solving Magic Leap's recognized "pink/blue problem", but was rebuffed and ignored. They knew they had a problem, and even gave it a name, but they refused to solve it.
>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.”
Did all of that suddenly change after the lawsuit was settled?
Because if it did suddenly tangibly change, then that might be evidence that settling a sex discrimination lawsuit by changing their behavior was a positive signal.
But if they only forked over a big pile of hush money, signed non-disparagement agreements and gag orders, and went their separate ways, and Magic Leap didn't actually change their culture, then I don't think you could consider it positive sign or a constructive settlement for anyone other than the woman who was paid to keep her mouth shut.
Quotes from the lawsuit:
>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.
>Sadly, because Magic Leap seldom hires and does not actively recruit female candidates, the company loses competitive advantage to products like Microsoft’s Hololens. Microsoft, which employs far more females on its team, developed its similar product on a faster time line with more content that appeals to both genders.
>"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.'"
>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.
>It is sort of a social meeting place for all the spouses that have been displaced, alone in the daytime and are new to the area, would like to have lunch with or just to have someone local to hang out with when their significant other is slaving away at work thru-out the 12-Hr day. Or are they just nagging you because you moved here?
>Please forward this Email to your wife if she would like to get better acclimated to South Florida. The group is not public and is reasonably private (by email invite/accept) as to not accidentally disclose any Magic Leap secrets.
>The gender-neutral reference to “spouses” notwithstanding, implicit in the subject line and the reference to “your wife” is the assumption — which is not too far from wrong — that all the employees were men with wives who didn’t work outside the home and were “alone in the daytime.”
I must admit I'd forgotten about Magic Leap, amazed to see they're still going and raising even more money.
In my head, I always put them in a bucket with Theranos and uBeam, Startups who made product claims which experts in their fields said were not possible.
I guess slick marketing wins over those doubts in some VC circles but you wonder if anyone at the early stage Magic Leap investors is getting asked tough questions about why they approved it, or if they've all just moved on to other roles.
> I guess slick marketing wins over those doubts in some VC circles but you wonder if anyone at the early stage Magic Leap investors is getting asked tough questions about why they approved it, or if they've all just moved on to other roles.
I would guess this depends on whether or not they managed to hoist the stock to someone else in subsequent rounds. Investing in a scam can still be a good deal, as long as you get out before the jig is up
That seems to be the playbook for today's highly valued unicorns. Squeeze out all the value then dump the stock on the public before things start going down. It's not exactly a scam but it's the same kind of thinking: Doing irrational things is fine as long as you are confident there will be a greater fool later on.
I have tried the leap in practice and the experience was significantly above what I expected. The tracking worked most of the time (how???), with occasional wonkyness. The accuracy was very good (outside of the wonks). Where it is very limited is number of applications.
The problem, to me, looks like getting 90% of the way there is possible. However, getting from 90% to 99.9% (to get rid of that "wonkyness"), seems to be way way way harder. Magic Leap has made little to no progress in working out the kinks in their product despite raising literally billions of dollars.
The 90% statement is both true and is one of the things that really sucks people in. There are any number of technologies that kinda/sorta work as a PoC. There's a gaping chasm between that PoC and a viable working product but a lot of people look at the PoC and can imagine what the working product looks like--and think to themselves that it's only about some refinement.
I wrote a camera/IMU tracking software (VIO) before. I can confirm this statement. Get it working is difficult and requires getting all the algos right. Getting it work reliably is a lot of rigorous testing, collecting datasets, evaluating slightest changes, tuning numerical stability, experimenting with different techniques which might work better in low light and optimizing for the hardware (VIO is intensive but the best VIO is useless if there is no computation power left for the app itself).
Neither of this is required for a slick demo in well lit room and perhaps on better HW.
What can one say? I also tried it (have always been fan of new interaction methods) and was severely disappointed. Even the "put reflective stickers on your fingers and use an off-the-shelf wiimote" had better tracking, though it is obviously less convenient.
That said, I am waiting for v2 from these guys and/or anyone else.
You mean the headset position tracking? That already worked very reliable on the Hololens years ago, and it works almost as well on the Quest, which is far far cheaper. It was a solved technology before the Magic Leap launched.
Or did you mean some other kind of tracking?
> Startups who made product claims which experts in their fields said were not possible.
Can you clarify what you mean by this? What aspect is considered impossible? Augmented Reality has been around for a while. There's the Microsoft HoloLens. Not to mention all the AR demos Apple does whenever they announce a new iPhone.
especially the Snapchat one. You have rendered images being obscured by physical objects directly "in front" of them.
