Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
When you're building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on fidelity, embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful processing, and compelling input methods.
The real question in AR is what use cases can you hit without great fidelity? What sort of value can you unlock with a low-res postage stamp overlay and slow processor instead of full FOV? That's where the go-to market effort needs to be placed.
A similar example of this overreach was in multifunction pen devices of the 90s (General Magic, Newton, EO Personal communicator). A great counter example is Apple Watch, which didn't chase the 'smartphone on your wrist' everything device, and instead picked a few key use cases, established a beachhead, and slowly added capabilities as the technology allowed.
When a category-defining product has yet to emerge on the market, there are going to be a lot of people making predictable mistakes like this - mistiming ideas, scoping the wrong set of features, getting too excited about the wrong technologies, not leveraging their assets.
If you're a product person interested in understanding more about these factors, I wrote an essay on the subject recently: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/
Like, the Apple Watch example seems easy, but what happened to FitBit? FitBit went all in on your idea. Picked a single use case with a market, delivered on it. Yet Apple swooped in, took the market from them. Why is that?
This is an open question, I don't claim to have the answer. It just seems that in this case, Apple was promising, as opposed to FitBit, that it would bring much more use cases to the user, a smartwatch on your wrist really, that seems like it was the messaging at least.
https://qz.com/857412/pebble-went-from-kickstarter-to-being-...
If you don't, and play cautiously, your competition will eat your market and starve you. You still eat the dust.
I just don't get it.
Nobody likes to admit it, but luck is 99% of success.
Of curse getting that skill and determination in the first place is largely luck based so there is that as well.
Google failed because they’re google; they don’t understand UX.
FitBit was a good product, but Apple had more experience and resources available when they decided to enter the space.
Even so, I have no doubt there were other factors at play as well.
If one of the properties you want your product to have is being fashionable and communicate something about you, you have to both invest effort in making a product that reflects that need (through the design decisions of form & function), and gets people to understanding it through that lens (framing it through product marketing). It's a push and pull to create something fashion-forward, the product adapts to the market's needs, and the market shifts what's fashionable to include the product.
> "a lack of leverage is one reason why category-defining products are rarely created by brand new startups."
This idea of course is distressing to product creators. You can create great products (focused, well-executed, nails the need) that don't succeed. Business can be pretty unfair like that.
I was confused when reading this and googled market share - you're right, apparently Apple has a much larger chunk of that market than FitBit does. Either I live in an odd bubble, or the market is a lot different in New Zealand because I probably know 5 or so people with FitBits, and zero with Apple watches.
The startup cost is enormous, it is really hard to create good content and there is close to zero revenue since there are few users. And the users that does exist is the techie crowd that doesn't like to pay for anything.
Technies will pay for hardware like the iPhone, that gets you laid. Not AR/VR, which makes you look like a dork and makes you seasick.
FTFY.
People pay for a good experience.
Yes you can use the link, but then you need an NVidia 1650 RTX or better which means you're a high end gamer already and so were not this supposed "mass market"
PSVR is still top selling VR and while cable and setup wise it's arguably the worst it at least has quality content.
It is, but it compensates by offering good enough experience while being untethered, self-contained and quick to start up. It may not matter for teenagers with expensive gaming rigs, but it matters for working adults with families, who otherwise don't have time and space to justify a VR gaming PC build.
Meanwhile, I've been playing the Echo VR alpha on my Quest (not Link) and it's fucking great.
PCVR is an evolutionary dead end, few adults want giant PC towers in their homes anymore. Even when I demoed PCVR with amazing experiences like Lone Echo people lost interest when I told them no, it wont run on your macbook, you need a tower PC.
Yet I demoed them Beatsaber on the quest and a guy ordered one within a minute of taking the headset off, he demoed it at a family BBQ and two of his relatives bought it after.
There are tons of ways to implement AR. They chose 'general AR', the kind of thing you see on Westworld or Black Mirror. That was a bad choice, because the tech isn't there and won't be for a long time, and it only follows that the implementation was going to be bad.
There are alternative ways to find a good v1 for AR. Take a look at this tweet storm for more of my thoughts on what that could be: https://twitter.com/nickpunt/status/1253087195159654400
As far as VR goes, it's further along. Quest is a quality stand-alone product, but VR is young and content is still lacking. Its also completely sold out, even before coronavirus. They aren't producing them in Sony/MS console numbers but its not a failure, just a stepping stone to success. Unlike the Rift or Vive, with cords hanging out of them and an appeal only to hardcore gamers, Quest is definitely on the path to mainstream, or mainstream-adjacent success.
What's the point of crappy half dim see-through display when you can just pipe the camera output to a normal VR screen?
For different definitions of "very far away". We're only talking about 15 years since we started getting proper video recording in phones, and only about 4 since the big players started focusing on software enhancements.
If there was even 1 amazing game, they'd be ok. Think halo->xbox, sonic->sega, mario->nintendo+gameboy, ... .
But apparently not. Nothing people want to buy.
I'd call it great choice. They wouldn't have been able to make nearly as much money on a purposeful, targeted device, because nobody's put in that much money for a narrow market. Worse, it would have been much easier for investors to figure that the more modest product would fail. Much better to sell moonbeams, to sell the glorious possibility of AR just like they saw on Westworld and Black Mirror.
I mean sure, the wheels had to come off eventually. After a while, you run out of fools. But most startups fail eventually, and you have to admit that 9 years is a great run for something that never worked, and probably never could have worked.
Bingo. If the product works as advertised I could justify the cost just in replacing existing screens, I could have a dozen virtual terminals floating around, I could replace my large TV, etc. All with zero new content required.
The problem is it doesn't seem to work as advertised.
- VR headsets generally are similar to focusing on something further away due to the setup of the lenses. It's not literally focusing on a screen 1cm from your face.
