Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
theinformation.com
theinformation.com
I can understand not wanting their product misrepresented, but all the secrecy and censorship about it makes me believe it is bad, and I'm not going to spend money on something I believe is bad.
It appears to have been scrubbed from the internet though because I was trying to find it a while back to show someone and I searched for a while, but couldn't find anything.
Magic Leap seems like a case study of how not to release a product, but maybe they were more focused on raising money?
Either work on your thing in public, shipping units (Oculus/FB) or work on it entirely in secret (Apple), but don't loudly and continuously talk vaguely about how amazing your thing is with no real public examples for years. This plus all the fake marketing video demos - if you're going to do this you better be as good as you're pretending to be.
Someone that good probably wouldn't need to show marketing videos, they'd just show the product itself.
I finally did get to play with one (friend who personally knows an investor had one) and it was pretty disappointing. AR seems likely to be the next computing platform, but the hardware is not ready yet.
Magic Leap reminds me a lot of the General Magic documentary - crazy hype, right general idea, but too early and bad product.
I'm not sure if they have the same talent General Magic had though.
Cracks me up every time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5jWtz3rzco
To their credit, the developers diligently kept working on the game and I've heard it's quite polished now. I kind of doubt we'll see the same turnaround story with Magic Leap, but who knows.
Anyone who has worked in software knows the difference between expectations/projections and real life. Everything takes 10x longer once you dig into the details. So it’s great to see a gaming company able to adapt and continually release through those down moments and eventually produce something great.
It makes you wonder how much better other games could be if they took an incremental approach and continually expanded the world available to users.
I mean, come on:
The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson, as told to Leo Laporte.
"In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California." ...
https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp...
Full interview with lots more details about the development of HyperCard:
https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=f...
Bill Atkinson's guest lecture in Brad Meyer's CMU 05-640 Interaction Techniques class, Spring 2019, Feb 4, 2019:
https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
Including polaroids of early Lisa development.
About PhotoCard:
http://www.billatkinson.com/aboutPhotoCard.html
PhotoCard by Bill Atkinson is a free app available from the iTunes App store, that allows you to create custom postcards using Bill's nature photos or your own personal photos, then send them by email or postal mail from your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.
Bill Atkinson, Mac software legend and world renowned nature photographer, has created an innovative application that redefines how people create and send postcards.
With PhotoCard you can make dazzling, high resolution postcards on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, and send them on-the-spot, through email or the US Postal Service. The app is amazingly easy to use. To create a PhotoCard, select one of Bill's nature photos or one of your own personal photos. Then, flip the card over to type your message. For a fun touch, jazz up your PhotoCard with decorative stickers and stamps. If you're emailing your card, it can even include an audible greeting. When you've finished your creation, send it off to any email or postal address in the world!
Lasers are dangerous to the eye because there's no real ramp up for the beam - you can produce an almost arbitrarily powerful pin-prick of light which gives you no warning before it's all hitting the same spot on your retina and destroying it. The beam doesn't diffract of diffuse because it's all one wavelength and colliminated so it puts all that energy suddenly on one part of the eye.
But that property is also what makes the idea of using them for VR/AR amazing: because you could more or less directly target individual parts of the retina with no diffraction, then there's no eyestrain - everything can be made always in focus because the nature of the beam means it essentially bypasses your eye's lens. Your eyes relax because you think everything's in focus already.
Even if Magic Leap dies on the vine, I don't think they're anything like Theranos except for both being unsuccessful VC-funded companies. Theranos tried to sell fraudulent health care services. Magic Leap is trying (and failing) to build a real product. You can buy one and see what it does, and nobody's health is impacted if their experience just sucks.
and burning it to the ground with brilliant 'lets drop $100K for cardboard box design' and buy a gaming studio management https://theamphour.com/394-jeri-ellsworth-and-the-demise-of-...
I’m just confused how the press and investors were misled in such a miraculous way.
http://valleywag.gawker.com/meet-the-google-founders-mistres...
>Since Google Glass launched to our awe and horror, the company's co-founder, Sergey Brin, hasn't been spotted without a pair. He's placed himself atop the privacy-eroding project, publicly, and inside Google's secret labs. Maybe it's because he's fucking the Glass marketing manager, Amanda Rosenberg.
>According to a startling report by AllThingsD's Liz Gannes and Kara Swisher, Brin and his wife of six years, Anne Wojcicki, are no more, now that he's found himself a PR girlfriend at Google. AllThingsD also reported this girlfriend was recently attached to another (totally coincidentally departing) top Googler, Hugo Barra, to make Brin's relationship with the recent San Francisco transplant behind the backs of his wife and children all that much worse.
https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discriminat...
>"Eric Akerman, vice president of IT, is a high school buddy of Abovitz. He is a loud and outspoken and several misogynistic comments have emanated from his department and from him."
>"Vice president of IT Akerman, on Nov. 8, 2016, told a large group of people who asked why he voted for Trump that it was 'because Melania is hot.'"
