Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
I think this article suffers from an overly binary view of technology -- if it isn't market ready, it's vaporware. No, there's probably some real tech there (aforementioned demo), but miniaturizing / productizing is still a risk. I think the blowback has something to do with the marketing itself, and Abovitz's amazing idiosyncracies. Neither of those indicate anything about the tech, but (absent any public information) it helps fuel the hate.
And from what I understand about their likely approach, it's definitely more aggressive than the HoloLens. I don't personally think that nearfield focus in a headset is that valuable, but that's just a guess. If light field displays are the tech that takes AR over the top -- from curiosity to a new computing platform -- then Magic Leap is really well positioned, vis a vis a large lead and big IP portfolio.
Also, with ~$1.4 bn raised, they're too big to fail.
It's almost an argument from authority, and it's not very useful. In particular, investors have made large investments in the past which it turns out did not have a strong technical foundation. So there's track record here.
Yes, there's obviously something. There's obviously a team of people doing something. That's not the argument, the argument is that a 1.1B USD investment isn't really a reasonable thing to do (and that it harms the engineering environment as I noted below).
To be clear, I'm not making predictions about ML specifically. I don't have a clue about what they're doing. My general point is that huge sums of money have both momentum and gravity of their own. (I'm not saying this is rational, good, or just -- just that it seems to be true.)
Sink cost doesn't work quite the same way. It's more that they evaluate the investment as good because someone else put in a bunch of money (and they expect know what they're doing/did good DD).
Yea, they might well use the money for /something/ useful. The might use it to acquire a bunch of other companies.
The question is, is this 1.4B USD more or less useful than 500K USD put toward the right idea.
As for $1.4B vs $500K... they're different species of investment animal. The people making the hundred-million dollar decisions aren't prepared to make hundred-thousand dollar decisions. So I don't think those huge investments are actually replacing or crowding out seed funding (especially if a highly-funded company like ML can then buy a bunch of seed-funded companies, returning liquidity to the seed market).
The only thing that's weird about it is money is fungible, so the two are truly equivalent... just not commutable. Could those billions have been a shower of seed investments instead? I dunno; this is one of those things that makes me scratch my head and shrug. I don't know enough about the history of finance, and venture finance in particular, to weigh in on the logic (or forces of nature, or chance) that led to this structure, but it seems to make sense except when it doesn't. (/hedge)
Would that engineer time be better spent proving out a bunch of smaller speculative ideas rather than throwing it all behind one speculative idea.
That's the crux of it really. We could be spending our engineering time better. Maybe not funding 1000 smaller projects, but even 100 might be better.
I understand that the current investment structure probably wont support that, but it seems unfortunate.
Particularly when the large projects that engineering time gets thrown at are large, very speculative projects with likely poor DD like Magic Leap (or whoever else).
How do you keep the size small, yet still get the funding you desperately need?
They may indeed have had a very slick demo. That doesn't mean the tech is anything special. That story has happened many times.
There's also no such thing as too big to fail.
People made all the same points you're making about Theranos.
After some introspection about why I think this way, perhaps it's the sum of money that makes it seem less risky... and but it could be an artifact of scale: most investments of that size are growth capital or PE. Instead, we're seeing risk capital assigned to a potentially enormous market, so it's scaled up, too. Almost like the world's biggest seed funding? (Take that, Clinkle!)
"The demos that I tried had some good attributes and some bad. The good - they were high resolution and they were able to focus the images at any depth - but only one focal depth at a time - so that they appeared very clear even when they were very close up. That said, the demos used a completely different type of technology from what Magic Leap ultimately wants to build. "
"Oh, and as I mentioned in the article, the bad was that the objects didn't stick very well. They were blurry and jittery when I moved my head, despite the fact that the device was connected to a desktop computer. That was one of the most difficult parts of building the HoloLens, but Magic Leap said it would figure that out on its final device. "
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicleap/comments/5hgtll/im_reed_a...
And that made Oculus worth two thousand million dollars to Zuckerberg.
The acquisition sent a strong signal, though. Shortly afterwards a bevy of competitors, big and small, started throwing out offerings.
