Magic Leap trying to sell for $10B
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
https://gamedaily.biz/article/1337/report-oculus-quest-has-s...
And it seems VR sales (EDIT: shipments) are hovering at around 6,000,000 a year (this tends to include the crappy VR headsets that are sometimes given away for free with high end phones).
https://www.androidcentral.com/nearly-half-all-vr-headsets-s...
This sounds like a lot...but it might not be. To put things in perspective, the Kinect sold around 20,000,000 units and was considered a failure by Microsoft which is why they abandoned it. I think the parallels between the Kinect and VR is worth noting, since most are really accessories to something else (or used for very niche purposes).
VR definitely isn't mainstream yet, but it might get there in a few years. I think Half Life Alyx will be an interesting juncture and maybe even a make-or-break point for VR.
I don’t really game on my Quest, but I do use it for a one hour workout everyday. My system is pretty beat up too, if it stopped working tomorrow I would get a replacement immediately.
Beat Saber is probably the best app for VR, because it solves that problem by not having any locomotion. The world locomotes to you.
But that works well for an abstract rhythm game. I don't know how well that works for anything else.
I’ve never used the knobs and triggers on my VR controller for anything beyond game selection. In fact, I think Oculus would do better just to put out additional simplified controllers meant for fitness gaming.
Nothing wrong with rhythm games if they can help you drop 40 pounds.
The space problem is easy to solve with....space. A VR gym setup could easily solve it by putting you in a racket court with an appropriate guardian, and then let the VR system do the rest. Otherwise we will have to wait for Omni directional treadmill tech to get better.
The game was basic, early "3d" (in the gaming sense), low polygon, low resolution, no depth or actual streoscopic, but this was the 90s.
I tried to check it out again on a subsequent visit to Malta but it had of course gone. Real shame, I saw nothing of its kind for decades later.
The main things I remember are; it was an FPS, it was indoors/enclosed, the lighting was bad so it was really hard to tell where walls/corners were and it was very, very red.
The controller was sort of ring/oval shaped, I remember basically nothing about the headset other than that it was tethered.
Edit: I seem to recall it costing 2 lira for a turn.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/02/25/its-the-simple-a...
The Kinect experience could have been dramatically improved with a hand-held device (at least some buttons you could use to do grabs and stuff, and some kind of tracking looked possible). Several efforts along these lines were either canned by politics ("YOU ARE THE CONTROLLER" dogma that you thwarted at your peril) or by people dog-piling so many features into an initially simple product that the costs went out of control.
It looks harder to convince customers to use terrible VR gear. (I could be wrong).
PC VR is a dead end for anything outside of creative tools, very few adults want tower PCs in their homes anymore. When I demoed my Rift to friends they were completely blown away and the first question was "Can I use it with my MacBook?" and that was that.
When I demoed my Quest, one person sat down and ordered one straight after taking it off, he demoed it to someone at work and they ordered one, took it to a family barbecue and two of his relatives bought Quests.
Call it a tv and manage to get something to market before those have effectively gone extinct, and you have a market.
Steam alone regularly has over 10,000,000 people logged in at a time [2].
I think saying "Adults dont want a tower PC" is a pretty wide sweeping statement. I agree about Alyx. If they release a full length game that has the same level of quality that Half-life 2 had, with the same level of mod and customization support, that is going to be the tipping point. If VR is still a sub-niche in gaming/PCs, we won't see it takeoff for another 20+ years. But we may see it become the new standard.
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/808630/csgo-number-playe....
Who cares that won't be needed for long
I don't think tethered PC-based VR is going away, simply because that setup is most flexible for development and experimental purposes, but for the mass market, I think a device like the Quest is the only thing with potential to truly take off. Especially if the weight of the headset can be reduced, as comfort remains one of the most nagging negatives of the whole experience.
Get out of your bubble. Among non-casual gamers, tower PCs are very common.
Unfortunately for Magic Leap, it's just too early for AR headsets to be viable. The technology needs another decade or so to mature before it can be truly mainstream, probably. It can only survive in research labs with funding from some other source, not as a standalone business.
Timing is everything for startups and Magic Leap was too early. I've been saying it for years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17829798
ML problems was hype, hype and more HYPE. And then under-delivering, the device was in many ways actually worse than the first gen Hololens, despite costing more and coming to the market later.
Oh and also the confused messages straight from the top - is ML a hardware company? A software platform? Services platform? Marketing to professionals? (then why those game demos and not some more pro oriented?) Marketing to retail? (then that price is a non-starter). Etc etc etc ...
None of Magic Leap's many problems would have mattered if there was actually a market for the product to sell into. But the market needs a product that's better than any available technology allows today.
The same Hololens 2 - except there Microsoft isn't able to deliver these due to manufacturing issues.
That something isn't selling millions of pieces like an iPhone doesn't mean that there isn't a market for it.
Magic Leap's problems were mostly of their own making - their gizmo wasn't significantly better than Hololens, in many aspects it was actually worse. For ex. the "goggles" form factor limiting spatial awareness - big deal e.g. in factories where a maintenance tech wearing it could get hurt or killed by a moving piece of machinery that they couldn't see.