Usually, Google being willing to give a company hundreds of millions of dollars is enough, because you assume whoever's job it is to give out all that money takes it seriously. Unfortunately, sometimes the more money is involved the harder it is for skeptics to get their own message out, since nobody wants to believe that all the money they've invested has been a poor choice. Just look at Uber. Any company that didn't have so many billions invested in it would have failed because of the internal problems they have long ago.
Are you forgetting Dropbox / "that's just rsync" and various other skeptics? No one likes anything here that seems flashy. And that's a good thing.
It’s the reason you get successes like Tesla or SpaceX and it’s generally good to bias towards optimism over pessimism - you get more people able to try more things and successes that have exponential returns make up for the failures.
Otherwise you get stagnation which ends poorly for everyone.
That said, optimism still requires a plan that makes sense and shipping a real product.
I just got done writing a long thread on the history of 3D as a novelty: https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1203074623232851970
But the basic summary is that since the 1850s, people keep coming up with exciting 3D innovations that sell lots of units for a while, but that never make much of a difference. Stereoscopic 3D is interesting and fun; we all loved our ViewMasters. But once the novelty wore off, we put it on a shelf and rarely picked it up again. The ViewMaster is basically a slinky for our eyeballs.
I've talked with quite a number of people who have bought VR systems, and I have yet to find one who uses it with the sort of frequency that people use their gaming consoles, PCs, laptops, or phones to play games. Maybe this wave of innovation will eventually take face-mounted VR from "novelty" to "daily driver", but it doesn't sound like it's here yet.
I pretty much play VR only at this point. Any time I try a typical flat screen 3D game something is missing. The frustration of having a camera stick. The boringness of having to "press the action button" instead of just reaching out and touch the thing I'm supposed to interact it. And of course most of all the feeling of "presence". The Citadel on the horizon in HL2 (old reference sorry) is a pretty picture but nothing more. The volcano in Farpoint is 3 miles high with a 15 mile high plumb of smoke and I feel that as though I was there. It's like a picture of the grand canyon vs actually being at the grand canyon. They aren't comparable and I can't go back to not feeling like "being there".
This isn't a "gimmick" like 3D movies where they stick things in your face or throw stuff at you just show off the tech. It's qualitatively different.
If there was more content I was interested in I'd spent even more time in VR. Unfortunately there isn't that much AAA VR content and worse for me I can't take horror in VR, it's way to intense, so I probably won't be able to play the new VR Half Life coming out in March.
VR today is like an Apple Newton in 1993. Everyone laughed. Heck in 2007 PDAs where just for geeks. Then in 2008 Apple's PDA shipped, the iPhone, and now everyone has a PDA in their pocket to the point that's you'd be considered strange not to have one. It might be a while, it might even be another 15 years but VR will happen. It's just too compelling when it's good.
but "reaching out" in VR equates to waving around a VR wand in space and pressing buttons on it, I'm not sure what's the difference?
I don't entirely agree with OP. I enjoy VR even when it uses the gamepad. If the iteractions have a good "in-game" explanation - no matter how far-fetched - then your brain will stop raising the alarm. So if the game gives a good justification for pushing buttons in-world then that will do the trick.
But, they literally aren't. The object is in virtual space, and your hands are interacting with two controllers (wands) that you cannot see and this interaction is then translated to control the virtual space.
I suppose, with practice they would become more of an extension of yourself? But that's not what I assume what was meant with "having to press the action button instead of just reaching out and touch the thing". Maybe the VR I tried just had really shitty controllers?
Which is certainly an argument that people get used to VR controllers. But I think it's also an argument against VR being particularly special in terms of immersion.
It's similar to tool use. Tools become an extension of your body and you tend to perceive them as such. Musicians, sportsmen etc are familiar with this feeling.
The biggest problem with VR is headset bulk, and space. Lighter headsets will make a huge difference. Finding a way to give people more raw space to play in will make a huge difference.
On the other hand, if the controls were actually like "reach out and touch the thing" (which they just aren't because you're holding things that only signify interaction), I might have felt better about it. Not sure, because so far all VR has made me feel completely helpless wrt the controls.
I'm still unconvinced. And I'll note that plenty of people get the feeling of presence from novels, from comic books, from movies, from games. Getting lost in a world isn't a property of technology. It's something humans have been doing since we were telling stories around a campfire.
When we want that, that is. As you say, we just as often want distance from our experiences. And quite often we're indifferent to immersion; it's not material to the experience we seek. Movie tickets sales are down 25% since 2000. That might be in part because some people have fancy home theaters that are nearly as good, the at-home 100" screen with 7.1 sound. But I think it's mostly because people are happy watching things on laptops and tablets and phones. They mostly don't want to "be there", however much that horrifies the Martin Scorseses of the world.
People always had TV. Obviously home viewing is winning because it's getting better and it's much cheaper and more convenient.
It's true that home viewing is winning because it's more convenient. But my point is that it's obviously worse in terms of viewer experience and the technical qualities that VR proponents believe will finally lead to VR success.