- One direction for current VR work is dynamic focus via lens arrays.
What were they showing investors and writers under NDA that caused billions of dollars and thousands of words of praise to flow?
I wonder if the NDAs still in effect? I'd love for Kevin Kelly to talk more openly about what he saw and heard.
I think VR is starting the mainstream (at least for gaming), and Coronavirus is encouraging this (as it’s making virtually all gaming platforms a boost).
Your statement was true for early VR seated games that used smooth locomotion or flight-sim-like games.
Roomscale VR games don't have motion sickness because of different locomotion methods (teleport, for instance... or they take place entirely within the room volume you have available). In fact, less motion sickness than you'd experience with a large monitor and something like a dynamic flight-based combat game. Unlike a monitor, your in-game view motion is mapped perfectly to physical head motion.
I've tried out about a dozen games, and the only time I had motion sickness at all was when I changed locomotion method from teleport to smooth in Rec Room.
If it were the scifi-like AR glasses of the future, perhaps that would sell itself due to all the dreamed up ideas in movies and tv, but that's pretty far afield of what's possible today.
AR right now is stuck because the display technologies aren't up to the task. The "Waveguide" approach has always fallen short - nobody's ever been able to make the viewing angle wide enough to be worthwhile, and the "passthrough" approach isn't really viable for walking down the street.
This is why I'm skeptical about Apple's AR moves - unless they've either got a totally new display technology or they've managed to do something incredibly clever with the waveguide approach, I just don't see consumer goggles working.
The only people I've seen doing something unique in this space is Tilt Five: https://www.tiltfive.com/ - they've basically done what you're suggesting: constrain the use case until you can actually build something for it.
Perhaps enough time has passed for those sorts of problems to be resolved and Apple will do something similar to Apple Watch but for Glasses.
I don’t understand fashion at all, so I wouldn’t have predicted it in advance, but it was unfashionable.
I also would like to play board games with my friends who no longer live close. Also if I was playing a game and they could be virtually sitting next to me so that we could communicate better that would also be great.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tiltfive/holographic-ta...
Fast Forward so many years and what got delivered in ML1 ? A consumer format device not capable of delivering on that original vision experience.
Your comment suggests MLeap should have early on baked in expectations for a substandard visual experience in a first mass market consumer product. I disagree. Instead, they should have planned on miniaturization problems and baked in expectations for first delivery of a ground breaking visual experience product not available in a mass market consumer device footprint or price point.
MLeap's killer app should have been their visual experience. That was the day one focus and it got lost along the way, as you say 'pulled in a ton of different directions'.
I tell people I would have bought a $10,000 Motorcycle helmet with a backpack from MLeap if that was able to produce just a good part of original Dynamic Light Field AR experience. Is that a fast moving mass market consumer device ? No, but obviously the ML1 was not either.
I am reminded of Theranos and their maniacal insistence on using 'one drop of blood' and how it defined the format of every component, when it is possible they would have succeeded with just a little more flexibility on that design principle.
As with Theranos setting back the IoT medical space, I fear that the MLeap experience will set back spatial computing in the short to mid term, however I think both these fields are at very early stages of transforming our living environments over the long term.
This is easy to assume but a far more common reason companies go broad is that it makes it much easier to sell big vision and big dreams.
Most investors in magicleap probably wouldn’t have invested if the pitch was “right now we are focused 100% on a product that serves $INDUSTRY_X well before moving to $INDUSTRY_Y”
In fact, many investors wouldn’t even have taken the pitch, let alone writing a check
This "pivot" seems like a play they should have been running in parallel regardless, considering they've had actual hardware on the go for a few years so far.
If you're interested I do cover this among other things in the linked essay.
So yes, I do agree that such specific purpose apps definitely validates and advances a new technology like AR.
https://medium.com/@gfodor/the-secret-mozilla-hubs-master-pl...
tl;dr, avatar based communication will require basic voice/body language, mixed media, globally addressable spaces on the web. no fancy scripting, crypto, etc etc.
On their website you have a video that displays several use cases that don't make sense if you really think about them.
Just to dissect the first example where doctors look at a low resolution brain over a surgery table. I don't know why there is a woman without a device who thinks: "why are those three people looking over me here?". But I think the association is some kind of neurosurgery.
* Neurosurgeons know how a brain looks like inside, that's anatomy.
* If this depicts the CT or MRT of the woman, those are evaluated on high resolutions displays by radiologists.
* It's difficult to keep those devices sterile in a hospital environment.
Let's extend this into surgery. "Hey cool you can look inside the brain in real time". Why would a display not be enough in any other case?
* Doctors don't wear a heavy device with a limited field of view during a 5h surgery.
* There are devices with a high resolution display, that can show you in real time where you are inside the brain. I tried this device once with a melon, I could make the mental transition within a minute. Now imagine a neurosurgeon with all his skill.
* What if there is a problem with the image. Right now the doctor can look from the display inside the real brain and check if something is off. You can't take the unobstructed view from a doctor here.
The other two examples in the video are not much more convincing. The second one is solved by a warehouse navigation device. Maybe the last one, but a car showroom usually has a real car you can drive.... Even without it a VR Headset would solve the same issue. Why do they have to see their surroundings?
After so many years and that much money, that's the best they came up with?
I used the one from Microsoft in a museum, that could in theory be interesting. Make it more interactive. You had to stand at an exact position, it couldn't interact with its surroundings and my nose hurt because it was so heavy. I think the battery was empty after 15 minutes.
Just the complexity building a fully interactive museum, all the 3D artists and programmers that would take. What else you could improve with those resources to enhance the experience?
Couldn't you have said the same of the Apple II or IBM PC?
Did someone at Magic Leap seriously think, people will buy an expensive AR device and wear it just to see virtual album covers placed on their table?
Sometimes, for some products, you have to build.