If anything, Magic Leap seems a bit ordinary with only its size being the standout feature. But, even there, it looks like they're already beat by Snapchat's Specatcles (see: https://www.spectacles.com/ )
So I fail to see how Magic Leap's product claims are in any way similar to Theranos or uBeam. If anything, their claims are not that impressive given the competition.
I was careful to say "product claims" and not products. I don't doubt AR is possible, but that the claims Magic Leap made in their early demonstrations were not realistic.
the hype was around their fiber scanning display patents, they were showing investors a totally new technology that projects images into your eyeballs. There are numerous articles describing the patented pie-in-the-sky vs the state-of-the-art, just one example here: [0]
> They don’t even have an decent brightness control of the pixels and didn’t even attempt to show color reproduction (requiring extremely precise laser control). Yes the images are old, but there are a series of extremely hard problems outlined above that are likely not solvable which is likely why we have not seen any better pictures of an FSD from ANYONE (ML or others) in the last 7 years.
Magic Leap was unable to improve and miniaturize this technology - its a dead end - so they ended up using the same tech as everyone else
What they lied about was the fidelity. They made demo video in 2015 that was a fully prerendered video of what they expected their AR experience to look like. Years later, the top of line headsets are fuzzy and very limited in field of view and have not seen any adoption outside of very niche applications.
> In my head, I always put them in a bucket with Theranos and uBeam, Startups who made product claims which experts in their fields said were not possible.
What was it that experts said wasn't possible about Magic Leap? My understanding was that their product was a more advanced version of the tech in Microsoft's HaloLens and the primary challenges for both were bringing down the cost, expanding the FOV and DOF, and finding realistic use cases.
Microsoft went the enterprise route, like Google did with Lens, while Magic Leap tried to release something that felt boutique.
> I must admit I'd forgotten about Magic Leap, amazed to see they're still going and raising even more money.
It's basically the only alternative for an investor who wants to get into AR, other than buying MSFT of AAPL stocks. That's why, despite shipping a V1 almost as good as the HoloLens V1 they are getting funded again.
Problem is, by the time Magic Leap gets it's V2 out there's a good chance we'll be seeing HoloLens V3 in the field.
One on my list of mind boggling "Tech 2.0" scams were:
1. Teranos
2. Magic Leap
3. Andelur Ghost
Only the last one still didn't get enough media attention. People who scored Andelur handshakes with the military & intelligence are the types who did it for Advanced Tactical Security & Communications Ltd ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 )
Andelur is basically trying to sell the governments around the world a Chinese toy copter for millions of dollars through incredible "Tech 2.0" type marketing fudging.
One thing these fellows can do for sure is a Hollywood grade CG. I was with a company on a competing bid for border patrol drone.
Even I, somebody with quite good experience with CG, was initially fooled by their videos. Indeed, they intentionally were trying to numb your guard by showing it flying in the rain, and being sprayed by water. https://youtu.be/5xDEroiMQWk?t=100
It took me a few minutes to figure out that the rain, and water spay in their videos were also impressively disguised computer graphics.
I will. I work in an engineering company which shipped a number of AR glasses projects (for clients I can't name,) and I can say that whomever did engineering for Magic Leap had no idea whatsoever about basics of optics, and such.
And their overall engineering level is totally amateurish — you cannot have such shoddy job being done for money, let alone such amount of money, but they have everything to tick the checkbox in the buzzword department: waveguides, holographics, structural colour, photonic chips...
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One main point:
Holographic waveguides, and such are a dead end development with a substandard image quality which you cannot do anything about, as well as its inefficiency (these waveguides waste 70-90%+ of light.)
You can make them more opaque to preserve more light, but then you get VR sunglasses, instead of what the promise is.
The fundamental problem is that the amount of image light transferred is inversely proportional to the amount of light obscured. — they are extremely inefficient, and there is physically no way around this.
For this reason this solution really had to be sent to the wastebin on day one, and not be presented as the next best thing after sliced bread. This is obvious to anybody knowing optics on above a high school level, and it's inconceivable how anybody paying real engineers can opt for this solution.
I have only a passing knowledge of Anduril, thanks for sharing your impression of them. But knowing his track record, I tend to believe Palmer Luckey has the ability to achieve daring innovations. That said, with quantum leap innovation, failure is the more likely outcome.
> Ghost is practically invisible to the targets it observes, with a frontal cross-section smaller than some of the phones I have owned over the years. Stay tuned for true invisibility.
I don't tend to believe people telling something like this being credible.