I pretty much fully agree with your assessment, with the caveat that I've seen a lot of folks really getting in to their Oculus Quests in a way that never happened for the tethered unit. I'm certain many would spend even more time using it if there was a larger software library.
(And yes, the success of the Quest genuinely surprised me, too. Having now gotten to play with one, I have to say tetherless with good controllers is the biggest single improvement in VR since the first modern headset.)
But the resolution and framerate is too weak right now. Needs 8K in 60fps, so it's just a matter of time.
But is resolution that important? If had to list the areas where VR needed improvement it would be fairly low down my list. I'd put comfort and FOV higher and improving the screen door effect would also probably trump resolution.
But I think none of these things are deal-breakers. Content is king as they say. Previous new media have not been held back by quality issues. Early consoles didn't suddenly leap into mass adoption when the graphics improved. Cinema didn't mature when film stock got better. It was content and people's awareness that changed.
Part of the problem the industry has with VR is unrealistic measures of success.
Does VR really have to be used with the same frequency we use consoles and have sales as high as smart phones to be considered not a novelty?
There's a huge gap between "another duffer like 3D TV" and "the new iPhone"
Look at movies as an example. When sound came along, it basically destroyed the market for silent film. Same deal for color film. But 3D has come and gone at least twice, bumping along as a novelty in between.
I think it's going to be even more true of VR, in that doing good VR content is a) difficult, and b) a pretty different process than most non-VR content. One of the VR fans in this thread was bemoaning the lack of AAA VR content in particular. But nobody's going to be making that content unless the market is large enough to support it.
Even if it's arty or niche content (which is fine by me) VR fills a unique role and people will want to keep experimenting with it.
Between education, arts, B2B, training etc the gaming side of VR could disappear entirely and there would still be enough usage to maintain an ecosystem. It doesn't take a huge company to design and make the hardware.
Maybe VR going underground for another decade wouldn't be such a bad thing. The tech industry might be slightly less unicorn-obsessed next time round.
I do agree that there's enough revenue in novelty that content can keep happening. 3D books are still coming out this year, more than 150 years after the initial wave of hype: https://www.amazon.com/Queen-3-D-Bohemian-Rhapsody-2019/dp/1...
But I don't think there's enough evidence to demonstrate that any of those VR uses you suggest will be sustainable businesses after this wave of hype fails. Sure, people will tinker, and I think that's great.
But the most I expect to be happening 10 years from now in VR hardware is the Cardboard-style "let's put a phone on your face" thing. With perhaps a side of "VR as amusement park ride", like today: https://www.msichicago.org/explore/whats-here/tours-and-expe...
And if that's all you're expecting, that's fine by me. My issue with VR is the enormous wave of hype around it.
God knows how ML spent $2 billion. Where did you get the figures on Oculus? Is that their spend or how much Facebook spent on them?
My source is the fact that multiple relatively small companies have brought VR headsets to market and that there are viable open hardware projects to do the same.
> My issue with VR is the enormous wave of hype around it.
Then we agree. My fear is the hype and the associated snipe will kill a fascinating new medium before it's had a chance to mature.
I do believe that it doesn't cost that much to bring something VR-ish to market, as long as they're trying to replicate older hardware with commodity gear. But if they want to push the state of the art forward, I'm not shocked at all by those numbers. Apple's spending something like $15 billion a year on R&D, and billions more on acquisitions. Maybe that's unnecessary for VR, but certainly a lot of VR advocates still believe that true success requires further technical innovation.
This might change for me if we could bypass the eyeballs and the limbs, of course.
Just to clarify - you mean VR with 6DOF tracking of head and controllers? Vive, Rift, Quest, Windows MR etc.
Or something else? For me this is the minimum bar to being "truly interesting VR". Everything before that was just a novelty in my view.
And I'll note that I've believed that myself as long as my use of the platform is modest enough that it stays novel. So what I'm really looking for here is what I look for when evaluating most new products: proof of sustained use by a broad audience.
My personal experience with a new product doesn't tell me a lot. There are things I personally love that never take off, and there are things I don't like that end up being wildly popular. The evidence that will tell me VR has actually arrived is when it's good enough that people stop using their TVs or their Switches or their gaming PC. Or, heck, use it 20+ hours a week at the office, letting their laptops gather dust. And not just the ~3% of the people who are technophiles, the people who absolutely loved their Google Glass. But at a minimum, people in the ~15% group of early adopters, with usage starting to leak into the early mainstream group.
http://www.houseofrave.com/goofy-slinky-eyeball-glasses.html
I guess Magic Leap's problem is that their product is thoroughly meh. Nobody is raving about it (that I'm aware of), and nothing I've seen makes me feel like going out of my way to try one.
Magic Leap originally lied about the concept video they posted to youtube, then retroactively white-washed it after they got caught by Time Magazine.