They have also focused mostly on hype rather then things that actually matter to businesses (given the price and form factor trying to market it to public was a non-starter - Microsoft didn't even attempt that). And, finally - you can't actually buy the gizmo, even if you wanted to - they aren't selling it anywhere except in the US! Unlike Microsoft, which has no such issues.
i agree VR is light years away (it's been just around the corner for years), but i don't even understand its potential. what are the big applications? i just can't get around its usefulness for anything but maybe video games.
Digital design in general.
For example, people using Quill can create animations incredibly rapidly.
There are ton of applications both in use and being developed. That you don't see it hyped on TV doesn't mean it is not there. Industrial applications are not advertised and marketed the same way as video games.
> That you don't see it hyped on TV doesn't mean it is not there.
no need to be condescending. and who watches t.v. or ads?
your response doesn't elaborate on anything. i don't know what your company is. and just because you say you have lots of projects doesn't give me any information.
can you elaborate? i humbly asked what the actual applications are, and you just listed a bunch of potential fields of use. because i have heard of various applications in those fields, but i don't get the overall usefulness that matches the hype. for example, in medical, how is VR useful? don't you need to be able to see what's actually going on and not be in VR land? if one is getting a live camera feed with overlays, is that really considered VR? i have seen applications of 3D viewing, but i don't see how that's better than using a monitor with improved input devices.
in the case of practical immersive activities, i suppose i could have listed that as useful.
And we are only a small fish, there are hundreds of companies like ours.
And re applications - have you tried to google? No, I really mean it. You complain about me being condescending but you have posted an obviously unfounded comment, post another showing that you don't know much about the subject - and it is somehow my fault that I didn't spoon feed you with the information.
Look here, for example: https://www.sendiancreations.com/top-vr-business-application...
Or: https://virtualspeech.com/blog/vr-applications
Or: https://disruptionhub.com/business-virtual-reality-5-uses/
And those are just three top links straight out of Google. Google Scholar would give you also a ton of research papers describing applications in medicine, biology, chemistry, physics and many other fields.
>for example, in medical, how is VR useful?
Typical applications (out of top of my head the few I have been involved with in some capacity):
- surgery planning and training (e.g. orthopedic surgery, dentistry)
- pain distraction (e.g. for heavily burned patients)
- post traumatic disorder treatment (think Iraq veterans, car crash survivors, rape survivors, ...)
- anxiety treatments (phobias of public speaking, phobias of flying, heights, spiders, you name it)
- rehabilitation (e.g. post-stroke, various muscular disorders, post-surgery ...)
>don't you need to be able to see what's actually going on and not be in VR land?
The entire idea of VR is replacing the real world with a computer-generated reality. So no, you don't need to see it, modulo stuff like the chaperone/guardian systems that show you when you are about to hit a real wall, for example (most people don't have a hangar to work in). Also, if working with physical objects/props, those are going to be tracked and inserted into the virtual environment, so when you touch the virtual steering wheel of the new car you are designing, your hand will touch the physical model in the real world. But this isn't done universally - it depends on the application and task that the user is supposed to do (e.g. ergonomics evaluation of a car cabin doesn't require the same user immersion/feedback as e.g. a racing simulator using that same car)
>if one is getting a live camera feed with overlays, is that really considered VR?
No. That would be augmented reality using camera-based pass-through (the other way is an optical pass-through where you see the real world through a piece of glass where the computer overlays are projected on somehow - e.g. Hololens or Magic Leap).
See the concept of reality-virtuality continuum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality%E2%80%93virtuality_con...
At one end is reality, at the other pure virtuality (virtual world). Augmented reality adds something to reality (e.g. overlays), augmented virtuality adds stuff to the virtual world (e.g. a video-based avatar of the user). Virtual reality and augmented reality are pretty much at the opposite ends of that line, everything in-between is mixed reality. Now, to make it nice and messy, Microsoft has decided in their infinite wisdom to "hijack" for their marketing purposes this terminology that exists and is used for decades and uses it like this:
- "Holographic" for stuff around the Hololens (even though it has nothing at all with holography - 3D image is not automatically a hologram) - "Mixer reality" for describing something that can do both virtual and augmented reality. Which isn't at all the same same thing as the definition from the above.
>i have seen applications of 3D viewing, but i don't see how that's better than using a monitor with improved input devices.
"3D viewing" is not virtual reality. Virtual reality is defined by two things:
- immersion - you replace the real world with a virtual one completely, i.e. no overlays on top of a real world!
- agency and feedback (action-reaction) loop - you can act on the world and the world reacts to your actions, then you react to what happens, etc.
The first point doesn't necessarily require neither 3D nor goggles - you could do virtual reality using e.g. a large (think few meters large) screens too.
The second point is hugely important and that is what distinguishes virtual reality from "3D viewing", 360 videos or 3D cinema. If you watch a 360 video and try to pick up an object, nothing happens. The same if you try to come closer to something. You can't. Sadly, that doesn't prevent unscrupulous snake oil salesmen that want to push their 360 cameras and crappy video viewing/streaming/pay-per-view platforms from muddying the waters by selling their stuff as "virtual reality", even though it is not. It only serves to confuse people.
In virtual reality you can come closer and not only to pick that object up (e.g. using a glove, controller or even bare hands these days) but the object will react to your actions - first of all it will move with your hand, giving you the sensation that you have picked it up and then you can also interact with it - throw it, drop it, rotate it, open it or whatever is the object designed to do. This is what you need the hand/head/body/object tracking systems for.