Especially when they try to pass lobotomised Chinese RC toy heli for "an Apex of Aerospace Engineering," and carefully photoshops all its photos to disguise its Made in China ancestry https://ibb.co/8DT5JMc
And now these guys seem to be heading towards starting an IPO.
Watched the video from start to finish. It's basically too good to be true -- modular, undetectable, lethal, rain proof, etc. Picturing the meeting room where the Anduril salesman plays the video to investors. A distortion vortex is in play due to the founder's previous success and no one in the audience dares object to the claims in the video. Bereft of challenge, the startup quadruples in valuation after the meeting.
> I tend to believe Palmer Luckey has the ability to achieve daring innovations.
If you're talking about oculus, they 'stole' a lot of their development from valve because there were valve employees who convinced whoever was decision making there to just give oculus tech without any license prior to the facebook acquisition, and then those employees got hired by oculus once they had facebook money.
Oculus is the story of one of the biggest tech scams in VR and the scam was on valve by employees who took advantage of and betrayed valve.
alan yates (posting as vk2zay on reddit) said the launch rift architecture was identical to the valve room headset architecture with its own tracking implementation and its own fresnel lens system.
>While that is generally true in this case every core feature of both the Rift and Vive HMDs are directly derived from Valve's research program. Oculus has their own CV-based tracking implementation and frensel lens design but the CV1 is otherwise a direct copy of the architecture of the 1080p Steam Sight prototype Valve lent Oculus when we installed a copy of the "Valve Room" at their headquarters. I would call Oculus the first SteamVR licensee, but history will likely record a somewhat different term for it...
---
Ben Krasnow (former valve employee who now has the youtube channel "Applied Science" https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience/ which you should check out if you haven't yet) posted here on hackernews back in 2017 during the oculus lawsuit.
> It fits a pattern. I was a hardware engineer at Valve during the early VR days, working mostly on Lighthouse and the internal dev headset. There were a few employees who insisted that the Valve VR group give away both hardware and software to Oculus with the hope that they would work together with Valve on VR. The tech was literally given away -- no contract, no license. After the facebook acquisition, these folks presumably received large financial incentives to join facebook, which they did. It was the most questionable thing I've seen in my whole career, and was partially caused by Valve's flat management structure and general lack of oversight. I left shortly after.
and then further down that thread
> Overall, I think Valve is a good place to work, and I learned a lot from all of the incredibly smart people there. The main reason that I left was the difficulty in merging hardware development with the company's exceptionally successful business model. The hardware team was pressured to give away lots of IP that could have been licensed, with the explanation that hardware is just so worthless anyway compared to online software sales, there was no other choice. It's possible that this was a good faith gamble, however it still doesn't preclude the use of business contracts that would have protected our investment. It also isn't so great for morale to hear everyday that your years of work are going to be given away to another company, and then watch that company get acquired for $2B. This is especially the case since many employees strongly voiced concerns about just such a scenario.
Oculus was built on stolen tech taken by employees working at valve who convinced valve to give the tech away in the spirit of cooperation, and then jumped ship to facebook right away for the $$$.
I won't give them a cent.
Every time people post things to do with John Carmack all I can think about is that he was doing the same thing from his former employer to oculus as well. No matter what he did back in the day to make video game engines amazing, his involvement in oculus is a stain on his reputation. Even if you thought he was innocent in a vacuum, along with the rest of the shenanigans with oculus I don't think it was so innocent. He took the source code he wrote, sent it to himself, then he was involved in the "clean room" reimplementation? I don't believe it no matter what the courts ruled could be proven.
They are literally a company founded on "semi legal" theft, fraud, betrayal, etc.
Amazing synthesis of facts... so much I didn't know.
I have a copy of The history of the future and was planning to read it. If all it's going to be is PR for Luckey, I will donate it to a used books shop.
Would you have an opinion on VR being the next computing platform? Despite the troubled past, do you suppose Oculus Quest 2 could become THE standard?
I've never read this book but I think if you read it, you should take it with a grain of salt. There's a lot of self aggrandizing and making your own myths in tech these days since personal brand is important at their level. What you do with your book is up to you though - if I had it I'd read it just to be aware of what's being said. If you keep it or not is your choice.
>Would you have an opinion on VR being the next computing platform?
Not any time soon, but maybe once the display technology improves. I like VR and don't get VR sickness, but when I take off the headset after a long session I can tell I haven't been focusing my eyes on distant things for a long time and the whole world feels a little unreal. I think the more time you spend in VR the more likely you are to cause short sightedness, but I don't have any scientific evidence of that so its just my opinion.
>Despite the troubled past, do you suppose Oculus Quest 2 could become THE standard?