They had the "Knowledge Navigator" vaporware in 1987, twenty years before iPhone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_navigator
They started working on realizing the KN concept in 1987, and shipped Newton in 1993, fourteen years before iPhone. Alas, the state of tech was not up to their ambition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
They shipped iPod in 2001, six years before iPhone. In conjunction with iMacs that could rip CDs, they had a massive hit!
Then they shipped iPhone in 2007. The greatest hit in product history.
What made it possible to have so many kicks at the can was, of course, having a successful(ish) business selling Macs.
With VC funding, you strip all the legacy/cash cow business out of the equation. In exchange, you get tremendous financial leverage for founders, but you also have a very limited window in which to ship a hit.
Another interesting Apple mobile device "kick": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Rokr
Incorrect. The Rokr E1 was how Apple built the relationship with AT&T, a test which ultimately resulted in the iPhone launch happening on AT&T.
I always reply "As it happens, the Apple Newton was Jony Ive's Apple Newton..."
It was his first product for Apple, the Bondi Blue iMac was just his first successful product.
In electronics & tech, the good scale comparisons are few, things like the iPhone, Mac, Windows, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox.
To put that $300b into better context, that's equivalent to the total sales of Windows throughout its entire 30 year history up to about 2014. The iPad will probably end up being the second best selling consumer technology product of all-time behind the iPhone. It has already well passed the iPod in units and dollar sales.
If Magic Leap had a cash cow business, they could be relentless about their vision (heh) for VR, whether it takes five years, ten, or even twenty(!) to realize.
Ah. Then yes!
They were an innovative company, till internal culture or complacency killed it (conjecture).
[1] lol iPhone "3D Touch"
I liked it. It was the first phone I had that could actually browse real websites. Badly, but it worked.
Apple succeeded not because they had features never before seen (though the capacitive touch screen was critical) but a far superior UI. The windows phone worked, but it was a pain to use.
Right... because of Covid-19. As a counter example, Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch is doing phenomenal right now, in part due to Covid-19.
They do not have any real games to play that the public at large would find fun for more than an hour or so. Their apps are like PoCs for what you can do with Magic Leap. If FF7R was on Magic Leap, I bet they'd be selling a lot more units and it'd be a great time for them.
Instead, you're better off getting the Oculus or Valves VR where you have tons of actual games to play and support for streaming apps.
There is no way for Magic Leap to capitalize on the consumer purchasing right now, because they don't have a catalog that supports the hardware to any meaningful degree. And they can't suddenly churn those things out in the space of a month since we've been hit with quarantine.
I get the sense that "shifting focus" means that Magic Leap were so focused on the hardware that they didn't really think concretely about bringing a viable platform to market, or something like that. I just don't understand how a company raises that kind of money and gets totally exposed during a financial crisis like this. Did they really raise that much money without a concrete go-to-market strategy?
> Did they really raise that much money without a concrete go-to-market strategy?
I'm sure they had a nominal strategy. But if you take the anthropologist-from-Mars perspective on Magic Leap, it looks like their real business was selling feelings of excitement to investors.
This is a common phenomenon with build-it-and-they-will-come businesses. If you want to crate a good business, you need contact with reality early and often. You need to test your hypotheses on actual customers, because that's how you really learn to maximize delivered value.
If you want gobs of investor money, on the other hand, it's often better to have no proof at all. With $0 in revenue, investors just have to imagine the billions that await. But once you have $1 in revenue, suddenly projections get anchored to real data. Rather than reveling in dreams of what people might do with, say, Segway or Google Glass, people insist on looking at the dreary reality.
Do you think the Wii was their first console or something?
Animal crossing is software, so not a fair comparison.
Karl Guttag has blogged about them for years, debunking their technology. Hi blog is a good read for all things in the AR/VR space https://www.kguttag.com/
I've owned and extensively tested nearly every AR device that's been on the market in the last 10 years. I can conclusively say: the Magic Leap is garbage for anything more than short-term entertainment. Between the extremely dim visuals, the horrible rainbow effects on every bit of text you display, and the awful resolution, it's not just bad for anything other than games; it's nigh unusable.
If I could go back and stop myself from spending the money on an ML1, I absolutely, without question would do so.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/gamedaily.biz/article/1337/repo...
I mean, technically, capital I Innovation often comes in finding a way to do something without violating the laws of physics, but that's how company origin stories are written. You don't schedule that on the project roadmap "And then a miracle occurs" style.
During a particularly memorable instance of this situation, I recall reading a story by someone suggesting that you can close this feedback loop with peer reviews across functional units. Marketing reviewed product management, product management reviewed development, development reviewed QA, and QA reviewed...
And this is the kicker: QA reviewed marketing. So if marketing sold something that was undefinable and thus untestable, they got an earful from QA. No bonus for you.
I fantasized about that over countless cups of coffee with coworkers for the next year or two.
Years ago, when "Web 2.0" was only just taking off as a buzz word ('07-'08?), Marketing came to my team to demand we make sure our shared web hosting platform be "Web 3.0", so that we were ahead of the curve. That was a super fun conversation, in a "hitting your head against a brick wall" way. You'd think that people in marketing would understand the concept of a buzz word.
Or if by tech you mean "purely software (preferably Internet-based) company", Magic Leap does not fit into that category any more than Theranos does, both being primarily hardware companies.
Magic Leap is reminiscent of another company with "Magic" in its name: General Magic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic). They both made a product that evangelize the form factor in the public's (or some subset of it) eye, but alas is way ahead of its time in terms of tech, and content.
It's easy to hate on Magic Leap and its self aggrandizing marketing. Although I personally never bought into the hype of Magic Leap in particular, they did inspire a whole generation of developers in a way that hasn't been done since the release of the original iPhone.
Has Facebook de-prioritized Oculus? I haven't heard any news, but I'm also not following it closely.