The most infamous misleading video that currently claims to be a "concept video" was originally deceptively titled "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap" and described as "This is a game we’re playing around the office right now". Only AFTER they got busted, did Magic Leap retroactively change the title and description so they were not so blatantly false and misleading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM
Before they got busted and white-washed the lies, a skeptical Time magazine reporter didn't think it looked real, and asked Magic Leap about it directly. The official Magic Leap company spokesman mendaciously lied to him that "the video was authentic":
http://time.com/3752343/magic-leap-video/
>It's unclear whether the video shows an actual game overlaid onto a real-world office space or just an artistic rendering of what the game might look like in the future. The way the gun rests so realistically in the gamer's hand certainly raises suspicions. Still, a company spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo that the video was authentic.
>"This is a game we’re playing around the office right now," Magic Leap wrote on its official YouTube account.
The "game they were playing around at the office" was actually called "lying to the public and investors".
I think that this is inevitably going to be a serious problem for selling a product like this to a generation that still remembers Virtual Boy.
People were able to film through the lenses for standard VR glasses. I can't find anyone that tried it for Hololens but given that they also cost several thousand dollars it's probably not that surprising. I have used the Hololens quite a bit and I can't see any reason why you couldn't film from the eye's point of view.
CastAR/Tilt5 all demos. We also allowed the press to film through our hardware.
They made a really myopic decision to exclude the short-sighted.
Looks like they're making money from investors rather than customers, and the strongest marketing efforts are probably not focused on things which would appeal to ordinary buyers.
I assumed garbage. I'm still not sure what I would be supposed to do with them.
By comparison the Nintendo VirtualBoy was for sale for one year at $180(in 1995/$300 in 2018) and sold 770,000 units[1].
[1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/pokemon-go-statistics/, Pokémon Go Statistics
[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/oculus-eclipses-100-millio..., Oculus eclipses $100 million in VR content sales.
But honestly, I wasn't even thinking about phone AR when I made my comment. Phone AR feels like almost a completely separate category from headset AR. On one hand, it doesn't face nearly as many technical barriers. No complicated optics leading to low resolution and low FOV. No problem drawing black. No need to convince people to buy an expensive bulky object and wear it on their face all the time. On the other hand... the use cases are obviously far less futuristic.
Still, there's significant promise. I'm looking forward to the first phone AR experience to solidly implement a shared virtual environment, where users can place 3D objects anywhere in the real world and have them appear at the same location for all other users. I think phone hardware isn't quite good enough yet to make this work well, but it can already approximate it (see Minecraft Earth), and the barriers aren't nearly as fundamental.
[1] https://arinsider.co/2019/04/10/the-age-old-question-is-poke...
This number gets more mind-blowing the more you think about it.
It's small enough that one needs to start considering the units bought by management, employees, investors, suppliers, competitors, et cetera to say nothing of their friends and families.
Working prototypes trump all theory.
I heard all silicon valley gurus stating they were "bearish on VR, bullish on "AR". This proliferated as a mantra throughout the industry. I thought they were wrong then, and believed the opposite - because I had a working VR headset that was awesome, but had only heard somewhat meh things about existing AR prototypes.
Until great AR hardware comes out, I'm still sticking with the same opinion.
Though there has been some progress since then.
Leave aside the issues associated with tracking objects in the real world in order to know how to virtually modify and interact with them. Leave aside, too, the issues associated with tracking, processing, and rendering fast enough so that virtual objects stay glued in place relative to the real world. Forget about the fact that you can’t light and shadow virtual objects correctly unless you know the location and orientation of every real light source and object that affects the scene, which can’t be fully derived from head-mounted sensors. Pay no attention to the challenges of having a wide enough AR field of view so that it doesn’t seem like you’re looking through a porthole, of having a wide enough brightness range so that virtual images look right both at the beach and in a coal mine, of antialiasing virtual edges into the real world, and of doing all of the above with a hardware package that’s stylish enough to wear in public, ergonomic enough to wear all the time, and capable of running all day without a recharge. No, ignore all that, because it’s at least possible to imagine how they’d be solved, however challenging the engineering might be.
Fix all that, and the problem remains: how do you draw black?
Her new TiltFive system is "AR somewhere" rather than AR everywhere which allows it to provide a solid, practical, and affordable experience.
Here's a Tested review if you haven't looked into T5 before...
Here's a bit more:
Given additive blending, there’s no way to darken real pixels even the slightest bit. That means that there’s no way to put virtual shadows on real surfaces. Moreover, if a virtual blue pixel happens to be in front of a real green “pixel,” the resulting pixel will be cyan, but if it’s in front of a real red “pixel,” the resulting pixel will be purple. This means that the range of colors it’s possible to make appear at a given pixel is at the mercy of what that pixel happens to be overlaying in the real world, and will vary as the glasses move.
This concern is technologically narrow-sighted. We already have VR headsets with forward cameras built in. If the real world image is a projection too, you can draw whatever you want, including black.
It's old but it was one of the first hits
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2010/04/20/chapter-two-...
How teens communicate might have changed but I'm guessing the relative amounts show girls still use it more.
I firmly believe that at some point those same people will embrace full eye AR (not phone AR) as a preferred or common way to communicate over all current methods. Further, I believe that once it's possible for them to do it easily without cumbersome equipment that AR will become mainstream.