Maybe signalling is the only reason to make these outrageous investments. Google thinks AR is important, a massive bid on an early frontrunner can kickstart an arms race which generates talent and knowledge, and even if ML fails, so long as AR in general succeeds, a consumer tech company such as Google will be able to benefit from it.
In the case of the HTC Vive, given the timings of product development cycles and marketing campaigns, that was just a coincidence.
I've been hearing the same things about the Meta 2 (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/meta-view#/entity) for months now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxwrXacMe6Y
And then I got to try it two days ago. And it was decidedly the worst AR experience I've ever had.
I have a laser-cut box of acrylic from a Kickstarter here called the Seebright Ripple that was basically "Google Cardboard for AR" that I'm about to throw away and even that was a better experience.
You can't trust first-time user reactions to mixed-reality technologies. They get lost in the concept that they are seeing any image at all. They don't know the competitor devices on the market, and don't have any comparison to be made to properly evaluate the object.
In the Meta 2's case, the only thing they had over the Hololens was wider FOV. In every other aspect, it was worse: heavier, tethered to a computer, not adjustable enough to make the image comfortably visible, extremely bad tracking, extremely bad hand gesture input. And yet, Robert Scoble thinks this is the most important product demo he's ever seen. They could have gone out onto the conference floor at where we were and found better tracking running on an iPad [0]. It was embarrassingly bad.
So what is the Magic Leap? We won't know until they actually show us. There hasn't been any real evidence on it yet.
[0] And at this point, if you're going to be tethered to a PC, you might as well just use Vive's Lighthouse tracking. Save yourself the time, money, and bad customer reactions.
Startups need to be nimble. When you raise 1.4 billion from the outset and hire hundreds of employees, you quickly build an internal bureaucracy. That's a hard ship to steer.
Most startups need to make course corrections, both big and small, before they find product/market fit. The political & psychological difficulty of those corrections becomes quite high when you have 100's of employees.
Investment dollars are like gasoline. Too much too early and you can actually drown out the flame.
So many companies have raised hundreds of millions/billions of dollars and then either completely blew up or became a shell of their former selves. Nothing is too big to fail, and that mentality is toxic.
Rony Abovitz must be a great salesman.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2qlHoxPioM
...and from the video I see that it's not just Watch Underscore Dogs by a long shot! It's weird to me that they keep pulling this nonsense, when amazing graphics are probably one of the biggest draws for Ubisoft Game. Maybe they're just banking on a steady supply of new gamers not savvy enough to realize that all Ubisoft games are Ubisoft Game.
On a practical level, it's frustrating for engineers because to operate as engineers we have to work for these companies. It's not just the fakeness, it's the bad management that comes with it. They dilute the pool of possible good companies that we could work for.
They also increase the cost of doing something actually worth while. Salaries get higher, cost of living increases.
So that's why these companies are annoying to engineers. It's not just people being bitter exactly...
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The next question is why does this happen?
Firstly, tech investors are not great at DD of science/basic technology startups. Maybe they hire external consultants to do the DD (due diligence). Maybe they rely on their friends (prior investments/contacts). So they roll the dice, invest in some company that looks safe (founders worked a Google etc. etc.) and their friends like.
Then you get one big investor who throws a bunch of cash in. A large number of other investors throw in as well. They assume that first, big investor did the DD.
This is an easy play for the investors. They don't have to do much work. It's easier than say, doing the DD on a smaller seed stage play.
Once it gets bit enough, I guess they assume that they can crush other players in the same area just because they have a stack of cash.
TL;DR: They don't do the DD, it's easier to make big bets than lots of small ones.
It would probably be better for us, if the cash that was thrown at Magic Leap went to fund 2000 seed stage investments. But investors would find that too hard to do...
That's my take anyway. I'd be interested to better understand what others think.
Suing them seem like an odd thing to do.
Surely you don't mean software engineers. There's a whole big wide world outside the ongoing bubble, and in entire honesty I've never quite found "move to the Valley, work for a startup" to be the no-brainer it's so often been represented. In particular, the quality of life really doesn't seem to be there, at least not reliably; we hear horror stories all the time from people who've gotten hosed in what seem to be the same relatively small set of ways, at a rate that suggests there's more going on than random chance or sour grapes.