If someone wants to look how Microsoft is also doing from a engineering PoV, watch this cool video from Marc Pollefys from ETH Zurich/Microsoft. It was made for a technical-minded scene and shows the behind-the-scene, some potential issues (privacy) and where it is going next https://vimeo.com/380218937
I just don't think they are with the amount of work they are doing on the Oculus ecosystem atm.
The reaction was that the demand for the device so outpaces supply Facebook shouldn't advertise it.
But the OP points out something I hadn't though of, which is that VR represents a potential opportunity in the times of social distancing.
If Coronavirus becomes like the normal flu, where seasonal vaccines offer only partial coverage[2]--social distancing will become something people get very good at and want to maximize the bounds of experience in.
Thus, if anything Facebook would want to increase its investment and accelerate roadmaps for the technology.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/fqk3dd/face...
[2] This hypothesis is based on this report from late yesterday and is currently not yet getting media attention:
I always assumed that Facebook is playing the long game with VR, with the end goal being a re-imagined Second Life.
They need to wait until the technology is cheap/mature enough though, which is probably 5-10 years out.
Seems cheap enough for mainstream. Considering the game console price point.
The comparison consumer-ready technology would be an iPhone or a Nintendo Switch which are sort of out-of-the-box experiences mainstream consumers are quickly getting used to.
As soon as you unbox the Quest you're ready for the onboarding process (which is quite enjoyable btw). No PC or additional hardware required.
There's no way that social distancing or shelter in place becomes a seasonal norm of any kind. Maybe some people will wear masks more often and we'll shake hands less. That's about it.
What specific medical changes will occur such that this will be "fixed" by next season?
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/04/22/coro...
You mean the fake video demos they distributed?
And what good has this inspiration brings to the economy then? It is funny to even call it an inspiration since for a very long period of time it is just rendered CG for marketing.
One of the sentences in the article that leapt out at me from the article was "Magic Leap is one of the most well-capitalized consumer hardware startups ever, having raised more than $2.6 billion from investors":
* "most well-capitalized" sounds very awkward.
* How much they raised is hardly indicative of how well-capitalized they are at the moment (in the sense of runway), without knowing how much of it they spent already.
* The article makes it sound like huge investments are all upside. But they carry a significant downside as well, because all those investors wanting to see a return will significantly increase the price tag if the company wants to sell itself.
The problem, however,is this. AR tech is simply not there yet. Glasses are becoming smaller but resolution sucks and we don't know if headaches will ever go away for more than an hour usage. I would estimate another 10 years of intense development before they are ready to compete with 6X cheaper 4K monitors in rendering quality. It's a long game and doesn't work without determined leader like Zuck willing to drain billions on it.
Rony Abovitz is closer to Adam Neumann than Steve Jobs.
I don't really think this is true. Most of what I've heard about magic leap from developers has been skepticism, while the hype seems to have been from VCs and journalists.
Any particular examples of the enthusiasm you've seen?
What on Earth is this claim? What XR developer was inspired by Magic Leap in any way other than the encouragement to bilk VCs out of their money?
Edit: I'm ready for Apple to pull a rabbit out of a hat again in a year with an AR wearable- I think the iPhone SE was strategic because AR glasses and an expensive phone and a watch is a tough sell. Cheap but powerful phone in pocket and a wearable makes more sense to me.
Well that looks a bit silly now doesn't it.
I suspect that the big difference here is, this being 1990, SNK didn't have nearly as much access to investment money from rich people who don't understand the what entertainment budgets look like for the other 99.99% of people. So it was never hyped as anything but a luxury product.
Yeah, I wonder if Magic Leap had started small and luxury, installing that Beast contraption with the undiluted experience to rich people, it could've grown more like Tesla. Of course, the Roadster ran on all the same roads, while whole new experiences have to be created for AR, but make a few great ones and it'll be like having a bowling lane in your house—you don't play with it except to show off to visitors. (Oh, League Bowling was the one game I remember playing on my friend's Neo Geo. He wasn't bowling-lane rich.)
Or Magic Leap could've licensed some Virtual Boy games.
Just to check things out, I rented a Quest over the winter holidays. There was very little content that was a) VR-specific, and b) so much better on VR that it was worth the hassle. After we sent it back, the kids never even mentioned it again; they're happy with their Switches and the PS4.
Game designer Jesse Schell said "If Oculus Quest can’t succeed we should just hang it up" [1] and I think he's right. The obvious technical problems have been fixed. It's technically very impressive, and it has a strong novelty rush at first. But if the current market isn't enough to drive the creation of must-have games, I expect it's a descending spiral from here.
Personally I play Beat Saber on a daily basis and pretty often other games as well.
Many people, like you, don't get it until they try it.
I also would hesitate to say they solve a common problem because the current market glut seems to be trailing a recent hype bubble of electric scooter startups.
I think they couldn’t get it to a place where it could be small enough to be useful?
Hopefully when Apple ships AR hardware for real it’ll be what it should be. Magic leap will be kind of like General Magic or the creative nomad jukebox - right idea but too early with hardware and not a great product.
Their constant advertising with no details for years really bothered me though so I probably have an unfairly negative perception of them.
Either build what you’re doing in public like Facebook/Oculus or do it in secret like Apple, but don’t loudly advertise in public when you don’t have anything to show for it.
###
(I played with the magic leap hardware that shipped for an hour or so and found it disappointing, a lot less interesting than when I had played with VR hardware for the first time. I think AR as the next computing platform has huge potential, but the hardware isn’t there yet and it needs a strong platform/ecosystem behind it. I think Apple has been preparing this for years.)
i think that technology was CGI:
https://hothardware.com/news/magic-leap-admits-outrageous-au...
"Gimme a ton of money to run this experiment. If I'm right you'll be rich"
Even this post is another example of the continued dishonesty I'd expect from them. This pivot is obviously not about COVID-19.
