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Comment by mustacheemperor | Hacker News Reader

I share the concern that there's still nothing too publically accessible, but the device itself isn't completely under wraps. The journalist in the Rolling Stone article[0] viewed a few demos built between the ML team, including one with Sigur Ros that's got a very small clip on youtube[1]. I suspect building a demo of this kind of tech that's remotely as impressive viewed on a website or youtube video is challenging. If I'd built the device as marketed I'd be concerned about giving half-baked first impressions that disrupt the hype machine, even if the device itself isn't half-baked.

[0]https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/lightwear-intro... [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLtDeonCAYE

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The device is supposed to be in the hands of actual paying customers within a year and they don't even have pictures or video of it _doing something_. Sure it might not be perfect, but there's exactly zero evidence that this product isn't just a hollow chassis. If a demo at this point comes off as half baked, isn't that a gigantic red flag that this product isn't able to cash the checks that Magic Leap is writing?

Nintendo announced the Switch about six months before it shipped. Before that they announced titles, showed game demos, and talked about titles in development. Magic Leap has shown us what could be a 3D printed mockup for all we know, and has announced (to my knowledge) exactly one thing for the console (mixed reality comics).

Magic Leap should be marketing the hell out of this. It's a multi-billion dollar product, and yet they have exactly zero actual footage of the actual hardware even working. Their sizzle reels have been nothing but concept art. Something is very wrong with this.

I agree that it is concerning, but I don't see how an entire multi page article of someone's hands-on experience with the device qualifies as "exactly zero evidence this product isn't just a hollow chassis."

The article, remarkably, has scant few details on the author's experience with the product. This quote sums up my skepticism:

>instead they were constructed to give visitors who pass through the facility under non-disclosure agreement, a chance to see the magic in action.

It's a controlled environment with purpose-built demos for folks under NDA.

There's no videos, renderings from actual hardware, or substantive critiques on the fidelity of the device's output. The only negative criticism is that it has a rectangular viewport which doesn't fill your field of view. I can't believe that's the only negative thing that could be said about this. Not a single comment on FPS, glitches, or any other problems.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I could totally see this demo as being fudged. The computations could be happening off-device with video streamed over wifi. We've heard before that Magic Leap has struggled to miniaturize their hardware, with the last version looking like a proton pack...what better way to demo it than to fake the demo?

I want real evidence that the cute hockey puck has a real computer inside, not just anecdotes from an NDAed journalist in a lab environment.

> It's a controlled environment with purpose-built demos for folks under NDA

Magic Leap pulled a similar stunt with The Information around the same time last year [1]. Seems like they found a more pliant journalist in The Rolling Stone.

"In March of last year, it released a video online titled “Just Another Day in the Office at Magic Leap.” Shot from the perspective of one of its employees working at his desk, all appears normal until robots start falling from the ceiling and converging on the worker, who picks up a toy gun and starts blasting his enemies into tangled lumps of virtual metal. The video, viewed 3.4 million times on YouTube, was meant to demonstrate a game people were playing with Magic Leap’s headset. It had been used for more than a year to recruit employees to South Florida. 'This is a game we’re playing around the office right now,' Magic Leap wrote in the description of the video.

But no such game existed at the time, according to two former employees with direct knowledge. The video was not actually filmed using any Magic Leap technology. It was made by New Zealand-based special effects company Weta Workshop, which has worked on movies like 'Mad Max: Fury Road' and 'The Hobbit,' the employees said. One of them called it an 'aspirational conceptual' video. The employees said some at the company felt the video misled the public.

...

In addition to the bulky demo connected to a computer, Mr. Abovitz showed The Information a prototype of the compact device it intends to build. It looked as if somebody fastened electronics to every inch of a pair of wire-framed glasses. It had a multi-layered, flat lens. He would not turn the device on, but assured a reporter that it worked just as well as the larger, helmet-like device. Mr. Abovitz would not discuss details of the technology, repeatedly responding to probing questions with the phrase 'Squirrels and Sea Monkeys.'"

I think Magic Leap is another Theranos. A second, independently-developed HoloLens makes for a respectable incremental business. But that nugget of truth has been leveraged to a $6 billion hallucination. Maintaining that hallucination could have forced management to lie to investors, to the public and to their employees.

