Magic Leap looking to raise at a $6B valuation

The rear sensor does not do "even more sophisticated depth mapping". TrueDepth sensor is only on the front. The CPU is not as powerful as anything you get in Desktop PCs. There's an order of magnitude power difference between a mobile SoC and a desktop CPU/GPU combination. If you have doubts about that, try running full Photoshop on a mobile SoC via Windows 10 on ARM. Not sure what "Dream VR" is. Do you mean Daydream?

Nothing is keeping someone.

Probably the depth sensor is not high enough resolution. The camera is not high enough resolution. The phone battery will be dead in 45 minutes. I imagine the high end AR market would be for things like surgery where extreme precision matters. For instance hook a high precision AR device up to a C-arm and the way angioplasty is carried out would be completely changed forever.

By putting AI on the Phone, they invert the data center and communication problem. The mainframe vs smart client cycle continues. A lower powered chip on the client would need a more powerful chip in the datacenter to make up for data transit time. Individual users pay for power, manage heat dissipation and upgrades. This actually saves Apple billions in data center costs while making them money.

> They also have a CPU that is as powerful as anything you get in Desktop PCs.

Is this actually true?

Tend to agree. The big problem no-one has solved is the glasses/immersive aspect.

Hololens is close, but the kit is waaaay to bulky still (and low FoV, not bad tho). In a few years tho... some kind of ARKit accessory will absolutely kill in this space.

Yup. Apple's depth sensor + ML can be also used as pretty powerful 3D hand gesture mapper. Better than Leap Motion I would guess. Also, switching to OLED allows low persistence. Their new custom GPU and custom video encoder on iPhone 8/X might even allow them to do ultra-low-latency AR pipeline. It's coming it's for sure.

getting there first is not the same as winning :)

Trilogy Systems perhaps. (It seems they IPO'ed pre-product? Someone on this forum was probably around when this happened.)

Trilogy Systems Corporation was a computer systems company started in 1980. Originally called ACSYS, the company was founded by Gene Amdahl, his son Carl Amdahl[1] and Clifford Madden. Flush with the success of his previous company, Amdahl Corporation, Gene Amdahl was able to raise $230 million for his new venture. Trilogy was the most well funded start-up company up till that point in Silicon Valley history. It had corporate support from Groupe Bull, Digital Equipment Corporation, Unisys, Sperry Rand and others. The plan was to use extremely advanced semiconductor manufacturing techniques to build an IBM compatible mainframe computer that was both cheaper and more powerful than existing systems from IBM and Amdahl Corporation.

...

In 1983, the company had an initial public offering and raised $60 million.

By mid-1984, the company decided it was too difficult to manufacture their computer design. Gene Amdahl stepped down as CEO and Henry Montgomery was brought in as replacement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilogy_Systems

I thought maybe Skycar since it spans 40+ years, but even they've apparently "only" spent 100 million (although inflation adjustment would boost it a bit).

Theranos is the only other one that comes to mind and we all know how that played out.

I'm skeptical, but the Magic Leap engineers I've met have been really confident that their tech is going to be a game changer (and of course wouldn't tell me anything about it ;)). Guess we'll see when they show their product publicly - it's weird that they've decided to stay stealth for this long.

I think you missed googles recent announcement for ARCore. They seem not that far off as it will also work on older phones to some extent.

There's a lot of 'lol, vaporware' type comments about Magic Leap, but taking some new fangled hardware from a crude proof of concept in a lab to the mass market in 7 or 8 years actually sounds like an ambitious timeline to me. These things usually take a long time. They also often end up going nowhere, which is why it's really surprising to see how much capital is being gambled.

All the hardware that went into the first iPhone (the last really breathtaking consumer gadget) was decades in the making, with many iterative intermediate steps along the way. Attempting to go from 0 to 60 in one product cycle is kind of crazy, but I'm not sure how else you would do it this day and age with expectations being so high, there's no room for anything half baked. Either you make the leap or you don't.

I would totally pay $2k for ar glasses that live up to the hype, though even under the best of circumstances, I don't expect Magic Leap to be living up to any hype for several more years.

They must know something we don't or there's so much money laying around, so a certain % goes into trash. For the company it makes sense to have as much cash a possible, not even blue chip companies could raise cash in 2008. 2008 is due to make a comeback IMO, in some form.

Look at the amount of jobs they are hiring for:

https://www.magicleap.com/#/join

Astounding.

It's all about who's on their board and who they've raised money from. If they have relevant industry expertise on their board and have raised money from smart investors like sequoia they probably have real tech. If they have bunch of dumb money and people who bring nothing technical to the board they're more likely to be another Theranos. Not having medical and science expertise and raising dumb money was part of Theranos' problem.

Having said that Magic Leap's investors are Google, Andreessen Horowitz and Qualcom. The board is comprised of Google's CEO and Qualcom's executive chairman.

That's all very impressive in my opinion.

They have 'real tech' - the issue is how marketable and productizable it is.

This is an old, old issue in tech investing.

Sometimes companies have amazing demos - but the ability to make a product is limited, or the market potential is limited.

That this money is coming from far-away, is not a good sign. If they were truly hot, then the 'good firms' would be lining up. I loathe to use the term 'dumb money' but there is a lot of it flooding into the US as of late - a similar thing was happening during the 2000 bubble, but this might be more sustainable as before it was regular money from overseas, or from big-boston firms - but now - the money coming in from Asia is sustainable. All that money we send for cheap stuff has to come back and find a home somewhere.

And 'dumb' is a relative/unfair term as well - for some investors, it makes much more sense to take on higher risk than others as their personal needs and opportunity are different. If you have $1B sitting in a fund and nowhere to put it, and your local government can come along and snatch it up at any time either through currency dilution or appropriation - well - all of a sudden a slightly-risky investment in Magic Leap makes much more sense than it would to say, Anderseen Horowitz.

VC investors are just as human as you and me. Manipulating people into parting with their social-economic power is essentially a solved problem. What Magic Leap says their gonna sell isn't.

Or the alternative is that they've seen things we haven't. Who would miss the opportunity to build the next Apple?

They had a prototype much much bigger than the current PEQ and as far as I know every investor before putting money tried it and was blown away by the experience.

That would put Magic Leap somewhere between Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash in their crypto market cap.

Magic Cards were successful... so maybe the coins will blow us all away...??

Last report I read mentioned two waist-mounted units for computing and battery that would be linked up to the sunglass-sized product (presumably by wires).

I'm sure they have made some good technical advances. But the fact that it's taken this long to productize it to something people can try is.. not promising.

Given their burn rate they really need the first product to have substantial market traction to sustain such valuations and keep moving. That's challenging to say the least..

Because cutting-edge hardware is expensive as hell to develop.

For example, Nvidia's R&D budget spend for just their Tesla architecture was $3B.

I would have said that 4 years ago, when they were 3 years in.

I believe they are working with Zeiss in that field.