And the cost of living in that part of the country is no joke, too. Remote working would solve that, but very few companies take it at all seriously - many fewer than want to be perceived as doing so. It's understandable why they don't, but the transparent duplicity is a bad look. Without remote? Sure, the pay's probably better than you'll find almost anywhere else, but you either plow three quarters of it into cost of living, or spend four hours a day commuting.
Meanwhile, in the "enterprise" companies at which Valley biens-pensants smirk and sneer, one finds often enough that among the various fiefdoms, there's one or two with a savvy director and a team full of smart, capable people who have everything they need for the asking, and whose job is to solve problems the organization would otherwise find entirely intractable - sort of 18F or USDS, if you like, except in an industry context and with less politics to worry about, and as well or better paid. The trick is knowing where to look and how to bring value.
And unicorn valuation isn't the only startup bubble, either. From where I sit, comfortably outside it, the whole tech entrepreneurship scene has gotten amazingly up itself in the last few years, just like it did in the run-up to the last bust. Buying into the mythos might feel nice, but unless you're a founder it also makes you easier to exploit than you might otherwise be, and even if you are, it ties you to a sector that's itself beholden to more or less every vagary of financial fortune. Sure, engineering is a profit center in a company like that, whereas in the enterprise world it's usually a cost center. But next time the market takes a nosedive, who's in better shape? Someone in a profit center of a company that found its runway suddenly shortened to negligibility and collapsed for want of money? Or someone in a cost center of a company with the cash reserves and ample profitability to get through lean times effectively intact?
True. But please tell the second part to the story too. Those innovative teams, can discover cold-fusion, and they will be locked in and ignored- or even worser, there idea would be patented to be held hostage in lawyercabinetscryo until a advancing humanity is willing to pay the ransom.
Those startups have only runway to loose and everything to gain- they will not throw away a discovery this way.
Discovering and inventing new things hasn't really been a major part of that, because the problems I solve, the problems very large companies tend to have, rarely require it; the question is less one of coming up with novel tech and more one of applying tools and ideas that already exist in ways that are novel to the organization because the relevant knowledge and expertise is hard to come by without specializing in software as a career.
If you want to discover new algorithms or invent the next React or C#, then working for a large corporation outside the tech industry may not be the best option for you. But there are many more kinds of problems to solve than those.
Add network effect and you get overly hyped stuff that don't deliver. I wish startup accelerators relied more on experienced, reputed judges in the startup's field instead of growth gimmicks. Online contests/challenges seem to be the way to find really good tech startups.
Raising millions is not a reward. I understand why you think that way since I used to think that way too. But I learned the hard way that raising money is nothing more than the price you have to pay to get to somewhere you want.
So what IS reward? Obviously, if your business does well and "growing" crazy, that's your reward. That way you didn't even have to give up your control over the company and still managed to outsmart others who wasted tons of money and didn't even get anything done.
That's the reward you get for working hard honestly. I also used to think that honest people never get rewarded, and that was a couple of years ago when I was looking at all the pointless apps getting funded. Now if you look back, none of them are alive. Even the ones that were growing like crazy all die off, because most of the ones that grew like crazy were designed to grow like crazy in a synthetic manner instead of organically growing based on the value they provide to users.
So the lesson is, just look at your customers. If you see that more and more people are using and buying your product, that means you are doing something right. You don't need validation from investors and the press.
p.s. You can buy press anyway. Once you have enough money and traction just hire a PR agency and pitch a story for a guaranteed spot on relevant publications. This is much better than these VC funded startups wasting money doing the PR piece when they have no substance.
They get paid for the X years it takes their startup to crash, probably quite well.
Afterwards, they are considered an "Experienced entrepreneur" and thus more likely to get their foot in the door to more negotiations, given press time etc.
What part of this is failing?
One has no idea what that feels like if they haven't gone through the process.