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/the-reality-behind-magic-leap

So are you explicitly saying that the Rolling Stones journalist is lying? And the only supposed "proof" you bring is an article over an year old written when the miniaturised prototype didn't even exist?

"This is a game we’re playing around the office right now,' Magic Leap wrote in the description of the video."

"In addition to the bulky demo connected to a computer, Mr. Abovitz showed The Information a prototype of the compact device it intends to build. It looked as if somebody fastened electronics to every inch of a pair of wire-framed glasses. It had a multi-layered, flat lens. He would not turn the device on, but assured a reporter that it worked just as well as the larger, helmet-like device."

Your post agrees that one year ago, Magic Leap was lying about the technology they had. JumpCrisscross only asserts that given all publicly available information, Magic Leap is probably still lying.

This is absolutely false, the Rolling Stones journalist tested extensively the miniaturised prototype.

The article begins with the author describing several demos, only after which he is guided to a different room where he has, in his own words, "My first close look at the full Magic Leap hardware."

Rony Abovitz calls the chips supposedly powering his tech "Sea Monkeys."

"I noticed that when I moved or looked around, her eyes tracked mine. The cameras inside the Lightwear was feeding her data so she could maintain eye contact."

Yes. The machines used to render that demo were, in the author's own words, not the full Magic Leap hardware.

edit: Also, even if that demo was the advertised Magic Leap hardware, it still only responded to camera movement, and Miller said the demo had capabilities that he refused to actually display.

> one year ago, Magic Leap was lying about the technology they had

>> This is absolutely false

The Information documented Magic Leap lying about something unambiguous and untrue. That is absolutely true.

And if you're choosing who to trust between The Information and The Rolling Stone... well that's like choosing between a Bugatti Veyron and a Ford Pinto.

I pick you: you people are insane. they have raised based off of demos. vcs come in, get the demo, sign a check (because it's that fucking good). I know at least 4 people personally that have gotten demos and it's very real.

What is known, empirically true - it is possible for one group of people to scam other people and groups for many millions of dollars each. Given what is known about the mechanisms of high end confidence tricks, what is different about the operation of Magic Leap that indicates that it is not a confidence trick? Remember, the most detailed article written by a journalist who experienced the demo describes a literal scam.

I think they're probably fudging their demos, but my hope is that they've just decided on a marketing basis to not show people on a flat screen the images. With VR headsets I think the best "selling point" is the experience - VR graphics aren't great - but once you put it on you get it (if its good).

This is the reason why I hate conspiracy theorist. You can't argue with them because they think to know everything despite the evidence of the contrary.

> despite the evidence of the contrary

You're on a bit of a roll across this thread [1] without anything more than the Rolling Stone article. People are expressing healthy skepticism towards a company that has been publicly caught in a material lie, has raised a lot of VC with little to show for it, and made an announcement with lots of CGI and a vague "2018" release date. Given whom this announcement is targeting, I think it's fair for people to have a balanced view before they commit their time or energy to this company.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tigershark

Ironically, he/she is causing people to post more information supporting the viewpoint he opposes.

Because I hate people that lie and spread misinformation. You are not expressing healthy skepticisim, you are outrightly affirming that the Rolling Stones journalist is lying and you are misinforming everyone with your false statements.

I'm not asserting that I know anything to be true. I'm pointing out that until Magic Leap shows actual reasonable proof that their product works outside of a lab, I have no reason to believe that it works. I sincerely hope it does, because this is cool as heck. But for a company to be rapidly approaching their target ship date and have released nothing of substance showing the damn thing working, that's incredibly suspicious.

In their defense, it looks like some sort of dev kit is supposed to be in the hands of paying developers ("creators"). That might be a pretty raw product.

I guess you didn't follow it at all. Magic leap showed the demo to a lot of people and the Rolling Stones journalist extensively tested it. How can you suggest that it is just a plastic mockup? As for the content there are hundreds of people working on it both in house and in selected partners like Weta.

I explained further here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15971433

It would be trivial to fake the demo. You can buy the parts to stream HD video wirelessly for a few hundred bucks. If they're using a small server farm to render the output, isn't that cheating?