I have many friends who own the Q2. It's an affordable device with a lot of good ideas. But sadly I think oculus was run by toxic people and being acquired by facebook can't have improved it. Them requiring a facebook login and their privacy policy preclude me from participating.
It's a neat device but I wouldn't call it the standard. The index is the gold standard. The quest 2 is the subway or taco bell restaurant of VR headsets - ubiquitous, affordable, but not better than the competition although the competition costs more.
We'll what happens in the future but I'm not betting on VR/AR computing being common anytime soon. If it is I hope facebook isn't the primary supplier because oculus and facebook are both unethical companies I dont' want to deal with.
But what do I know? I'm just a guy who loved the idea of it and paid attention during the development of the recent VR revival. I think the biggest barrier is resolution, and then graphics silicon need to run it at good framerates.
At least in earlier stages, Magic Leap's marketing and communications were fun and accessible. This blog post is pure corporate jargon - "engaged a number of strategic partners to further bolster our support," "accelerated the organization’s pivot to enterprise, brought our industry-leading capabilities to new customers," "our core business objectives remain focused on enterprise solutions, there continues to be intense interest in the application of Magic Leap’s technology in the consumer space"
Whenever I read “pivot to enterprise” from a startup, I read “we’re out of ideas”. In my own personal experience, startups who pivot to the enterprise are dying stars and that statement is a hallmark.
The demo he refers to was not (and could never be) an actual commercial product. It was stationary and the optics were 100x what could fit on a mobile device. What they eventually shipped had very little to do with the tech used in the private demo.
I could be wrong on the timeline, but wasn't Ben Evans at that time a partner at Andreesen Horowitz. Partners are expected to be cheerleaders of their investments. After all difficult technologies become manifest by cheerleading them until one of them catches on.
Now you know you can't trust that person, because they're full of it, or too ignorant about what they were shown to understand it was bs and thus not someone to follow for news/advice/etc on it.
I personally believe that they raised a ton of money and the people behind that money wanted it to be successful so had friends of theirs in various media spaces hype it even more.
When someone has a positive magic leap review, including these throwaway comments like you linked, I assume its corruption. Just my opinion.
You can't believe it, because you think there's a rational process involved in investment decisions. After watching how things go for some time, I came to believe that who you are and what connections you have is far more important.
It is a rational process. The mistake is in thinking that anyone involved cares about technology or value delivered to customers as anything but an afterthought.
It's default, not just common. Anyone investing in research startup knows that there is slim chance that the company will be positive in valuation, just that the upper limit for valuation is very high.
Does anyone here work with super expensive "enterprise" VR/AR? My gut instinct is that they try to make something good, realize the tech to fulfill their dream is incredibly expensive, then pivot to "enterprise" to get more funding. Am I being cynical?
My last company tried really hard to pitch AR/VR projects. Using headsets, phones even the Bose sunglasses. It was a huge struggle to find anything compelling to do with AR even when it worked. We ended up selling a few nifty marketing experiences and artsy installations but they were like 30 second experiences and not useful for anything. The tech "works", it's just not very compelling.
Think about phone AR which works very smoothly and Apple/Google have been investing in hardware upgrades to enhance AR experiences yet it's been 5 years since Pokemon Go and no one has figured out another interesting thing to do with it.
Here example of enterprise Varjo XR3 (full version cost 6000$ plus 1500$ subscription) from someone only testing consumer VR headsets till now.
In short: it's way better than best consumer headsets.
I didn't know Magic Leap was still a thing, I'm somewhat impressed. I definitely understand the negativity in the comments but at the same time with their experience with the v1 maybe they'll manage to deliver something useful this time?
Some skepticism is definitely warranted, but I'm looking forward to actual demonstrations of this hardware. Assuming of course that this time they'll actually share proper demo footage instead of obviously bullshit marketing videos.
I think they're the definition of a sunken cost fallacy for VCs. People already billions into their company hoping to get something or even anything out of it.
EG "This blog has been reporting why from a technical perspective on the massive problems with Magic Leap since November 2016. At that point, Magic Leap had “only” raised about $1.4B. They were able to raise another $1.2+ billion since this blog started reporting on their hype. Magic Leap’s total VC raise of over $2.6B dwarfs the measly $700m raised by the infamous Theranos."
They do have a product. It didn't live up to Abovitz' hype, but that's also why he's not CEO anymore.
The ML1 sits somewhere in the vicinity of the Hololens 1 in capability. Some things it does better, some things it does worse.
