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Comment by jorgemf | Hacker News Reader

$8B Valuation and no product in the market. It sounds crazy for me. Can somebody put some sense here for me?

Sure, look at a comparable "AR" company. Snap generated $150M in revenue last quarter, and is valued at $24B (market cap).

Magic Leap would need to generate $50M quarterly, or $200M annually to sit at a comparable valuation multiple. Given that the "AR" market will be in the $billions for yearly revenues, I think this valuation is totally feasible. But that is still an assumption nonetheless. Facebook, Google, and Microsoft will play in the mix, but a billion dollar "AR" market will be big enough to sustain a few large players.

Obviously only time will tell as it's impossible to evaluate what Magic Leap is actually developing and selling at this point.

PS check out the comments on this thread that got flagged off the front page earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14343480

The problem is that AR can't make things dark. You can add light, but you can't take it away without blocking whatever you're looking at.

Whether that's an extremely serious hindrance to the AR movement remains to be seen. Adding text overlays would be most of the benefit of AR, but there might be optical reasons why you can't just block out some light and then overlay text in a readable way.

It might turn out that AR only works well at night, when it's dark.

It can make things dark. Have you seen the dimming windows in 787?

That's not good enough to work.

For a more complete answer: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-...

Then you can't see what's in front of you. Take away the "R" in "AR" and all you've done is stuck another screen in front of your face, albeit much closer than any previous technology.

People say this all time, but I'm unconvinced. Your AR glasses can have two layers:

* a transparent-or-black layer, whose only point is to block out the real world when necessary

* the actual additive display layer, which either operates on top of a transparent pixel or a black one, if it's better to draw it that way.

Nope, I thought so too, but you can't. When the transparent-or-black layer activates, you end up with a blurry blob of black, not a sharp one. That means the best you can do is sort of muddy the image, not block it. It's the same reason you can't see scratches in glasses -- it gets blurred because your eyes' focal plane is in the distance.

Or more precisely: You could do this, but it's probably not going to have the results you wanted. The effect has a good chance of being too distracting to be practical. But it's hard to know without trying it.

Good analogy w/r/t scratches in glass ... but if that's a solvable problem for what you want to show (the additive layer), it seems like it should also be a solvable problem for the subtractive layer (?)

It might be interesting to get a pair of glasses, put some black tape on the lenses and see what it might look like in practice. You could get some partially transparent tape to simulate what AR would end up doing.

It seems like an experiment worth doing. If you put your finger up to your eye and close the other, then focus on your laptop screen, you can see the blurry edge of your finger interfere with whatever you're looking at. But that's opaque -- it's hard to know what a partially-transparent blob might look like, or how much of an impact it'd have.

"We made black with light." - Rony Abovitz (founder of Magic Leap)

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136110

> Snap generated $150M

Yes, but Magic Leap generated 0 revenue. How can you be so sure it will generate something? It can be something like google glass, very cool but noone used them. Or the next smartwatch, some traction for a year and later the market size is really small. That is why it sounds crazy for me, it is a huge risk, and the have 0 feedback from users.

This is what I call a 'Valuation bubble' :)

They release a conceptual video, throw some jargon, have yet to release an MVP even, but have high valuation because it is very promising. I am not saying they are evil or they are doing something unethical.

They also demo prototypes.

http://www.businessinsider.com/magic-leap-photo-leak-prototy...

I'm pretty sure they are going to build a nice, licensable operating system. No doubt, packed full of wonderful patents. Interaction design and ux will be the most difficult part of AR.

It can turn to be like google glasses, that it is very cool and promising but noone used them. So $4B valuation means 0

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