I strongly suggest you try some actual virtual reality application (i.e. NOT a 360 video on a phone or some such!) and you will see (and feel!) the difference immediately.
I stopped reading your comment after this, because you are being a condescending ass. If you want people to listen to what you have to say (and it's clearly a lot) you should try being more friendly.
Thanks, MegaButts
In 11 days Valve will release Half Life: Alyx which is the most awaited VR game ever. I suggest you to tune in, it might shed some light on why it's so cool.
Actually it's off the ground and becoming commoditized in those fields where it makes sense - AEC, digital design, training.
The reason they might not be familiar to you is that they are niches. There is no reason for everybody to use VR, but there are very good uses for some professionals.
If phone is a hammer (everybody has use for it) then VR kit is an arc welding tool - extremely practical for some uses, but not for all.
Or, pencil vs. oil paints. Oil paints are an essential product category, yet since the professionals who use them know them already and the market segment isn't that huge the non-artistically inclined consumer is likely not familiar with them due to lack of marketing dollars and hence media exposure.
I came from a stint at a company doing consulting and training for the defense sector mong other things. Considering the prices they asled, and got, from the government that is a big market. Adding some VR based training scenarios for the military, or emergency services, police, whatever, looks at frst glance interessting enough to at least dig deeper into. But no interesst. No idea why.
Military acquisition cycles can last for years, which slows down tech intro.
Interaction with the wider training tech ecosystem is also a factor. For example, course authors need good VR environment editors to create usable scenarios, scoring tools, etc. They would have to be able to import their large libraries of existing vehicle and weapon models. Anecdotally, it can take an hour of scenario editing to get a minute of usable scenario
One route in would be if an existing vendor of military sims (e.g. [0]) added a VR plug-in to an existing COTS sim already used widely by the military, and the military users then got a funding opportunity (e.g. a new platform with a fresh training budget) to enhance their existing kit.
But I do understand why people don't want to work with the military.
I'm big fan of the magic leap for gaming. It looks and feels really good.
I'm a big fan of the HoloLens for work because it's easier to navigate and works more like expected for business applications. I have not gotten to try the HL2 yet but I am excited for the broader FOV.
Notably, their two big $1B+ acquisitions were Beats and Next.
One of the really annoying habits of all of these companies in both VR and AR is they want developers to pay $$$ as early adopters and then also have an expectation around those same developers building all the experiences.
The one exception I've seen to that rule was Valve. Valve sent me multiple HTC Vive headsets, even shipped them to Australia, so we could build against and demo their early VR, from nothing more than a meeting at their office.
And we showed those headsets to thousands of people at our office and tradeshows (Real Estate). I can only hope that it repaid that generosity.
Really reminds me of what happened with general magic (In secrecy w/ failed product and huge investor hype)
I also interviewed with this a while back: they were clearly frantic from what I could tell
Yeah, right
I know a person who is currently a director at ML. The simple fact they were hired and placed in an administrative/managerial role is enough to tell me never to work there. Shame too because I think the tech is cool and I'm fairly well qualified for the jobs this person posts incessantly on LinkedIn.
Don't mind South Florida either, go canes. Also 20% off the salary of most regions, but also no state income tax and relatively cheap home prices if you go up to Broward.
And much like Shockley semi I think ML is a flash in the pan. But unlike Shockley Semi, Abovitz didn't hire an equivalent of the traitorous 8 because they already worked out here and got paid way more money to hang out at a FAANG or startup.
Everyone I'd want to work with from my time in South Florida is either out of the area or trying to leave. It pays like shit, and there is no money or companies down there to make cool shit to make up for it. Besides ML. But it appears that is shifting.
There aren't many like-minded people here, and that's kind of nice for a change. I still love San Francisco, but it simply priced me out of living there. I'd rather retire in 5 years here than work another 30 there.
Is this not standard practice? I honestly can't remember the last time I didn't sign an NDA before interviewing.
Maybe those folks are all outliers somehow. But I doubt it.
Florida is one of the US East Coast states with no state income tax.
Right after the "dot bomb", several SV VCs moved to Florida or Texas to avoid California state income tax.
Amazon's reason for re-investing all profit was to pay zero tax (in the USA you can do that, but in some countries they just tell you what percent is the minimum.)
They've been building pyramids in Ft. Lauderdale for a very long time.
Usually with not enough enough scale to be noticeable very far from the Everglades.
Eventually what caused this meltdown are two things: 1. Rony’s reality distortion field extending way too far for the companies own good 2. A complete lack of managerial cohesion and competence. Turf wars, selfishness, lack of vision. Very rarely anyone got fired. Resources were wasted on multiple parallel efforts which were politically driven. The company spread geographically very early with very little cooperation or shared culture.
There were some talented individuals but shadowed by what was going on with the senior management.
I still have a warm place for the company, the product and the people, but the real magic is that they survived for so long going like that.