It's clearly years out but the fact that I can carry a tiny and relatively light computer on my wrist with display (a smart watch) suggests it might not be that far off to have stylish glasses with similar tech at a price people will pay for once the applications make it clear they want it.
If you asked in 2007 how many non-techies wanted a PDA the answer would likely have been close to 0. Now the answer is close to 100% of them carrying one at all times. I think AR will be no different. What has to happen is they need to go from the bulky Apple Newton level tech of today to something light and useful.
Layar [0] was an attempt at that a decade ago on Android. Seems to be completely dead now though.
If I couldn't get a demo, it's a cool enough concept that I might be tempted and they would get revenue and also the refinement that mass usage can help fuel.
But that doesn't really exist. There are some AR-ish apps like Google Translate that IMO fall into the better than nothing/sometimes useful category but there's certainly nothing in the "How did I live before this !?" camp.
But it is still a less compelling proposition than VR. The main market is games where seeing the real world is kind of pointless. Good VR is much more immersive, and being taken to another world is much cooler than seeing some floating planets or fish or whatever in an office (even though that is cool).
They might pay money to do something that they literally can't do using any other technology, i.e. AR games.
citation?
Same reason cryptocurrency is hot - it threatens the financial/insurance/ownership industry, which as a $13T behemoth is currently the biggest economic prize on earth.
Hololens 2 is already publicly available, and I had a chance to play with it for a bit. All I am going to say is, if you thought the original Hololens was decent enough, you will be blown away by Hololens 2. It is leaps ahead of the first version, both in terms of the UX and the tech. Even everything auxiliary about it just feels "right", stuff like the flippable visor, easier head mount, etc. It is the kind of a device that I would legitimately consider using occasionally at home to read news and do other stuff while lazying around doing other things.
It isn't at the original iPhone levels of "whoa, we are entering a new era of how people use their personal computing devices" yet, but the overall experience is such a large step up from the original Hololens, it is clear as day to me that AR is quickly getting closer to the point where it will be dominating personal computing niche currently occupied by smartphones.
If I didn't have a toddler to watch while I work much of the time, I'd probably just go all-in on VR (I'm currently working 30-50% through the Quest), but being able to see the world is kind of essential for those times haha.
As it goes with those kinds of things, you should definitely try the device out before making a conclusion, but given what you said earlier, I feel like you will like it.
(The submitted URL was https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/06/report-magic-leaps-early-d..., which made sense while the original source was behind a hard paywall. Changed now.)
I am curious now what it was saying.
EDIT: Got it again, it says:
"Welcome Hacker News Readers
Before you quickly exit out of this popup, consider subscribing for $10/month for your first 3 months"
I was quicker than they expected lol
AR is really hard and anything that does it at all is impressive and could, believably, be the precursor to a revolutionary product.
All current AR tech is more expensive than seems sustainable for a consumer product. It's also difficult to develop for and has few (if any) compelling experiences. These things are endemic to early stage products, but it is also possible that they will endure long enough to cripple AR as a product in the foreseeable future.
Everyone in the AR industry is guilty of overhype. Moreso than early tech start ups in general. That said, Magic Leap seems to have behaved significantly worse than its peers.
Part of the effect of the hype machine is that it's hard to get any depiction of what it looks like to look through the lenses of the products. This comes, as far as I can tell, from the likely true idea that the experiential qualities of AR cannot be captured through 2D video and such video would be somewhat deceptive. To me, it seems like the practice of releasing visualization videos is more deceptive but reasonable people can disagree.
-----
It feels to me like a lot of AR discussion comes down to people asserting that one of these genres of view is true in response to someone else expressing a different one of these views.
To me, it feels like it's hard to talk usefully about the current state of the industry. The promise is very cool, the products are early stage. So many factors legitimately excuse current failings. Do people feel like we the tech is public or mature enough that we can talk about the real limits or likely arc of the tech at all, or are we trapped between hype and development?
His whole blog is a pretty compelling read on the current and near future state of AR.
>“Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.” [2]
If you call your company magic then the product most likely is not just at the brink of your understanding but so far out that it is impossible to close the gap by hard work alone.
Steve Jobs mentioned in a very early interview somewhere that he wants to build a computer for everybody. He waited years and decades patiently until every duck was in line and he could launch the iPhone.
This thought doesn't lead to a meaningful point. I am just wondering why he and Apple (e.g. the A7[3]) got the timing right several times but many others push too soon or wait too long.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/547452-magic-s-just-science...
Both are hard for startups to take on. The former because many of the founders are heavily focused on a technology they came up with and attempt to shoehorn it into products that don't quite make sense. The latter because it requires either very patient investors or a big bank account.
Both are also hard for established, mature companies to take on. The former because they seem to believe that innovation for innovations sake is a useful thing to do, and for whatever reason the tech press seems to encourage them. The latter because they are focused on delivering quarterly results over building long term platform and ecosystem value, and because politically a cancelled project can be career ending.
