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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

Does this officially place the Magic Leap's consumer device on the list of the biggest vaporware products in the history of the tech industry?

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.

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I think it's less of a tale of "vaporware" (I mean, Magic Leap has something that actually exists, even if it's not successful) than yet another cautionary tale of startups taking WAAAYYY more money than they need.

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.

The issue is the problems they were trying to solve required boiling the ocean. They did manage to boil a good bit of it, but didn’t see it thru all the way — their tech was very expensive and not that good in the end.

Do you remember the whale demo[1]? This isn't close to anything they released and I don't see how that is the result of taking too much money or not being able to find a market fit. This product simply didn't exist.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbpqwUUfMAQ

And this is what Magic Leap could actually do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ7-F_vWUVE

It looks like AR project first tutorial

This is exactly right. They have some impressive technology and if they had found some non-consumer niche applications they could have had a decent business while continuing to develop the display technology to something suitable for consumers, which is probably 10 years away.

They were killed by too much ambition and too much money about 10 years too early.

Magic Leap was founded in 2010, it was a different market for capital back then. The market is the market, you can't fight it or it wipes you out, plus you don't ever have complete information until 5-10 years later.

Or: It doesn't matter how many billions you spend on a problem if the core technology isn't there. Scientific discovery advances based on curiosity and open experimentation. That even includes when we "know" how to do the things but its not miniaturized enough yet. Imagine being a company tasked with inventing the walkman 10 or 15 years before it was possible. You'd end up with some crazy designs.

See also: Apple Newton versus iPhone.

They weren't selling a fantasy, they were selling real tech. Their block has been "consumerizing" it.

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 projected light right onto the users eyes,

> 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.

Most new tech is of this form. https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/news/smartglasses.html uses something like <5uW or something crazy low. If the hardware caps out at a safe power, you'll probably be fine.

Was that the one where they vibrated a fiberoptic to basically create a scanning projector?

My take always was that their long-term vision remains very hard to implement in practice, particularly in a consumer-friendly form factor. They should've kept working on it in a R&D capacity in the background, and pushed a more limited AR (or even VR..) product to build a brand, ecosystem and start generating some revenue. And, of course, figure out what the hell their product-market fit was going to be! The quarantine era, in theory, could be a golden age for AR/VR products that deliver a compelling experience.

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..

There's something about using the word 'Magic' in your company's name [1]; great concept, likely amazing people, but in the end either vaporware or something that's way too ahead of its time.

Maybe the 'Magic' is how they are able to get so much funding and attention for so little end result.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic

Some names are just too perfect.

Starcraft Ghost

The Phantom (games console)

Duke Nukem Forever (though it eventually did come out)

> Duke Nukem Forever (though it eventually did come out)

Duke Nukem (took) Forever

My favorite was the Guns and Roses album "Chinese Democracy" which took like a decade to release. They used to say democracy would come to China before the album would.

I remember a small delivery startup called "Magic" too that had quite an impact here in HN, then I never heard about it again.

Edit: Here it is the HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819

They are still around though https://www.getmagic.com

The problem is, that they were never specific about their product. They just suggested that it would be far ahead of the competition which it wasn't.

Nevertheless, I tend to agree that the product they were marketing did never materialize.

I think it’s up there, but still Google Glass takes the cake (or maybe General Magic).

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...

I'd hardly classify Glass as vaporware.

They have an Enterprise product still being supported: https://www.google.com/glass/start/

Glass was killed by a single word: "glasshole" - I've never seen anything else so utterly destroyed so quickly.

It wasnt that word that killed glass...

I would be glad to be a designated glasshole in return for a decent and affordable AR device to put on my face. Like, "shut up and take my money!" If you build it me and my fellow nerds will be waiting in line.

I don’t think so. They just didn’t find the tech ready for a useful experience yet.

I don’t think that nomenclature had anything to do with glass failing as a consumer product - the glasses simply did not fulfill any need or desire that would lead to mass consumer adoption at their price point. When the iPad came out Apple was pilloried by the press and Twitter dummies for releasing a product that sounded like a feminine hygiene product. It didn’t hurt the product at all.

I don't know if that's really fair. Their devkit is subjectively on par or slightly better than the Hololens. Its not vapor but might just not be a hit.

They have amazing software running on a supercomputer, but weren't able to fit it into a pocket (with their portable NVidia-based device). Maybe in 20 years?

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