I posted this earlier:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21726144
There was some overlap, and both had lots of "Magic" hype, but there were some really great people working at General Magic, and not nearly as high a level of narcissistic bullshit and self aggrandization and utterly dishonest marketing as from Magic Leap. I mean, come on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209363
The whole point of the lawsuit was all about how Magic Leap's company culture and product plans and demos and self image all revolved around adolescent male egos and sexist fantasies, and excluded women. Tannen Cambell, who filed the lawsuit, was actually hired for the express purpose of solving Magic Leap's recognized "pink/blue problem", but was rebuffed and ignored. They knew they had a problem, and even gave it a name, but they refused to solve it.
Read the lawsuit:
https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discriminat...
>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.”
Did all of that suddenly change after the lawsuit was settled?
Because if it did suddenly tangibly change, then that might be evidence that settling a sex discrimination lawsuit by changing their behavior was a positive signal.
But if they only forked over a big pile of hush money, signed non-disparagement agreements and gag orders, and went their separate ways, and Magic Leap didn't actually change their culture, then I don't think you could consider it positive sign or a constructive settlement for anyone other than the woman who was paid to keep her mouth shut.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209469
Fortunately we can all read the details of this particular case in the lawsuit, enabling us to more fairly and easily make a judgement call.
https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discriminat...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209432
How about this, it sounds like harassment to me:
https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discriminat...
>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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209441
How would you describe this one?
https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discriminat...
>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.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209424
Would you consider this discrimination or harassment?
https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discriminat...
>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.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209452
This one sounds like discrimination to me:
https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discriminat...
>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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209567
Like the way Magic Leap picked up so many other people's literal designs and IP in their patent applications?
https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/30/7954611/magic-leap-augmen...
>Magic Leap's futuristic patent art was copied from other artists' designs
>When Google-backed augmented reality company Magic Leap quietly applied for a patent, it did so with dozens of pages of futuristic (and slightly creepy) scenarios: a social media charm bracelet, a gargoyle bursting out of a box in a store, gamified cucumber chopping...
>Wait a second. That last one sounds familiar. Maybe that's because it's a line drawing of a shot from "Sight," a Black Mirror-esque short film about an augmented, sinister future. As it turns out, Magic Leap's patent art isn't so much its vision of the future as one created by various students and designers. Former Verge-r and current Gizmodo writer Sean Hollister was tipped off to a set of side-by-side comparisons that leave no doubt we're looking at copies.
>If patents are about originality, does this mean Magic Leap is hurting its claims? Not really. A great deal of patent art just shows potential designs or uses for something, in order to make the actual, more abstract claims clearer. In this case, Magic Leap is patenting an optical system that has nothing to do with the interfaces displayed here. Even bringing a copyright claim would be hard and arguably pointless. "Images such as these are setting consumer expectations of VR and AR today," the company told Gizmodo. "We wanted to use the same images to demonstrate what our technology will enable."
>The designers themselves seem ambivalent of their images' rebirth as patent art. Magic Leap appears to have neither contacted them nor credited them, but at the same time, it's showing the world how this futuristic design fiction could work. It's one thing to have someone rip off your art. It's another to have them actually make it real — if Magic Leap can actually deliver on its ambitious promises.
https://gizmodo.com/magic-leap-ripped-off-those-awesome-ui-c...
>Magic Leap Ripped Off Those Awesome UI Concepts
>Magic Leap is secretly building a headset that could blend computer graphics with the real world. Recently, we lucked into a treasure trove of illustrations from Magic Leap about what that future might hold. There's just one problem: Magic Leap didn't actually create all those awesome UI concepts. It copied them.
>The images speak for themselves. On the left of each of these comparision shots, you'll see an illustration plucked directly from this Magic Leap patent application. On the right, you'll find a screengrab from an awesome UI concept invented by someone else.
>Remember Sight, the incredible student film where a man with bionic eyes plays Fruit Ninja with a real cucumber that becomes part of his meal? Same cucumber. Same everything:
>Or how about the Ringo Holographic Interface dreamt up by then-UI-design-student Ivan Tihienko in 2008?
>Here's a augmented reality concept from interaction designer Joesph Juhnke called "The Future of Firefighting":
>And below, one from designer Michaël Harboun and his team called The Aeon Project. "What if you could travel to exotic, far-away destinations while being stuck in traffic?"
>Lastly, two images from "Meditating Mediums - The Digital 3D," which was the graduating thesis for Greg Tran at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He now designs for Samsung.
>This might also look familiar: [...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14312061
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.
Wow, that's quite a number of offensive stereotypes in a single statement.
It's a shame but not a surprise. I have friends and acquaintances that have worked or still work there, and yet I wouldn't vent details of what I know here, everyone knows they have been struggling with their technology, overpromise and growth. Archetype of the "too much money in too little time" syndrome, and a despair to deliver and build a successful company. Be careful with what you wish for.
I don't know Abovitz personally, though I have worked with people who worked with or under him since the early Z-KAT days and he is well regarded. Contrary to what most think about engineers in South Florida (or Florida in general), we have some very capable people here. Companies complain that they can't find good talent. However most of the time they cannot put their money where their mouth is and commit over the local "market price", which is comparatively low, to secure a good hire. It has certainly been an issue in my career, indeed. But guess what? We faced the same difficulties in one of my companies finding the right people when I lived in the Bay area a couple of years ago. The answer is not that simple.