Another thing is, you're pretty much locked into that company for X years. Even if you realize on year 1 that it's not what you started out to build, you still need to go with it, otherwise you're seen as an irresponsible prick, and people won't see you as "experienced entrepreneur". Most of the times what happens is you either trick yourself into thinking that it will work, or compromise your initial vision into building something mediocre that generates money (For example you may start out thinking you will build the next generation social network that will change everything, and end up with a behavioral targeting ad network)
Imagine wasting X-1 years of your life working on something you no longer "truly" believe in. That part is failing.
If you still don't agree, try raising money and starting a company, and work on it for X years. You will understand.
> One has no idea what that feels like if they haven't gone through the process.
> Imagine wasting X-1 years of your life working on something you no longer "truly" believe in. That part is failing.
> If you still don't agree, try raising money and starting a company, and work on it for X years. You will understand.
please, enlighten us with the hardships of being paid lots of funny money, and spending even more funny money, on something you know is going to fail for X-1 years, but you keep doing it anyways because ???
I have better things to do than trying to enlighten some random guy online.
Not with someone else paying for it, and knowing I'll still be well-regarded even if it fails.
It's easy to sit on the sidelines and make snide remarks about founders who you think are wasting others' money paying themselves cushy salaries (most pay themselves far below what they'd make at Google), but I don't think you're really in any position to until you've put yourself out there in some similar fashion.
Wait. Are you talking about politics now? :)
Unlike Theranos (where people's health was also at stake), if/when Magic Leap fails, their investors will lose their money and capitalism will go on - this is how things are supposed to work.
"We could do that, and end up like Magic-Leap.." will be the Standard slogan at every pitch.
Comparing AR device with VR device itself is not correct. Every one in VR world knows HTC Vive has far superior experience than Rift.
I understand that AR and VR are very different challenges, I was simply comparing them as two nascent techs that are frequently talked about together as being upcoming. VR is much closer to being ready for primetime, despite Hololens' release. Even the Oculus DK1 was closer to ready for mass adoption.
And most of /r/oculus would vigorously debate your last sentence since Touch came out, which makes that sentence completely false. I say this as a Vive owner, Touch has taken away the Vive's main advantage.
No - the information from ML boils down to falsehoods - this is not how 'capitalism' should work :)
Granted, it does sometimes happen this way.
More limited investment, with reasonable hype, a longer time frame might have worked better - as a lot of the $$$ spent on ML today will be on marketing, overhead, unecessary staff.
Granted, even if they do go bust, they'll have made some tangible progress that will be leveraged elsewhere.
Google is a big investor - it could be that if ML goes bust, the Google can take hold of the IP, and probably end up hiring a bunch of people and carrying it on. That said, since Alphabet they operate differently.
Yes, that's how capitalism works (technically, America's mixed market).
Now, if Magic Leap were a public company that lied to the public, yes I would be totally in favor of regulatory/civil, maybe criminal, investigations.
though at least the latter has a proper, released product...
I suspect the work is interesting for the engineers but nobody has the heart to tell the C level execs that what they are trying to sell the public is bullshit.
People get locked in, family commitments etc. etc.
Lower employment risk due to more high paying jobs and increased job liquidity.
Living somewhere cheap, where you can get occasional well paid work and save money can also work.
Looking for an out in FL now -- finding it very hard to maintain salary. May move back to west coast, but not quite ready for that yet.
Was there ever an ingress of talent in the first place? I haven't seen a single technical blog, white paper, conference talk, or anything else of any substance from their engineering department. Every time I see them at a trade show it is nothing but marketing folks with zero technical information. Who is even really working on this?
Mostly because they are getting paid :).
And it's not entirely implausible that they get 'something' to work, and are able to sell that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...
Long associated with Barnum & Bailey, this is the legendary traveling spectacle whose touring will soon be permanently cancelled for the first time in over 100 years.
Anyway, when it comes to Magic Leap, I don't see any way that PTBarnum would be disappointed in their profitability so far.
Without even touring or entertaining very many people at all, they've brought in enough money to start a number of colleges.