For example, having a real controller was very useful as the input latency on the Hololens' hand tracking is a big impediment and not having a variety of physical buttons makes designing games with lots of different types of interactions really hard. I think Waltz of the Wizard on the Quest 2 is the only game I've seen with hand tracked input that isn't just "point and click".
Wider field of view than the Hololens was nice, but it came at the price of lower pixel density.
Being based on Android was a drawback for me, though. Hololens has a workspace metaphor, akin to a 3D desktop, that Magic Leap never really put much effort into. Hololens also has speech recognition as a first-class citizen, whereas Magic Leap left it up to developers to roll their own. It's really, really hard to get good performance out of Android, too.
A bunch of the other stuff was just too wonky to consider. The surface meshing was unusable in real life scenarios. The hand tracking as well. A lot of people don't realize that the Hololens could do full, positional hand tracking, it just wasn't a great experience, so everyone designed around nose-pointers and just using the hand as a clicker. The hand tracking on Magic Leap was even worse, yet they went with trying to showcase it.
I think, if Microsoft were to release a controller to get over the latency issues of hand tracking on the Hololens, it'd be strictly better all around.
I'm rather bearish on AR devices making a big splash in the consumer market, especially ones using waveguide displays. Waveguides are a technological dead end. There isn't really any room for them to grow by even 2x, when they really need to grow by at least 20x. Good AR application design is also excruciatingly hard. What you typically end up with is a VR app made shitty by having to run on an AR headset. Oculus' approach of starting with a VR headset and adding AR-passthrough makes a lot more sense.
Surely the NDAs that were signed when they were previewing the tech to journalists have expired. I'd love to know what it was they were seeing that resulted in so many articles announcing something great was coming.
For me, only the Segway (Ginger) was a bigger disappointment.
Is it just me, or is that announcement full of weirdly specific statements. Like "Magic Leap 2 will be the industry’s smallest and lightest device built for enterprise adoption", implying that smaller/lighter devices exist, just not ones specifically built for enterprise adoption.
Aren't the the alternatives Germany or Japan? I'm not at all a WW2 expert, but I don't think that decision is quite as clearcut (at least between Germany or Italy).
Though the question was about the leaders, and I'm even less confident in my ability to imagine an answer to that question.
I humorously selected just one pairing of 'specific axis state' - 'specific notorious allied state'. It was not intended as a serious analysis of average life outcomes in said totalitarian regimes.
Are the any AR headsets that will give me a good multi-monitor setup where I can still see everything going on around me? Id happily pay $1500 for something like that.
If you can settle for VR, you might be happy with Immersed and Vive Focus 3.
There are no AR headsets today that would be remotely useful for day-to-day work, let alone with any kind of passable software support. Stuff from Varjo (like the XR-3) is getting there, but it's not there yet.
floating app windows would be better, but thats going to be a lot more complicated than virtual desktops. I just want a multi monitor setup without the monitors.
>That number seems wildly exaggerated... unless I'm missing something?
Both Apple and Facebook are wildly understood to be launching AR glasses with serious marketing pushes in 2022.
100 million units sold between the two of them over 2.5 years at an average price around the price of an iPhone (so $1000) plus some app sales adds up to $140BN. I guess. I agree that even there it seems high.
I recently got an Oculus Quest 2 and was immediately stunned by the dearth of content that exists on the platform.
AR/VR is a hard sell, still; besides the initial experience - and as a dev in the AR/VR industry I'm honestly waiting for when we can get rid of the screen door effect in VR and better solutions to the lighting problem in AR.
dearth of content? What are you looking for that's not there?
The Quest 2 also doesn't have a noticeable screen door effect since it uses an LCD screen. The trade off is black is washed out. imo the screen door effect is only noticeable on older VR HMDs that use OLED like the first Quest.
The post mentions that Magic Leap recently raised money at a valuation of $2B.
Seems like a significant downround, considering they’d already raised at least $2.4B in the past. I’d guess their pre-launch valuation must have been closer to $10B.
I wish the Oculus Quest 2 had higher quality cameras. Some of my favourite times in that experience are when I have to see the world through my googles.
".. thus we pivoted to projecting directly into the eye, while able to darken the background, away from purely additive drawing, making ML2 useful for outdoor and light-strong environments."
Heres my video flying inside my house:
https://youtu.be/Grlk03MdScQ
The jaw dropping aspects:
- it correctly knows when to mask for the column
- it does lighting effects from the planes headlights
- it does particle collisions with my furniture when it crashes
- it crashes by detecting i hit the wall
It really is amazing tech but it is very unpolished. But I am very hopeful they keep pushing and it gets cheaper and more people can experience it and develop for it.
This is like the amiga. We are at the infancy of AR.