Having worked mostly in startups through my life, from the outside it amazes me how they were trying to spread out so early. When I first heard about them they were pitching movie producers, but after they got their first $50M things started going crazy. I once dated a girl who was a writer producing fancy literary content far before they had shipped anything. This was way before they hired Stephenson. I have experience in medical devices and robotics, and their recruiters have contacted me offering positions for healthcare applications, and also a very pushy one was trying to convince me to move to their Sunnyvale office where they have a robotics team. Think industrial manipulators. Then they go out and sue their once employee Gary Bradski for doing his usual Bradski things and for which he is lauded in the valley... but not here it seems. Certainly they have management problems due to lack of experience.
It would be painful if they fail. They have been the most funded tech company in the state and at least they managed to ship, something many startups are unable to demonstrate.
They’re worth something relative to the revenues they’ve been able to generate. The IP is also worth something but given the cold shoulder from the FAANGs of the world probably not as much as they’d like.
At some level these sales start to look like a stubborn buyer that’s asking far too much for their house. It will sell but a painful reset of valuation expectations is clearly required if one wants a sale to close.
I think they all know it's bunk.
What does that even mean? Companies are both sold and bought. One implies the other. There are always willing buyers for entities with non-negative value. Hell, I'm a willing buyer for Magic Leap, at the right price.
A company being "sold" means that they don't have active interest and instead offer themselves up as a last resort for whatever price they can get. Usually everything is liquidated at the absolute minimum to avoid completely shutting down the company and still marking it as an "exit" on the investors books.
That's exactly the point, the buyer dictates the price it is willing to buy at. At the wrong selling price for a specific product, there are no buyers.
It means the number of potential buyers for a company is generally small. That it's a buyer's market: https://www.redfin.com/guides/buyers-market-vs-sellers-marke...
> Hell, I'm a willing buyer for Magic Leap, at the right price.
You almost certainly aren't. Magic Leap is burning money at an incredible rate, reportedly $50 million/month. Even if you could buy it for $1 over their cash on hand, you'd be a fool to do it, as you'd have to spend the next several months laying people off, negotiating with creditors, liquidating assets, and fending off lawsuits. It would be miserable, and there's a good chance you'd have little to show for your time.
Any serious buyer would expect to put another couple billion in cash in just to get it to where it has a product people will actually pay money for. I'm guessing that isn't you.
Given the money raised and all the talent and assets, it's unlikely they'll shutdown completely.
In retrospect (at the time, even) it felt like complete BS. If you look back at the threads posted on HN, I distinctly remember people calling out their methods as super vague, and probably completely fictitious - amazing to see that the angry, dismissive comments actually turned out to be the most factually based!
The problem with Magic Leap is that it was always vaporware. I think the second you start using 3D CGI to "show what the product will be like" you're already kind of fucking up. I mean I get it, if youre building a concept car, you can't just immediately build it. But Magic Leap's videos were always like "yeah literally, it'll be like you're in Avatar."
Give me a break. I hope some mega-corp eats up the IP for like 7 cents on the dollar and actually uses some of the tech for something that sees the light of day.
The thing is, there is no way to “show” this to the masses, and there is not even a comparable experience (you can’t show oculus/vibe in an ad either, but everyone has played with a 3D display at some point even if only static - such as the red disc toy with 3D images whose name escapes me - stereoscope, maybe?)
What’s the comparable experience of something projecting into your eye?
What does buying ML buy you? The goal isn't to own a product. The goal is the product. When Google bought Android, it was a two years (and a lot of money) away from being the only sane option for manufacturers not named apple.
ML is years and billions away from (I assume) an entrant in a high-end subsector of the market.
The counter-example to google's android is MSFT's nokia/windows mobile experience. A money suck and no benefit.
It took three years from google buying android until the absolute first android phone was launched, and I'd say that when microsoft bought nokias mobile bussiness (in 2014, nine years after google bought android) it still looked like there was a chance windows would be a serious third player in the mobile OS market.
Correction taken on Android timing.
If I'm JP Morgan I'm sweating this sale process right now because if Magic Leap do default (eg say the sale process tanks and they burn through their remaining cash and default), the recovery on these patents is going to be difficult so JPM will take a writedown on the loan.
[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/11/13/ml.pdf is the patent assignment if you want to see what got assigned
Apple has actually have a much bigger patent contention with Beijing University with them holding the lockdown portfolio on the microled, and they recently "tainted" themselves through business relationship with one of Beijing University subsidiaries.
It may look to the court, or at least a Chinese one, that they solicited samples from them, and very expensive at that, without stated purpose just to sneak away the tech.
[1] https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/02/magic-leap-ripped-off-tho... [by Sean Hollister]
A company is worth a value relative to whatever a buyer believes they'll generate in the future. The historic revenue is often a useful indicator of what that might be, but not always, especially if the company is operating in a very new industry or if the company isn't very old.
They are also a hardware company with some cool patented solutions that seem to more or less work. IMHO any of the big companies could be potentially interested in adding that core technology to their portfolio. That's worth something but maybe not ten billion.
What they don't have is the operational side sorted to build and ship products in volume (at least not as far as I know). They are shipping a product in limited volume to developers only and so far the reception of this device has been luke warm. Presumably this is not the final version.