If they can show it to a journalist in a lab, why not make a marketing demo in a park? Like I said, I'll believe it when I see it.

Except it has to do a bunch of other things to do what they described convincingly.

> he journalist in the Rolling Stone article

It's called PR.

Interesting that this came out in Rolling Stone and not another tech site. I obviously couldn't say for sure, but I don't see why it isn't implausible to think that they found a publication that was happy to roll over a few details in exchange for an exclusive dig.

> “We went on this really crazy sprint from basically October 2014 to December 2017,”

This is the part that startles me the most. 3 years of a "crazy sprint" with no revenues is extremely hard for companies to pull off. It leads to all sorts of problems internally and hiring decisions are usually rushed and lack direction. It's surprisingly much easier to do when you have paying customers, because you make decisions based on the market and not just your gut (Slack being a good example of this).

They got almost 2B$ of investment, I can't see why having 3 years of crazy sprint would be a problem.

3 years...

Also, having more money and no biz model is a bigger issue than you think.

Yeah. Can you say Duke Nukem Forever?

I don't think we can really compare 3 years to the 15 years Duke Nukem Forever was in development for.

If we're talking videogames plenty of games have 3 year development periods.

That's why Amazon's stock crashed and lost 90% of its value in 2001.

Amazon ha(d), arguably, a trivial business model - at least for retail.

Things have changed with Prime and supply chain innovations, but there isn't a much simpler model than what basically amounts to consignment.

> https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/lightwear-intro...

This is very impressive if what it says is true. They've basically reinvented the concept of a digital computer display by projecting a sort of artificial light field into the eye. The amount of capital they've raised makes sense now, this sounds like a ridiculously big undertaking. What remains to be seen is whether all this work will be worth it as opposed to just better displays, but color me intrigued.

It's just talking about a VRD, which is used by HoloLens as well. I imagine "light field" is just jargon to impress investors (it's not an impressive concept in itself - projecting a 'light field' on a 2D plane (retina) amounts to simply projecting light).

Building a demo for this would be challenging, but come on. They have been at this for what... five years now, and had $2 billion to work with?

Besides, hype can be very dangerous. Look at what happened with No Man's Sky. They rode the hype train to the Moon and came crashing down hard because the product utterly failed to meet expectations. That's why it's important to temper hype with regularly administered doses of realism.

> Look at what happened with No Man's Sky.

I feel like this is also an answer to the top comment in this thread - gamers are a target market for stuff like this because they are more likely to take risks based on hype without waiting for a technology to prove itself.

The journalist in the Rolling Stone article[0] viewed a few demos built between the ML team, including one with Sigur Ros that's got a very small clip on youtube[1]. I suspect building a demo of this kind of tech that's remotely as impressive viewed on a website or youtube video is challenging. If I'd built the device as marketed I'd be concerned about giving half-baked first impressions that disrupt the hype machine, even if the device itself isn't half-baked.

I hadn't read the article in rolling stone to be honest, but after reading it I get the impression that it would be even easier to prepare a more public demonstration (in a controlled environment) instead of this NDA shackled article. It wouldn't be that hard for example to show a video of the journalist in the room wearing the device and side-by-side a cloned view of what the journalist is visually experiencing. Something like what Steve Jobs did in the first iphone unveiling, but not live - an edited version would be more than fine, conveying both the visual experience and the journalists reactions.

This is a ground breaking technology with so many non-gimmicky applications that it's mind boggling. I was thinking earlier this morning how it can be used for driving assistance: wear the headset in your car and get an overlaid "google maps" experience without ever having to get your eyes off the road, pair it with the car's sensors and get collision distance information, coloured lanes in dark roads, etc.

How about (paired with sensors) measuring dimensions, inspecting components, counting objects, etc. in professional/industrial environments?

I don;t know, maybe I'm wrong but I feel this obsession with secrecy is hurting both their product and the technology

If the concern is interrupting the hype machine, why not use reaction videos? That worked for Enchroma glasses, which is in a very similar position: both are about doing something with your vision by wearing glasses, making it hard (impossible in Enchroma's case) to capture on video.

http://enchroma.com/

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