Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsemrau | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how Pokemon Go took away a lot of AR marketing Buzz from Magic Leap.

That's quite the stretch. Magic Leap only got buzz in the first place because a lot of famous people said they were the best thing since sliced bread, and Google Ventures gave them tons of money.

The main reason you don't hear much about them anymore is because they don't show anything.

Magic Leap has also gotten a lot of buzz because tech publications are willing to write about them despite almost total lack of details. Look at the article Kevin Kelly wrote for Wired about Magic Leap: http://www.wired.com/2016/04/magic-leap-vr/ It's like 10k words, yet after all the embargoed/NDAed info has been omitted, what do you really learn from all that besides that Magic Leap is some sort of AR glasses and Kelly thinks it's really really really impressive?

It's starting to sound like the new IT/segway.

I find it disappointing that there is this aversive sentiment in tech-scene towards groundbreaking, physical technologies like segways, self-driving cars, and now magic leap. I like Peter Thiel's point of view on this issue: world needs more zero to one and less of the same. Note that I'm talking this as an average software developer (I don't work on cool technology at work). I'd like to live in the future and I acknowledge that without huge risky hardware bets the future will be as bleak as present is.

Much like this writeup, which is mostly a "what if/could be" based on the patent filing.

Perhaps it should be retitled "how magic leap might work"

Google Ventures gave them no money, Google the company invested in them with Sundar Pichai (Google CEO) taking a board seat at the company

Pokemon Go's AR is a gimmick, though, and doesn't work anywhere close to where you can claim it's mean to be serious. It's just so you can tell your friends "it shows you Pokemon in the room!".

Yeah it's not really AR, it's just turning the camera on and pasting an image over top of it. I'm not sure the app does any analysis of where the Pokemon is standing, I see them floating in midair all the time.

Technically I'd say it's not just the PokemonCamera (which everone has turned off except when they want to take a picture of a pokemon in a cool location). The game augments reality by providing a virtual layer that you can only see on the phone (poke stops, arenas, spawning of pokemon). Yeah it's not the shiny AR of projecting objects into the room but I'd argue it's augmentation regardless.

Is mapping a game over real-life not a form or AR? The normal game screen in Pokemon Go takes "the real world" (streets, locations) and augments it to make it part of the game.

I suppose it could be considered AR. But where do you draw the line? Is Google Maps with certain businesses outlined AR because it's an augmented version of the real world?

Personally I limit what I consider AR to be graphics superimposed on a real world view. With the maps in Pokemon GO, the real world and game are distinct, almost like VR.

My guess is it further legitimated their end goals and will increase investment (if Pokemon Go doesn't fizzle out fast before making significant money).

Pokemon Go was the first non-creepy AR use case. Everything else they came up with with Google Glass and such involved disturbing mass surveillance type stuff. Even so, Pokemon Go was treated as a national security threat by some governments.

With AR you could do all kinds of kind of socially awkward crap. Can you think how cringe inducing AR Tinder would be?

I dunno....I don't find either to be necessarily creepy (although you can find creepy uses for just about anything I guess). Still, using a game to track your travels and location combined with the whole business aspect of an uptick in customers when you're a popular poke-location seems just as potentially creepy than the stuff that got people wailing and gnashing teeth over Glass - namely...a camera that you're always carrying around on your face.

I mean...miniature cameras are old news and they're a lot easier to hide in ways where people don't realize you have a camera. Just as there have always been ways to track stuff like location and purchases via cell phone location and credit card use.

The stuff in Pokemon isn't much "creepier" than what your average map app or social "gamifying" app like Foursquare does.

Yelp's Monocle has been doing non-creepy AR since 2009.

Well Ingress also exists. But I'd agree if you mean mass/mainstream use case.

All those dedicated agents, forgotten as soon as someone decided to slap cute cartoon characters and "training gyms" on our interdimensional portals...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com