Why would someone spend $2,300 on this equipment other than as a developer kit? I assume there is virtually no compelling content or services available to make a consumer interested in shelling out that amount of money, or even 1/10th that amount of money.
Frankly, I'm shocked at how the investors couldn't see past this CEO.
("Huckster"... that's the word I was looking for)
But if you've got a truly persuasive and aggressive salesman who can really get things done and actually sell virtual snake oil like few others, especially for much more than it's worth if genuine to buyers who don't actually need the product or as much as he is selling them; well that salesman needs to be incentivized with excess genuine product to sell, and appropriate adult supervision and probably legal counsel and you can reach goals more impressive than most top salesmen who are themselves very productive.
IOW with that kind of salesman you don't need functional product anyway since you'll do quite well selling the sizzle alone, but if you do actually throw in a real steak it can indeed be relatively non-slimy.
So a product company might be able to slide more product out through a slick pipeline, but when you're delivering something of value you're still a product company.
The problem is a salesman like this who gets too close to executive rank can overcome the supervision and turn it into a snake oil company, and it can ruin everything.
Or with the right connections, found a new high-tech snake oil company where the most important consideration was not a product of value anyway. Unless dreams came true of course.
Magic Leap Ripped Off Those Awesome UI Concepts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8974976
https://www.vrandfun.com/magic-leap-settling-sex-discriminat...
>Magic Leap Settling Sex Discrimination Lawsuit with Former Employee (vrandfun.com)
>[...] It’s quite alarming to see Magic Leap make headlines for sex discrimination lawsuits rather than innovation and technology.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14310144
https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discriminat...
>This is an action for hostile environment sex discrimination and retaliation brought by Tannen Campbell ("Campbell" or "plaintiff"), former Head of Strategic Marketing and Brand Identity and, later, Vice President of Strategic Marketing and Brand Identity, against her former employer, Magic Leap, Inc. (“Magic Leap” or “defendant”).
>"Eric Akerman, vice president of IT, is a high school buddy of Abovitz. He is a loud and outspoken and several misogynistic comments have emanated from his department and from him."
>"Vice president of IT Akerman, on Nov. 8, 2016, told a large group of people who asked why he voted for Trump that it was 'because Melania is hot.'"
>Campbell, one of whose responsibilities was to help Magic Leap with the “pink/blue problem,” had to endure hostile environment sex discrimination while proposing ways, not only to make Magic Leap’s product more woman friendly, but also to make the workplace more diverse and inclusive. Campbell was terminated after (and because) she, like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who blurted out that the Emperor was naked, challenged Magic Leap’s CEO, Rony Abovitz, to acknowledge the depths of misogyny in Magic Leap’s culture and take steps to correct an gender imbalance that negatively affects the company’s core culture and renders it so dysfunctional it continues to delay the launch of a product that attracted billions of investment dollars. Campbell also raised concerns that what Magic Leap showed the public in marketing material was not what the product actually could do—admonitions ignored in favor of her male colleagues’ assertions that the images and videos presented on Magic Leap’s website and on YouTube were “aspirational,” and not Magic Leap’s version of “alternate facts.”
>Campbell met September 28, 2016 with Magic Leap CFO Henry and Head of Operations Tina Tuli for a conference call with the CFO and leadership team at R/GA, an award-winning international advertising agency that was Magic Leap’s advertising agency of record. During the call, Henry said of the product under development, “I’m sitting here between two beautiful ladies. They’re not going to want to put a big ugly device over their pretty faces. And I have an office with glass doors, I don’t want people to see me with these beautiful girls with ugly things on their faces.” Later, one of the male R/GA executives on the call asked Campbell if Henry frequently made sexist comments like he had made. A female executive at R/GA also was offended by Henry’s remarks.
>As an example of more egregious comments, Campbell told Abovitz of the “Three Os” incident and Vlietstra’s lack of any meaningful discipline in response. As an example of unconscious bias, she told him of an IT employee who was helping Campbell a new logo into the email system. Cognizant that she was taking up a lot of the employee’s time with minor changes to get the logo “perfect,” Campbell apologized for taking up so much of the employee’s time, to which he responded, “Oh, don’t worry, I get it. You’re a woman and you care that things look pretty. I’m a man. I just get the work done.”
>Euen Thompson, an IT Support Lead, on November 16, 2016, gave a tutorial to a group of seven new hires, including two women, how to use Magic Leap’s IT equipment and resources. One woman asked Thompson a question in front of the group and Thompson responded, “Yeah, women always have trouble with computers.” The women in the group, in apparent disbelief, asked Thompson to repeat what he said and Thompson replied, “In IT we have a saying; stay away from the Three Os: Orientals, Old People and Ovaries.”
> During Campbell’s last four months at Magic Leap, Abovitz—who always had been pouty and prone to temper-tantrums, began to dig his heels in even more in the face of dissenting ideas and to explode ever more frequently into child-like fits of rage, threatening retribution when he didn’t get his way, felt betrayed or was portrayed publically in an unfavorable light.