The reason they are allegedly looking to sell is either that they are running out of funding and are having issues securing more and/or because it's clear that their current strategy is failing.
The real question of course is what investors stand to lose their money and what kind of financial constructions they can come up with in terms of equity swaps, and portfolio consolidation to protect their investment and turn this into an acquihire/IP grab. I hear Google has a lot of money in this already and its CEO is on the board and it has a history of doing AR stuff (and not quite succeeding). Jack Ma is on the board too.
My comment wasn't really about Magic Leap, but just valuing companies in general, but to address this particular point the fact Magic Leap is looking for a sale could be seen as Google's reluctance to invest more money, or even that Google is looking for a way out. Neither is particularly good for Magic Leap.
The fact someone invested in a company in the past doesn't mean they still believe the company has value or is worthwhile investing in now. The sunk cost fallacy applies here.
They had close relationship to them, and they may know something others don't. Even their initial stratospheric valuation came almost solely from them being a potential competitor to Apple's product, or an ip blocker, and an expectation that Apple will spare no money to buy them.
In Shenzhen, rumours were flying for quite some time down to photos of "suspicious HDI PCBs" with "property of Apple corporation" on them. And the fact that Foxconn has only one HDI PCB contractor in the city, gives a lot of credibility to that.
There are a couple problems with this theory. Firstly, it's pure speculation that Apple are even trying to make an AR headset. They might not be. Secondly, if Apple are and they've managed to get as far as making PCBs in Shenzhen without licensing any IP from Magic Leap then Apple believe they don't need to license the IP. Apple might be infringing and ML might be able to sue, but that's speculation. If Apple has managed to make a headset without infringing then ML's IP is basically worthless because no one else will need it either if they take whatever route Apple have taken.
To be honest I imagine if Apple wanted access to ML's tech they would just have invested in them during one of the many rounds ML went through, and then negotiated a favourable licence agreement between the two companies. It would have been much cheaper, they'd have access to the tech earlier, and it would have prevented someone else offering more.
Forever? Or is this cyclical?
The days of "weird" values aren't over.
The new $trillion companies are worth a trillion because they achieved a lock of one sort or another on a market.... ideally a literal market, a platform or an exclusive data source.
That's basically the idea behind most of these valuations, from FB's "outrageous" IPO price to WeWork's shenanigans. Get a "monopoly^" or strengthen an eventual buyer's monopoly.
With Youtube, google was buying dominance in online video, with a lock on creators. With Android, they bought a running start to mobile dominance... market locks.
Magic Leap's problem is not revenue, it's strategic value.
When FB bought oculus for or $2bn They got to be a major competitor in the market immediately.... the assumption being that one or two of the early products will become the dominant platform.
What do you get if you buy magic leap? How do you get from here to a product that dominates its market?
VR is still not an important market, but it is interesting. Companies will buy into it, but they need to be buying into it. Magic Leap isn't really in the market, nevermind dominant.
The technology itself doesn't matter.
^ In the Thiel sense.
Also, according to this, all their patents are assigned to JP Chase as collateral: https://www.kguttag.com/2019/11/10/all-magic-leap-patents-ha...
They want to exit because their investors don't want to pour more money into that bottomless pit, with no prospects of profitability (not to mention that there are other vendors doing the same thing and better/cheaper).
So hype things up, offload the worthless junk to some sucker and move to the Caribbean to enjoy the "profits" ...
I really hope someone talks about that after they either go broke or get acquired.
Cocaine.
I don't want to know why it failed, honestly for most of these you can look at their product and see how there's just not demand and etc.
What I want to know is what investors and everyone THOUGHT would change about the product, use case, how the world would react to this new thing ...
I think their problem is basically timing. Nobody wants this thing right now. Nobody wants it in that specific form factor. And nobody wants to create content for a platform with such a high price point and unexpected future.
It's an egg and chicken situation. I can see why Facebook doesn't want them or need them since they probably have been developing parallel IP in their Oculus division.
Apple may be also very deep into the development and exploration of its own AR (which is already evident by accelerated development of ARKit).
Microsoft has its own competitor for years (Hololens).
So I think is really a problem of who might want all this IP and who can use it meaningfully to create a solid pipeline of AR products.
Again. Their problem is definitely timing. Consumers, content creators, and companies definitely want this type of technology. But not until they can have something with the same footprint as a pair of reading glasses. I think we are still very far from that.
Now it's a fashion accessory that everybody wants.
For example, they made an entire new semiconductor unit just to make microled displays for it.
They also been hiring, and buying companies in light field imaging field for years now, and they may add a light field imaging/display into the mix.
I think Magicleap knows now that Apple is miles ahead of them, and tries to sell while they still can
Yeah, I do get it, Apple and all, but this is ignoring the elephant in the room.
On the flip side, if you've got an actual business case for hololens, acquiring them is rather trivial. And quite frankly for the use-cases I've seen hololens deployed, $3,500 a pair is barely a rounding error in the project budget.
$5,000 mac pro is not targeted to the consumer market. I doubt it is responsible for 1% of Apple's profit.
If apple does VR, they want it in everyones house - not in a few hundred. That's not the scale they operate at.
PS: 28 cores and 1.5TB of RAM is still very much workstation territory. Few people need that, but it’s a solid investment if you’re in that group.