Even snake oil salesmen have a demo if they're good; these guys suck at being phonies.
If you reveal the thing then that dies down (or worse knowledgeable people know that what you're dong isn't possible), but if you keep it secret while giving content-free little hints about it you can keep it going longer (and maybe raise more money by letting people in on the secret?).
I have a strong dislike for this kind of thing, but that doesn't mean it's not effective.
[0] The FOV is accurate, given we're looking through a narrow camera lens, but gives the wrong impression that it fills what the user could see because it fills the video frame. The graphics wouldn't be "solid", they'd be transparent, but a pre-setup room can definitely do occlusion effects with foreground furniture. The physical gun controllers could be done, though nobody would fork out the money for it. And all the hand gestures and UI pinning stuff could be done, though the software support on Magic Leap does not help you in the least.
This is the kind of thing that I think the real AR value will be from: https://twitter.com/st8rmi/status/1249950879807045633?s=21
Basically a meta-layer for the real world that you can interact with outside of a screen. This would let you do things like interact with a lightswitch from across the room by looking at it, get metadata about most object states by looking at it, anchor big displays to white walls, etc.
I think there's huge potential for this kind of interface, but I suspect the hardware isn't possible yet.
I personally define VR vs AR as "who provides the context in which we are working? The app (VR), or the user (AR)". A lot of extant "AR" apps don't do anything particularly interesting with your surrounding environment.
If your AR app needs me to clear out a space in my livingroom to give you room to drop some 3D models that maybe bounce off my walls, you've not actually made an AR app, you've just made a crappy VR app instead. Facebook could release an update to the Quest any day now that auto-scans your room to set the boundary and then you'd have exactly the same experience in an occluded headset, but with twice the FOV and better input.
But the cost of entry is mid-4-figures, between the hardware itself and the required development equipment. It's obvious that the people making the hardware and platform aren't a wide-enough cross-section of the public to create what business interests or consumers don't know that they want yet. They're shooting themselves in the foot, trying to maintain control over the platform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNppUJzsvXQ&ab_channel=Oculu...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbRvARuCoRU&ab_channel=Oculu...
Imagine a physical checklist where areas get highlighted, arrows to direct you to the next step, and a little red icon that goes green when you're done.
I think this could shave real time (maybe a third?) off airframe downtime while keeping the very high accuracy requirement. That would save actual money.
Is there anything I could read about that? I'm taking your word for it, I would just find that interesting.
Or do you mean "this already exists but isn't in AR goggles"? Because I can see where my phrasing was unclear, I mean this mounted in an AR HUD.
https://defensesystems.com/articles/2018/06/21/af-augmented-...
I personally also worked on similar systems for industrial factory equipment repair.
In some way this reminds me of Theranos.
Holy crap, the memories. I had the creative nomad jukebox and for years convinced myself if fit in the pockets of my jeans...it did...but it didn't. The folly of youth!?
AR is 1-2 orders of magnitude more demanding than VR, so if we get to acceptable screen-door-effect-less VR on 30TFlops hardware, we might need like 1 Petaflop for the same with AR. That won't fit into a pocket anytime soon, but we can build such experiences on beefy demo rigs.
In the demo I saw, you get immersed into a coral reef and walk around. It's very cool, but I'm not gonna buy a unit just for that. So you need lots of content before it makes sense to buy one of these things, and then you have a chicken and egg problem. Who is going to spend massive amounts of money to create content when there isn't already a big audience for it?
For me the illusion of it sitting on the table didn't even feel like it was really on the table because of how dark the glasses were and how faded the image was.
VR was like being in a different place with a real sense of perspective and your hands in VR felt like a part of you. Sure it was low resolution, moving was strange, and the sides were letter boxed a bit but it was an impressive thing.
No idea when it will be a viable product in a nice enough hardware package, they're working on the ecosystem and platform in the mean time via iOS/iPadOS, but AR via those devices is a lot less compelling.
Doing this in a real way would be big if the hardware is possible, but it may be a ways out.
They acquired Akonia Holographics in 2018 who specialise in holographics for an AR headset. And they already have many patents:
https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2019/11/apple-w...
The only real indication is Akonia, that is interesting, but they have 200 patents on display technology. Any of that stuff could be useful in other applications. So I’ll stick to my guns.
Imagine minecraft, but in real life. They had blocks you could put on walls, dinosaurs roaming around on the ground, knights fighting the dinosaurs, and all of it was controllable.
It was in a small-ish room, roughly ... 15x15 feet? a few meters by a few meters.
It had couches in the room, and pictures on the walls. It didn't look special. But in retrospect the room may have been part of the demo in some way.
(I went through their interview process, and one of the benefits was getting to see the ML in action. Supposedly they also had an "AI assistant" demo or something like that – Cortana? – but it wasn't available on that day.)
If I were an investor, I would probably invest based on the strength of that demo. It was enough to make you question the reason we're all staring at laptop screens. The device was comfortable, and I could imagine myself sitting at a desk typing into thin air (because goggles) rather than typing into a computer screen.
Of course, it looks like I would have lost my money if I were an investor. But how could we know it would play out this way? All they had to do was build a strong developer ecosystem. The lame demo-style apps we see are a direct result of inconvenient APIs and SDKs.
In fact, they were actively hostile to developers. I remember getting a C&D just for publishing their SDK's manual on a personal website. No idea how they even found the link.
The premise is real – in the same way the Vive was in many ways superior to Oculus, I think the next "Magic Leap" will be superior and more affordable than what we see here. If you are looking for an investment opportunity, the AR scene is still a strong bet over the next decade or so.
(If that seems unlikely, think about how many major advances worked out after seeming so unlikely: deep learning in AI; consumer-grade VR; voice controlled devices; the list goes on and on.)
What you and other early-people seem to describe appears to be something else entirely, in which case yea - original plan fell through completely and they pivoted to their current thing. But was it actually different?