>[...] the “Wizards Wanted” section of its website. Indeed, given that a “wizard” generally is defined as “a man who has magical powers,” and virtually without exception images of wizards are male, Magic Leap’s recruiting verbiage contains a not-so-subtle “women-need-not-apply” message.
>Senior Engineer Eric Adams sent out an email December 4, 2015 through a company email list serv for social activities for Magic Leap employees and their families, which email bore the subject line, “Board (sic) Wives at home while you are loving it at the Leap,” which stated:
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Hello Leapers:
My wife is starting a Google group outside of the Magic Leap locked domain.
It is called “Magic Leap spouses” and should be findable as such.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/magic-leap-spouses
It is sort of a social meeting place for all the spouses that have been displaced, alone in the daytime and are new to the area, would like to have lunch with or just to have someone local to hang out with when their significant other is slaving away at work thru-out the 12-Hr day. Or are they just nagging you because you moved here?
Please forward this Email to your wife if she would like to get better acclimated to South Florida. The group is not public and is reasonably private (by email invite/accept) as to not accidentally disclose any Magic Leap secrets.
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>The gender-neutral reference to “spouses” notwithstanding, implicit in the subject line and the reference to “your wife” is the assumption — which is not too far from wrong — that all the employees were men with wives who didn’t work outside the home and were “alone in the daytime.”
>Sadly, because Magic Leap seldom hires and does not actively recruit female candidates, the company loses competitive advantage to products like Microsoft’s Hololens. Microsoft, which employs far more females on its team, developed its similar product on a faster time line with more content that appeals to both genders.
$2300 is an expensive experiment, one that might not be for me.
You want to get developers to bet on new tech, to innovate, then get the cost way down. Make me as an individual developer willing to take the risk that I might not have the time or the mindset to follow through.
I can't imagine that the cost of production is more than $500... start selling them at that price point.
As other commenters have noted though, the problem is not so much the price as not having a real target use case or audience. Hololens is similarly expensive, but Microsoft cleverly did a late pivot before launching the first one to an audience that actually had a need for it.
You can't imagine that the cost of custom bleeding-edge hardware produced in four-digit-volume runs is more than $500?
This is not a "product market fit" problem, this is bad tech being pushed down the pipes until it makes it out of a fucked up company.
I wouldn't panic just yet. I bet for every order of magnitude they reduce the price they will increase sales by an order of magnitude. Get it under $100 and the will sell millions of units.
The demo in lab was shown to the investors. They were sold a bill of goods because the technology simply does not scale down to a headset size with proper heat dissipation and power needs. Ever hear of Microvision?
The bottom line? Magic Leap was completely arrogant and gave Devs the run-around. Then they hyped up the market with the fail whale videos that we're all CGI and served no practical need showcasing the technology helping to save time or fix a problem.
The dev kits shipped did showcase a lot of hard problems that needed to be solved and integrated. A cool glimpse of the future. However the waveguide system that they hyped investors on was never shipped in the dev kits. They used smoke and mirrors to fool people.
Magic leap is really based off of old Microvision hype with the great backroom demo for investors that will not manifest into a real product anytime in the near future.
Microsoft's going to own the Enterprise in this space with integrated cloud scale systems powering the headset.
I've tried the Magic Leap, HoloLens, helped launch the Gear VR, and was early in the old Valve VR room. Remember kids, don't believe the hype.
a computer?
Hopefully they will still trigger a revolution of some sort... but this was predictable.
Most reviews are positive but main problem seems to be the price and the fact that the overall end-to-end experience still feels pretty rough.
A product that is obscenely expensive and therefore can't be sold as a consumer device is not vaporware.
Edit, to people that disagree: Did they have an even half-finished form? Did they offer it for sale?
Was it "announced to the general public but never actually manufactured nor officially cancelled"?
Vaporware doesn't always mean it's a scam. Sometimes it means there were intractable tech problems. Coming out with a fundamentally different product doesn't negate the missing product.
They promised light-field AR goggles, and you can buy light-field AR goggles.
If we distinguish the magic leap one as a different product, then from what I can see the original qualifies as vaporware.
To me, AR sounds great when you are mobile and apps can supplement reality with useful information. Playing Minecraft or some kind of space invaders game in my kitchen isn't that much more appealing than playing a game in a full virtual environment.
I could see it as a carnival or arcade attraction where the AR application is tightly coupled with the space it is in, but this is a niche application.
I applied for their developer grant program, and got offered a consolation prize of a free headset - that they wanted to send me a 1099 for the full price! Would have had to pay $600-1000 in taxes on it, so had to reject. Nice tax write-off opportunity with a bonus of good PR!
For the second mistake, let me say only that people in AR marketing demos should not be smiling. If they are, you're introducing the wrong product.
The core idea was on the right track, but the conductor let the train derail very early on.
Classic case of a company having no idea what they're selling and who they're selling it to but expecting billions just for existing.
If you get a chance to try one, I HIGHLY recommend it. It’s an incredible experience. Even just the demos.