TEDxSarasota [1] => Saratosa, Florida [2] => Ringling College of Art & Design [3] => Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus [4] => P T Barnum [5] => Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College [6] => Magic Leap [7]
[1] http://www.tedxsarasota.com/surprises-abound-in-this-multime...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarasota,_Florida
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringling_College_of_Art_and_De...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringling_Bros._and_Barnum_%26_...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringling_Bros._and_Barnum_%26_...
True.
"Now, the logic is that whoever pours the most money into it will win the race and with patents be in a monopoly position."
This is not quite true :).
My bet is that the quality of AR that we see in their hype videos will not be possible on a consumer scale until after the core patents have run out :).
This is a 'disruptive' technology but it's still way behind practical applicability.
We see this in every industry - and sometimes it takes quite a long time for products to come to fruition :)
In addition the lack of 3D isn't that big of a deal given the brain fills in the details with other cues. E.g. People that go blind in one eye can adjust quite well to the lack of 3D.
I personally would love a HUD for my sporting activities; e.g. Skully. But my phone is perfectly fine as a daily driver.
> - Refusing to give a launch date
> ...
> - Confusing working hard with making progress
Some of these are valid, but some are inevitable for any tech that is actually revolutionary. Magic Leap's actions seem so far to be consistent with both theories. It's kind of unfortunately true that it's impossible to distinguish between the exaggerated-for-media-coverage-sake case and the actually-world-changing-but-really-technically-difficult case.
But to be fair, author does the exact same thing than he is accusing Magic Leap of : making claims without displaying anything to back them up. He states that Magic Leap won't happen, just like flying cars. Based on what, except his frustration of not seeing the product? Same there : "The truth is that Magic Leap cannot get its huge prototype working in a much, much smaller version". Starting a sentence with "The truth is" doesn't make it true by itself, we need evidences.
As far as I know, maybe author is stating exactly what will happen, but I can't agree with him given so few evidences.
https://twitter.com/rabovitz/status/807077358624772098?ref_s...
There are drawings of something more helmet like in their patents, like this one: http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?Docid=D0758367&homeurl=http%3A%...
http://gizmodo.com/magic-leap-ripped-off-those-awesome-ui-co...
Based on this cheap setup I'm confident we'll see something mind blowing in the near future.
> If you were investing millions into something, would you not request a personal demo where you actually see the demo for yourself, in your own time, and see how it works?
I know I would.
Hololens is where our state of the art is - and I'm quite happy with that, it's imperfect magic! So when someone comes along and essentially says "we're doing all the magical stuff we can do today but somehow removing ALL the really hard limitations, and no we won't tell you how!" it just smells like wish-fulfillment hucksterism. I can just point a finger at Hololens and say "hey, this is what today's reality ACTUALLY looks like."
"Maybe Microsoft is saving all the wow factor for its keynotes, but my demo was a less refined and less capable version of what we've seen in on-stage demos. My experience, while impressive, felt like child's play AR compared to what's been in Microsoft's keynotes."
Microsoft unveiled it well over a year ago, and still when people can actually try the device the demos are a fraction of the myth presented in their keynote. And of course these things always rely upon the development of technology, but we often get 80% and think the last 20% is the easy part when really it's the extraordinarily difficult barrier between realistically credible and a toy.
The projection technology (the field refraction grid) is very interesting, and the environment mapping is fantastic, but the resolution of the device makes the demos farce out of the gate -- the total overlay resolution is 1268x720 max (in most realistic scenes much less), so when you see someone demo something like a web browser in their AR display, if you ever see the demo it's just entirely unusable (far too low of a resolution) unless you move directly in front of the projection occupying the majority of your FOV, at which point what is the point.
The technology will improve, obviously, but right now it definitely falls in the category of gimmick to me, with several generations before it's remotely as usable as being pitched.
Where did you see the "rigged demos"? It works as shown in the demos if you even understand what it can do and do not. Your 20 minutes on hand demo never shows/teaches you any thing.
"OK now, this show used to be hosted by my friend Paul Baldwin, but he developed shpilkis in his genechtagazoink. So now he's in Boca Raton, Florida, recovering nicely, thank you very much." -Linda Richman [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_Talk#Discussion_topics