For anybody who hadn't seen the demo, the company always looked like typical SV smoke selling pitch. "This is the best thing ever", "It will change the world", "We have great stuff but we can't show them in public because reasons".
The whole "demo in a closed, secret room and then you can't tell anybody about it" reminds me too much of the carnival fair fortuneteller experience. You get shoved in a mystery room, get shown a bunch of smoke and mirrors, and then you're out before you can't think too much about what happened.
As for that, the ecosystem is far too closed. ML and Microsoft seem to be approaching the technology Apple-style, with expensive hardware and by-the-numbers (if that) developer support, which would allow them to control the platform - and profits - once the we reach some sort of inflection point where either a unpredicted killer app emerges or the tech matures enough for the more obvious applications to be viable.
They're not going to get there, though; someone is going to (or perhaps already has) released a cheaper alternative with a low barrier-to-entry creation platform, and that will allow the number of people who have access to both a good-enough device and a good-enough skillset to reach a critical mass. They'll create for that device and platform and everyone else will be playing catch-up. It's the early PC and BASIC all over again.
Do you know what would be really interesting? If Sony's PS5 were to launch with an affordable VR headset and an updated version of Media Molecule's Dreams.
I think Zuckerberg said at the last FB conference their aim with the Quest was to get 10,000,000 sold because that's the tipping point to a self sustaining app ecosystem.
Software is worth making, so hardware is worth buying, so software is worth making... etc
They had zero chance of achieving this at their price point.
They may have failed but their impact is felt everywhere.
The 3D space is particularly prone to this. I count at least 5 waves of 3D innovation going back to the Great Exhibition in 1851. 3D movies were going to revolutionize things twice, in the 1950s and a decade ago. Over and over, this stuff is absolutely amazing for a hot minute and then nobody cares.
Of course, Evans is sold as a brilliant pundit and now VC genius, so if anybody should understand that novelty doesn't equal a business model, it's him. But as you suggest, Upton Sinclair's quote applies here: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."
Just because a technology is currently in a niche position doesn't mean that in the long term it won't be a revolution or won't become mainstream.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/01/well-didnt-work-segway-technol...
Of course personal electric vehicles seem to be having a renaissance at the moment (scooters) but the buzz:use ratio of modern scooters is much-much lower than the original segway era from 20 years back.
The segways itself doesnt make much sense to me though. I dont remember too much about the hype when it was released, but like, I'm still unclear about what it was supposed to be able to do that an electrified scooter or bike couldn't.
Segways have much better low-speed handling characteristics than bicycles, which makes them safer to intermix with pedestrians: Travelling at a slow amble speed in a crowded environment is extremely difficult on a bicycle, but no big deal for a Segway (or similar)
Now I ride a Onewheel.
When the Segway was released? It could do this one cool trick: actually exist. Electric bikes and scooters (at least at any sort of scale) were at least ten years off.
There were other factors. Ungodly expensive for what it was, and poor enough range that I questioned whether it could get the six-ish miles from the house to Microsoft's main campus with that WA-520 hill to contend with. Now my Boosted Rev scooter can almost do the 7.5 mile round trip to work, with that same WA-520 hill, and for 1/3rd the price the original Segway was going for.
EDIT: oh, wait a minute, the max speed on the original Segway was like 20kph/12mph, right? Yeah, the Rev would easily make the 15 mile round trip if I were riding it that slowly.
If you're referring to electric unicycles e.g. SoloWheel, they are probably the perfect compliment to mass transit.
60 miles of range!
I still respect Kamen but take every pre-announcement I hear with a strong degree of skepticism.
I remember being extremely underwhelmed when they unveiled it. It seemed like one of those things that had never been invented before, because why would you invent that.
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/steve-jobs-and-jeff-bezos-meet...
And it wasn't totally insane, for the same basic reasons people think scooters, etc, could revolutionize cities.
The fact that you can rent one by the minute is going to make marginal differences to most people. If people wanted to use electric scooters to get around the city, everyone would own one already.
No one except their PR interns thought it was going to revolutionize anything.
Most of these, certainly including Segway and Magic Leap, fall apart as soon as you ask ten random non-tech people if they'd actually buy one though.
Anyone that follows him closely on Twitter Should know this. He's the type of person that just throws predictions everywhere so he can say "I told you so", but never owns up the ones that don't crystallize.
It's not silly to try some promising technology that ultimately doesn't work out for business. It's easy to be nasty in hindsight, from the comfort of your home, isn't it? Not so easy to try making it work in the first place.
But go to Magic Leaps website now. Look at the promotional video that is being shown there. Now go and look at actual footage of the Magic Leap unit in action.
The company are being entirely misrepresentative of what their product actually is. They are using that amazing video footage to sell a product TODAY that is nothing close to the quality shown there. Look at what the unit is capable of and compare it to that.
Now sure, you can be given creative freedom to express the ideas of things that the Magic Leap lets you do. But then you remember the Whale video. They've been misrepresenting their product and trying to sell it using that misrepresentation for years at this point.
When TechCrunch first released video of the little floating robot game I remember people being astounded at how asinine it was. This is what VCs have been raving about and pouring money into?
So what are they trying to make work? Their promotional videos, ability to dupe VCs and probably their rock solid sales team - how long can should you give that benefit of the doubt for? They are 9 years old at this point!
Now their TEDx talk on the other hand... speaking of silly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY
To me that was the moment both Magic Leap and TED (sadly) jumped the shark.
But I do think TED Talks have jumped the shark, probably before that talk.
So:
Magic Leap built a technology demonstrator, on a rig that was bolted to a table (as everyone has said). That demo was great. It was also, yes, bolted to a table. They have not turned that into a shipping mass-market consumer product.