Curious if the quoted 100k-unit estimate was for the so-called "Creator Edition" (clearly targeted at devs and early adopters), or if it was supposed to include a more mass-market unit that hasn't shipped.
By comparison, I haven't seen a single ad for Magic Leap anywhere on the internet. People aren't buying it b/c they've never heard of it.
Not everyone has the money of Facebook behind them. ;)
Classic. Instruction to team to not leak info get leaked.
Lesson for the day, these guys have an excellent team when you need to fundraise, not so much when it comes to execution.
That being said, AR truly is the future. In a few years there will be multiple digital universes overlaid onto our world. Magic Leap should be commended for their technical accomplishments, but can they stay solvent until their dream of the future is realized? I honestly hope they pull through.
Magic Leap smells a bit like the Apple Newton. Too far ahead of its time to be a market success, even with so much effort behind it.
I think applications like HUD displays on car windshields is an obvious place where it will be big for regular consumers. There are a bunch of interesting applications for commercial use too. Other than that, I have a hard time seeing much interest in regular people until they can eliminate the need for glasses or goggles.
- Laptop monitor replacement or augmentation
- Indoor and outdoor navigation
- Identifying an available self-driving cab and dropping a waypoint for it to navigate to
- Immediate POV recording + sharing of ephemeral events (many people will like this, even if the HN crowd won't)
- Shared viewing of footage, large 3D graphics, or news items with your friends no matter where you are
- "Digitalized" brick and mortar fashion stores where you can easily identify clothes that fit you or that are in your price point. An enhanced view would show additional information, such as online reviews of each item.
- All the filtering features of the digital world can be brought into real life, including filtering out of advertisements
- Games games games. It sounds comical to say, but Pokemon will become real. People will run around with poke balls that release increasingly intelligent digital creatures. In Harry Potter AR, people will be able to cast digital spells by waving their wand in a certain way and saying the right thing. WOW or Runescape players could dawn their achievement capes irl
- Aesthetic landscape transformation. I imagine there will be a "default view," "modified view," and "off view" of the world. If you go to Times Square and enable the default view, you would be immersed in a digital world curated by the brands that advertise there. If you use a modified view, you can see whatever you want, whether that's anarchist graffiti or cyberpunk renderings. In the off view, all advertisements and all screens would be rendered invisible
- Usable IKEA instructions
- Non-boring meetings at work with interactive holographic renderings of enterprise projects
- Remote guidance and instruction (enabling emergency plant maintenance by people who have no clue how to repair a broken pipe)
- Digitally enhanced classrooms. Imagine a physics lab with a 3D rocket or roller coaster sim overlaid with force diagrams.
- Multilingual digital tour guide bots that can explain every nook and cranny of a city for free
- Guided construction of elaborate, ML-generated Lego structures
That's just the beginning. There are probably use cases we couldn't even imagine yet, kind of like how some technologies that are out today seemed like science fiction 10 years ago.
Outside of education, games, and commercial uses, I don't think they will be able to overcome the glasshole factor.
It's going to be a big market, but I don't think it will ever be as big as cell phones are today.
What is the other option? Implanting projectors in our eyeballs? Having some drone flying in front of your face that projects stuff right onto your eyeballs?
I doubt that. South Florida isn't crawling with engineering talent, we all left. Having known, studied, and worked with several people who work(ed) there, I sincerely doubt they can claim to have such a deep bench of talent.
To work, it has to understand the world around us. It needs to be full AI.
There's also no reason why we would want it. Nothing. As we develop ways to augment our world a simple phone can deliver the info.
VR has a use case for entertainment. It has no business or education case.
Work is done by reducing dimensions and abstracting things not adding dimensions and unabstraction.
But at least entertainment will propel the VR industry forward so we can see if anything else pops out.
Magic Leap faked all use cases from day one. It was obvious on multiple levels it was vaporware
Plus I did premise it on full AI to understand the world to augment. Technically we already augment with the 100 year old phone allowing us to talk to someone far away anywhere-ish.
Your case why in a decade we want AR which is a overlayed response and a camera that can analyse the world using real technology. What will it do? Sci Fiction movies struggle to come up with more than ads or more intrusive notifications ;) Magic Leap made beautiful whales that looked pretty, cost a fortune to produce and would have worked equally well in a movie which is how everyone viewed it, in a 2D advertisement. There was no reason to AR it even if you could afford to do it in the wild.
Most museums, a place of high structure and high value struggle to even create simple voice overlays of art work.
By that metric, we had smartphones at least since the early 90s. They didn't make any significant impact on the world at all until at least late 00s. And now, look at the world we live in these days.
>Your case why in a decade we want AR which is a overlayed response and a camera that can analyse the world using real technology. What will it do?
Everything a smartphone can do, but in a much more seamless, unobtrusive, and superior way, as well as many many other things that we cannot even think of now. If you think a tech that can completely supplant smartphones (as well as offer many more things that smartphones cannot do) isn't gonna be desired by people in the future, then I think there isn't much one can say to convince you otherwise.