But its still a rather overpriced workstation. However, thats not the topic. Microsoft also charges what the market will bare, but it is a completely different market. MS has been quite focused on their B2B products for a while, so selling the expensive Hololens to companies and not private users makes perfect sense. So if you're in that group, its a solid investment
https://www.kguttag.com/2019/12/18/hololens-2-not-a-pretty-p...
Physics is a bitch, there are some real reasons why you can't make AR glasses thin and sexy like sunshades and costing sub $1000 to boot.
I'm certain Apple could make an AR (ish) headset that is amazing for $2k
iPhone sells for $1000 because people will pay so much for it but that doesn't mean that the technology in it costs so much.
However, when a single diffraction waveguide (the piece of glass that forms the display of devices like a Hololens or Magic Leap) which is the only known way how to make a flat-ish display (otherwise you need bulky mirrors or prisms) costs hundreds of dollars (and you need 3 per eye minimum, one for each color), then it is hard to see how Apple would pull that off. And that's only a display.
At least if we are talking a proper AR device, not a personal HUD/"smartglasses" like the Google Glass.
> Something that doesn't exist is just so much more exciting than something that does. Real things have caveats, limitations, and costs.
Right now Apple's glasses aren't real, so they have no caveats, limitations, or costs: only raw potential. That's way more exciting than a real product which we already know is too expensive for the average consumer to use.
And the "no one is talking about them" kinda doesn't match with the coverage of Apple rumors - and even this discussion.
Like MS selling zune and music subscription decades before it became a norm ?
If you create a thing that people don't want currently polishing and marketing all that matters.
iPod 1st Gen was released in 2001.
What are you raving about?
Apple's approach seems to be powerful iPhone in pocket, wirelessly talk to a dumb display/sensors on your head.
Look what Apple did with watches...
Those cameras need video processing - that's big, hot and heavy compute capability somewhere nearby the camera itself because you can't stream that e.g. using Bluetooth to a phone in your pocket.
That compute also sucks batteries dry like there is no tomorrow, so a large battery has to be somewhere.
Oh and if you want to actually display an overlay to the user (and not only some text in the corner of your eye like Google Glass did), then you need fairly large optics - laws of physics won't budge only because it is Apple.
That's why the Hololens is so clunky and unsexy. Magic Leap has put the compute and batteries in the user's pocket, but then there is a cable between the two (and the goggles aren't much lighter/less clunky really).
Perhaps their plan is to start small and scale up only as much as will be "sexy" year over year. Rather than go all in on a massive headset and shrink with iteration.
Edit: I realize that might be very direct, I have no knowledge of the smart watch market, only remember that Pebble seemed to be first in the space.
The only thing I want that Apple currently makes is a UK phone charger[1]. Its folding mechanism is far superior to any other charger. These things are what I really miss.
[1]https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MU7W2B/A/18w-usb-c-pow...
All they do (and all they have ever done) was reinvent the wheel. They do, however, consistently reinvent the wheel better than anyone else.
Case in point: In literally the year 2000, I owned an HP Jornada 548 pocket pc, complete with a wireless modem that worked on cell phone networks. It ran Windows CE, and I was able to surf the web, use AOL instant messenger, ICQ, do voice recordings (even transcription), handwriting recognition, play games, and yes, even make phone calls. But it was clunky, and it wasn't something that I would even dream of recommending to my grandmother (because the UI was terrible and slow, and it required a lot of fiddling with things to get it dialed in the way I liked it).
Contrast that with the iPhone (which was released a full 7 years later). Was it the first smart phone? Obviously not. But it was the first smart phone that I could honestly recommend to my grandmother.
/s
While MS had products like hololens out, Magic Leap was still “in stealth”. This is the same company that was “worth billions” before they even released a product or before they had made public whatever product they wanted to sell. The marketing videos they produced early on (which were impressive) look nothing like the technology that was released years later. Look up the expectation vs reality videos of if you want a laugh.
Now they want out at a crazy valuation.
When the economy is “good” and there is plenty of dumb cash lying around (think these past years of bubble build up), an expert sweet talker is able to command money away from the vision fund type of folks. However, then the situation is like we are right now, we go back to the basics... things like market-fit, income, revenue, growth, sustainability... the healthy business.
We need the bubbles of the Magic Leaps, WeWorks and all the other unsustainable unicorn startups to burst. This is what will bring us back to industry sanity. The first dotcom bubble burst made our industry better. I hope this one does, too.
Reminds me a bit of the cost of working with data vs. the actual models in ML. The models and tuning them and playing with them is the cool stuff but most of the competitive advantages (imo) come from mastering the data part.
I learned a lot from my ventures into AR and it was fun and I've kept a mindset of pretending there was an AR device in contact-lense form to brainstorm what one could do with this breakthrough every now and then. But there's really not much beyond "novelty effect" and gaming I see as interesting products today. Even in areas where AR solutions are deployed in industry (warehousing and logistics), I feel that less glamorous solutions would provide similar benefits.
All that being said, long term I'm quite optimistic that the technology will bring very interesting changes and things I cannot imagine right now.