Somehow, a bunch of people on the internets decided that because they, personally, hadn't seen the demo, anyone who had must be lying (or on acid?). This was, well, 'a bit silly', for lots of reasons, and it also missed the real challenges. The question was never 'does the tech demo exist?' Rather: Can they turn the optics on the table into something you can wear (that also has even better optics, with acceptable FOV, occlusion etc)? Can they go from a display technology to an actual platform?
Presume for the sake of argument that they solved all the optics etc questions - then they would be in the position of a company that had invented multitouch. That doesn't give you an iPhone. You still have to make an actual smartphone, work out the software and the UI, build an ecosystem, create an app store, get to scaled mass production, and that's really expensive. Or, someone had to - you could licence it out in some way (which is what Qualcomm did with CDMA - Qualcomm doesn't make phones or build cellular networks)
So: imagine back in 2006, you'd seen Jeff Han's multitouch demo. It was three feet across, came in several packing cases, and it was very very cool. But it wasn't an iPhone.
1. They were founded by a well-connected VC-type, in a hyped new industry. These companies always raise a lot of money (because of the connections and the hype) but rarely (never?) work out well. (See also 21.co for “blockchain”.)
2. A few years ago they contracted with my friend’s company to make some swag, it was a chromed 3D paperweight of their logo guy. I saw a prototype of it, and it was really nice and pretty cool. Then I heard magic leap had rejected it because they didn’t like some way the chrome plating came together at the point it was dipped or something? It was insane to me, that thing was pretty cool and totally professional, and I knew if that was emblematic of how they did business they were screwed..
I don't know whether there was some tech hurdle they could never get over or if they were just straight up selling a fantasy from the beginning, but this result has seemed to be the likely destination for years.
Maybe the 'Magic' is how they are able to get so much funding and attention for so little end result.
Starcraft Ghost
The Phantom (games console)
Duke Nukem Forever (though it eventually did come out)
Duke Nukem (took) Forever
Edit: Here it is the HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819
They are still around though https://www.getmagic.com
Glass did release limited versions of stuff, unlike Magic Leap, but I think they spent way more money than Magic Leap. Magic Leap raised $2.6B [0]. Although I have no idea how much Google spent, I suspect it’s more than this when you factor in the barges and rollout plan that they had and didn’t use at all.
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-leap#section-l...
They have an Enterprise product still being supported: https://www.google.com/glass/start/
There was simply no reason for them to need this much cash before they proved market fit. I mean, has there ever been a successful company that gorged on funding before they needed it that eventually became successful? So many of the Vision Fund companies are in the same boat here.
If Magic Leap couldn't find at least good market fit with a couple hundred million, I don't see how they were going to get there with a couple billion.
They were killed by too much ambition and too much money about 10 years too early.
Which is also to say, the charismatic/ crazy founder with a reality distortion field is great and all, and can move mountains and often succeed - but sometimes reality hits with a thud. To some extent, their challenge was one grounded in physical limitations of our technological capabilities in the 2010s. In the 2030s though..
Nevertheless, I tend to agree that the product they were marketing did never materialize.
My understanding (from sources who have experienced the demo) is that their first demo was BONKERS. They projected light right onto the users eyes, so instead of having a AR heads up display, you had a light beam projecting images into your eye so they could add elements into your field of vision and make it look like they were naturally there. The issue is that they couldn't get that demo into any sort of a state where it could be commercialized. The rig was the size of a large room, the person hooked in was basically required to be stable for the duration of the experience. The eye-tracking for projecting was difficult and worked alright but not 100%. The funding they received was based on the demo of tech. After they realized they wouldn't be able to commercialize it, they transitioned to a more classic AR setup. The magic leap tech will work, but it will be 10-20 years until we are able to use it.
> they couldn't get that demo into any sort of a state where it could be commercialized
Dear Lord! I would hope that they couldn't get that out. Putting lasers directly into your eye sounds like a perfect recipe for large scale disaster. I don't care how many people say it's safe or how many papers there are out there on it, all it takes is a few microseconds of error just once in your whole life and it's boom lights out forever.
Hopefully someone competent buys them before that happens.
Magic Leap is at least a tech product, though. And even though they had some actual device, the thing they marketed was complete fiction, they never brought the promise from that whale demo to market.
1. Put the goggles on some investor's head (in a normal looking room, but with known lighting and spatial properties...).
2. Show them some flashy demo that has some limitations, but promise that with their investment, they will be able to remove those limitations.
3. Investors, who probably lack the deep knowledge of optics to know that those limitations aren't so trivial, throw money at them. Because if those limitations (e.g. FOV, opacity) were removed, it would be world-changing tech.
1. Put the goggles on some investor's head.
2. Investor catches COVID-19 and dies.
Nobody wants to share VR or AR gear any more. The whole idea of location based VR / AR entertainment centers is deadly now.
If it's so great you can't believe it without trying it yourself, and nobody wants to stick their head in a device that anybody else has been drooling and coughing and vomiting in, it doesn't matter how great it is, nobody's going to try it.
There's a price range where I could see buying one to be shared by everyone in my house, but not one for each individual.
For example, Valve Index is in that category for me.
Why shouldn't I? The exterior surfaces of "electronics" are just glass, plastic or aluminum and lysol seems to work fine on all three. It's sold in plastic bottles so it's not like it'd create nerve gas or something.
Not that I generally take marketing claims seriously, but lysol advertises itself as appropriate for use on electronics: https://www.lysol.com/cold-flu/home/how-to-clean-electronics... If there were any real danger, I expect their lawyers might not let them do that.
Some cleaners can mess up the texture of rubber parts too
"Facebook also noted that alcohol-based wipes and cleaners are not recommended for use on the lenses. The lenses can be damaged by alcohol, so users should opt to use a dry microfiber cloth instead. If a smudge is being stubborn, users can dab a small amount of water on the cloth as well, but alcohol should not be used on lenses at all, according to the company."
