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Comment by ghusbands | Hacker News Reader

You're not going to find the technical truth on this blog. Look at the history of posts; the author clearly believes that Magic Leap is fraudulent at its core and wants to prove it. Everything Magic Leap does/says is attacked from that inherently biased position. Any facts or data presented on the blog will be with that goal in mind, and any facts or data that support the opposite will be downplayed or omitted.

I don't know whether Magic Leap actually will produce anything of merit, but this blog won't help anyone find out.

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A lot of experienced people in the computer graphics industry doubt Magic Leap and their claims -- myself included.

It is a fact that what ML started out saying they were going to do is not what they are currently doing. And what they are currently doing is incredibly similar now to the Hololens.

> I don't know whether Magic Leap actually will produce anything of merit, but this blog won't help anyone find out.

I think the author of this blog post isn't wrong.

Can someone provide a brief summary of that difference as of today?

I thought they were always going to be a Hololens-like AR product?

No, they were a product that did not require goggles or glasses or anything. They promised that you could see the effects without any glasses or contacts or anything on your face.

Either they engaged in highly illegal false advertising about their current product or their old product was too magic and futuristic so they cancelled it. Not sure which.

But they pivoted from a non-goggles technology to a googles-technology somewhere along the road.

Oh wow, ok yeah.. I don't remember those claims at all, how would that even have been possible?

The first time I heard of ML was the Wired piece, and I think that one was already referring to glasses.

edit: Like the other comment here says, I just went back and checked a few places (Wikipedia and other articles) and it seems they've always been about glasses..

Remember this?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/09/magic_leap_neither_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/comments/3q5bxc/magic_leap...

https://www.cnet.com/news/magic-leap-shows-demo-video/

From your links:

The hardware is yet to be revealed (but it'll presumably use a headset)

they waved away the fact that reducing it down to a wearable pair of glasses and an affordable computer was far from inevitable.

The truth is that Magic Leap cannot get its huge prototype working in a much, much smaller version.

Nobody who knows anything about AR ever thought it was anything but some form of glasses.

I would argue that the number of people who know much about the technical side of this is less than a rounding error against the population who watched that demo.

Edit: Given the seeming impossibility of an FSD like the one they’re still selling to investors, it may be ML’s investors are not part of the “know much about...” side.

That matters why? The majority of marketing materials for any technology are vague, abstracted and non-technical.

That someone would make an assumption about something that they have no knowledge about, that isn't even available to them, means what exactly?

You guys are shouting at clouds.

You seem to be conveniently ignoring the years of patent and investor material, while simply hand-waving away deceptive marketing materials. Worse, you’re adding nothing here except the truly dubious currency of your personal incredulity.

Whoa, hold on there, Magic Leap never promised anything like that.

No official marketing, patent or legal documents or anyone familiar with the space said anything about a form factor that was anything other than glasses ever.

In the circles I run in, it was fairly well known that it was some type of fiber optic light scanning and "lightfield" technology. They shared this officially with their investors as well.

Here is one of their investor documents from late-2013:

http://www.kguttag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/2013-07-12...

On page 37, it states "Enabled by Proprietary Scanning Fiber Projector"

Page 148 "Enabled by Proprietary Ultralightweight protection and true lightfield technology."

Also look at how light the googles are in the fundraising documents, and compare to the huge v1 release they have just released pictures of. Night and day difference.

Right, as I said it's always been known to be glasses.

You are right that it has always been "glasses" in a rough sense of the word- at least when I read the actual details, even though their simulated PR videos often showed it without glasses and way more vivid and with larger FOVs than it could have been in real-life. But the lightweight ultra thin glasses they promised and the tech they said would be inside them is not what they are actually delivering. But technically they are both "glasses".

I don't know what to say other than point out that until the ML One "reveal," ML has never officially promised or revealed anything publicly to anyone about the tech that would eventually reach consumers.

Nothing in interviews, talks etc... have they said anything about what they would deliver, on what timeline or in what form factor. Not in the wired interview the Information article, anywhere. Their patents have a wide range of designs and cover a lot of territory, which means basically nothing aside from optionality.

The "promises" about a ML product come from many "technical" people speculating based on no first hand knowledge. It's really astonishing and possibly really impressive depending on the outcome, how ML has really let the technoverse drive the narrative about them as a company and their product. It's like fan-fiction almost.

For anyone else who may have fallen in this linguistic trap: it was a tiny projector that projected a lightfield directly into a user’s eye.

Remember this?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/09/magic_leap_neither_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/comments/3q5bxc/magic_leap...

https://www.cnet.com/news/magic-leap-shows-demo-video/

They kind of did.

> No official marketing

Actually all of their official marketing promised this in the earliest years. Here is an example, I remember there are more as well:

https://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/comments/3q5bxc/magic_leap...

The author of the post is trying to prove the negative, that ML can not succeed because GP can not reconcile a successful solution from the the disclosed technologies, or that one does not exist. This may be true, but can not be proven.

Dealing with ML often feels like dealing with climate change deniers.

But ML has pivoted away from nearly all of their major technology advances at this point, so they are much more likely to deliver now what is likely to be an underwhelming product that is little differentiated from Hololens.

Why not drop the ad hominem and address the numbers presented?

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