Really reminds me of what happened with general magic (In secrecy w/ failed product and huge investor hype)
I also interviewed with this a while back: they were clearly frantic from what I could trll
And honestly, with the latest OS updates, the HoloLens 1, even today, is still the better device. You can compare specs on a sheet of paper all day long, but there are fundamental flaws in the Magic Leap hardware and software that prevent it from being a good user experience. The HoloLens, on the other hand, is just old.
Magic Leap's battery/compute pack turned out to not give it an appreciably longer battery life, while also making the device uncomfortable, as the cable constantly tugs on the back of your head. The HoloLens isn't comfortable, either, but that's mostly because the vast majority of people completely ignored the little, rubber strap that came in the case that you attach across your to take the bulk of the weight of the device.
The WiFi and Bluetooth an my ML are constantly failing. I've used three different units and have had the same experience on all of them.
The controller constantly loses tracking. It uses magnetic tracking and it just doesn't do well. Also, the sensor is on the right side of the headset, and it is legitimately worse to use the controller in your left hand. It's also way too complicated for just-a-pointer, while not being complicated enough for a bespoke user input device. HoloLens has a clicker instead. It's superfluous, but it does the job and doesn't fail.
The hand tracking is too broken to actually use. HoloLens' hand tracking isn't anything to write home about, but I've never encountered it doing something blatantly wrong. It's just slow. Magic Leap's is similarly slow and often wrong.
This goes hand-in-hand with the ML SDK being poorly documented and rather incomplete. One way HoloLens gets around its rather limited user input capability is by giving you voice recognition out of the box. And in writing software, it's incredibly easy to setup. It's also relatively easy (though takes some thoughful design) to create a speech-based UI that works reliably. Magic Leap, on the other hand, talks about how great it would be to have speech-recognition, but offers nothing in their 1st-party demos to demonstrate it and nothing in their SDK to implement it.
The operating system on ML is a hacked-up Android system. I'm sooooo over trying to do 3D graphics on Android systems. All the standalone VR headsets are also a gigantic pain for developing software. If you've ever developed software for the HoloLens, it's a joy in comparison.
And Microsoft did a lot to make 2D applications an integral, usable, and useful part of Windows Holographic. While Magic Leap has its own version of that feature, they bury the documentation and don't provide any good samples. Whereas, on HoloLens, you can basically run any pure UWP app, whether it was made for the HoloLens or not.
That positioned Hololens as a more competent general-purpose computing platform. That's a valuable perspective to have on what AR/XR is supposed to look like: new, but not entirely new, and flexible enough to be able to run the old software.
So better than VR, doesn't need generic human level artificial intelligence, and wouldn't work as well from just talking in your ear.
And I think that points at some consumer uses, too. Basically anything where people are already using their hands has AR potential. When I still owned a car, I would have loved to have the repair manual info overlaid on whatever I was looking at. But so far I don't think anybody's found much compelling enough to pay what AR systems cost.
[1] See "Fundamentals of Wearable Computers and Augmented Reality" ch 14.
There will be less AR manuals since they will have to produce both paper and AR.
To recognise parts will take pretty good pattern recognition, but possible, what can a phone do now?
But the next step will take AI at a fairly high level if it's guiding you through a process.
If a camera can look at a motor and 'see' what to do, then just a voice telling you want to do will be close to brilliant and useful now, camera and speakers are easy.
True a overlay would be better, but the underline tech is AI, if you can make this AI then no need for AR at this stage, sell it now if it's possible.
Automatic translation of signage as you walk through a foreign-language environment.
But I knew World Lens could do this since 2014.
I've taken it overseas on my phone and never used it.
I've never seen anyone use it in two+ years living in a country with a different script.
You think this is useful, but it's not. When do you walk down a street and really not know what's going on?
But if you need to hold your phone in front of you and squint at the screen like and idiot, nobody will use it.
So the use-case is real and valuable, it's just not achievable on a phone, it needs to be a socially acceptable wearable AR device.
It will only be able to do what current technology allows. IE Magic Lens / Google's Product
AR is not AI, it won't magically solve complex problems.
As I stated I have been in other countries with the tech, I have not been embarrassed to use it. I have never used it. Neither has anyone I have been with. In real life these situations just don't present themselves.
Have you used the current tech? I fail to believe you haven't because you are too embarrassed every time, if it's "very useful in almost any setting or environment".
1) Simple translations that google translate or similar can do sufficiently well. This exists, is useful in many scenarios, such as reading signage or posters and other stuff, but I never use it IRL because I don't want to walk around looking through my phone all the time. And for traffic signs, I obviously can't go throuh all of that while driving. AR can solve this when the tech is small enough. It's not so much a case of that I'm too embarrassed to pick up my phone, it's more that the expected value of any single translation is very low, but taken all together I'm missing a lot of information, some of which could be useful.
2) Complex translations of documents and such. I have tried google translate for this but the text is typically both too complex and also can't fit on the screenspace so it never manages to get the whole paragraph to translate. Some of this could theoretically be solved with a super high res AR device with a great translation AI, but obviously then a similar tech on my phone would also do the trick.
Do you think it would be useful to have had AR glasses to do this while walking down the street?
World Lens was free on Google Glasses, there are almost no reviews though, here's one of the few not ads -
But the same as car navigating it should be fine talking in your ear.
But you might want to walk or jog on an unknown route and listen to music, so ok this is a use case.
1.
So yep, 2.