1: https://www.amazon.com/Vive-Disposable-Hygiene-Cover-Starter...
The consumer product is quite lacking compared to what people said was a demonstration of game changing technology.
It makes it sound to me more like a Séance (with its usual implications) than anything else. Or, for an easier to understand analogy, selling a Disney ride as if it was real.
You make X in dirty money, then invest it into a cool sounding company promising groundbreaking stuff that has a bunch of big known investors on board already. If the company does well, you take the clean money out with a nice profit on top. If it doesn’t work out, hopefully you pulled out at a level where you lost some money but not much. And it still returns you clean money at the end, so the goal is accomplished.
Typically, this kind of money laundering is done through retail businesses like restaurants and such, but it is way easier to just drop those money as an investment into another company, rather than maintaining your own retail business. Plus, the amount of money you could launder by investing is way higher, since it isnt as suspicious to drop a few hundred millions on a startup investment, as opposed to claiming that your small restaurant that is almost always empty is bringing you tens of millions per year.
Also curious on how it would work. If a rich foreign national decides to invest into a random startup, i dont think US has the ability to look into where the money came from, unless that foreign national claims to have made those money in the US.
Again, could totally be wrong here, so please someone correct me if that’s the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Foreign_Investmen...
Not speaking from direct experience, only logical first principles. I think the money needs to be laundered before i vesting in US firms.
More like Dean Kamen's launch of "Ginger" in 2001.
> Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
So maybe similar reasons to WeWork.
They made some Incredibles 2 style goggles.
This company could snub reality for a long time and I'm honestly surprised it lived for this long.
That said:
1. There absolutely exists a product and putting it on for the first time is a pretty exhilarating experience. Unfortunately Magic Leap failed to provide an convincing reason to put it on for the second and third time.
2. The company had very good talent. Unfortunately its management turned more awkward as you climbed the ranks - professional corporate survivors which needed to bridge reality between Rony's dreams for the next year and what's possible in the next 10 with their modest skillset.
It was a bit of Hunger Games up top.
3. AR hardware startups need money, and lots of it. I estimate Magic Leap had about 50% overhead, meaning that given better management and direction - and a bit of hindsight no doubt - it could have been done with $1bn. It's still $1bn.
4. Consumer AR will come in a minimalistic form, such as Intel's deceased Project Vaunt (ironically enough, many of its Swiss optics team were brought on to Magic Leap following its termination in Intel). Minimal, stylish, useful - not something to wow you once over but to provide day in, day out value. An Apple watch rather than an Oculus.
Source - I was there for few years, running some parts of their engineering. I don't regret a second of it.
That disease is going to get a whole lot of bad news laid at its feet. Basically if any company has anything bad they want to get off their chest, now is the time to do it.
I don’t think the product could’ve ever lived up to the hype train.
Magic Leap is one of those companies where it seems like everyone (in tech) was rooting against them. Too confident, too much money, too little to show. The only people I ever heard defending them were people who were financially invested in them or in AR as a whole.
It seems generally like they decided to do X, Y, Z but needed to invent A, B, C before they could get there, let alone know if anyone wanted X, Y, Z.....
But based on the people I know (personally) who work there - there wasn't a lot of talent being thrown at the product. I think their organization is incapable of bringing a product to market, even if that market existed.
Not a good recipie talent wise.
I tried both myself, and the biggest improvements in v2, in my opinion, are:
* Field of view. That’s the biggest one, as it felt like just a staring into a small rectangle with v1. With v2, I was actually able to read a NYT article in a web browser rather comfortably, moving the web browser around the room and such, with no significant field of view limitations felt. The limitations are still there, but you rarely ever hit them, while with v1 it was more like “almost the whole time you are using the device”. And it felt really annoying.
* UI/UX. Everything is much more intuitive and smooth to operate. After the initial 5-10 mins, i didnt feel any jankiness and was able to perform all operations with no struggle. Also, v2 works without that annoying clicker/pointer device (that was pretty much a must for v1) rather well, just by tracking hands. And i would say it is even more precise without that device than v1 was WITH the device.
* Ergonomics. The headset is lighter, feels more comfortable, doesn’t require as much fiddling around to get it sit well on your head. The flip up/down visor is such a great quality of life improvement, I am baffled that current consumer VR devices like Oculus or Vive haven’t implemented it. Especially since it would provide way more utility for VR than AR, because VR completely blocks out the real world.
https://youtu.be/ybhYJ87U2Gs?t=523
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbRvARuCoRU&ab_channel=Oculu...
It was a really cool product. If it was $300 instead of $2300 I would have bought one.
Some examples:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8c3pDKdHEc
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTuKcm8s4QQ
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loGxO3L7rFE
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pyiiO72ZwM
If you search on youtube for "hololens industrial", you can find other demos. When HoloLens 2 was announced, I think Microsoft showed a number of demos of why companies would buy it for their employees to use on the job.
The respectable way is to get them in person, look them dead in the eye and admit to the failures of the company and product vision, and then let them go, apologizing profusely for your incompetence.
That is possible in an amusement park where you can roam in an environment, but if you want to make a livingroom interesting, might as well cut out reality completely.
But I've said it for years, if I shorted it 2+ years ago I would have lost money!
Not sure what that means.
They are clearly pivoting off Covid-19 for more VC money, something I wouldn't have predicted last year. I guess if not Covid-19 it would be something else.
How do you predict when they will fall off the end of the graph I guess is the question?
Ensure that the frame rate is capable of 120 frames/second, or whatever value will make it comfortable for humans to see in real time.
Then, overlay the digital artifacts on top of it. And skip frames, if you can’t compute the objects fast enough to match the frame rate.
This way, you can put on the VR goggles, and still be able to walk around in the real world, without tripping and falling down.
The AR stuff seemed way too complicated.