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Comment by newfocogi | Hacker News Reader

What happened to Magic Leap's advanced photonic lightfield chip? I thought the thing that made Magic Leap special was their light field tech, but this just appears to be stacked wave guides, which other than having 2 focal planes seems to be the same tech as Hololens.

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I think it's in there in the "waveguide" tech. iFixit has a pretty good write on on their tear down and they mention this.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Magic+Leap+One+Teardown/1122...

Also...

https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/23/teardown-of-magic-leap-one...

It never existed and was never going to exist, except as marketing and investor hype. Same with their fiber-scanning display, and everything else that doesn’t add up to, “like a Hololens, but with a much dimmer view of the real world and more useless patents.”

https://www.kguttag.com/2018/08/27/palmer-luckey-founder-of-...

Quote from Palmer Luckey in that blog: “The ML1 is a not a “lightfield projector” or display by any broadly accepted definition, and as a Bi-Focal Display, only solves vergence-accommodation conflict in contrived demos that put all UI and environmental elements at one of two focus planes. Mismatch occurs at all other depths. In much the same way, a broken clock displays the correct time twice a day.“

Downvotes aside, are there any actual counterpoints to be offered to this critique? It is like a Hololens, it does have a dimmer view, it doesn’t match their many promises and early patents, it is slightly cheaper and has a slightly better FOV than HL, but it’s also wired to their Lightpack. All in all I’d say the investors should be carrying pitchforks and torches.

I don't think that's fair to say at this point. Everything points to it being vaporware right now, but nobody outside of their R&D is sure, and Palmer Luckey merely analyzed their current product just like everyone else (but perhaps with a bit more bias).

It (what they advertised) looks like it's vaporware, but when they release something else I'll keep an eye on it just in case it isn't.

What’s unfair about it? They’ve spent years making claims that turned out to be patently false, and their patents tell the story of a company that pursued something better minds have failed at, and then shows them pivoting to the boring “Hololens 1.1” we see today. Other than an incredible facility with both deceptive marketing and fundraising I see no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt at this point. They’re still blathering about “photonic lightfield chips” when they’re selling run-of-the-mill waveguides.

I don’t see vapor ware, there is a product, it’s just technically unimpressive and at odds with years of marketing. If they release something else there is no indication that they’re capable of producing more than incremental modifications of existing tech. Do you see some other indication outside of their marketing and fundraising to indicate otherwise? Investors were sold on visions of something completely at odds with their actual product, how is that not a huge red flag?

The chip plus nano machines that enter your eyes cortex are coming in the next round of funding.

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