Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz Is Out
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That's basically the state of VR and AR as it exists today.
But in general I think you're right, most VR stuff is gimmicky. But for us niche nerds, it's a cool addition to our stuff.
The big issue I’ve found is the UX and software is atrocious. Things are not intuitive, there’s walled gardens (f you oculus). I’ve had so many moments of knowing what I want to do, but being totally unable to figure out how to do it.
I’ll be excited once Apple enters space to figure out a bunch of this stuff and the rest of the field can just copy them.
How do you get to this number when Apple has only 25-35% market share..
I'm not sure VR can really compete with a device that for ~200$ allows you proper view directed freelook in loads of games without having to seal your eyes off under a visor. With a modestly sized panel I didn't notice any less immersion using head tracking versus a (for me, highly annoying) head-encasing visor.
It also leaves room for having sim-appropriate peripherals that you can actually use because they aren't obscured by the screen.
Just my experience having tried both and being a big simulation enthusiast (flight sim, driving, arma milsim, all that stuff).
Comments like this make me feel like TrackIR proponents are just people who don't know depth perception exists or that things can happen in places that aren't in front of you. TrackIR is an _input_ device. VR HMD is a _display_ device. The two are not interchangeable. TrackIR doesn't magically make you able to look over your shoulder.
And binocular depth perception is only one method of depth perception..
edit:
> or that things can happen in places that aren't in front of you
> TrackIR doesn't magically make you able to look over your shoulder.
No idea how to decipher this: I have no issue looking around in any of the games I use trackIR with. It gives you the exact same freedom of input it just doesn't seal me off from being able to see what's going on irl around me.
So you have screens behind you? And above you? And to either side of you? And at other odd angles? Suddenly your $200 is looking a lot more expensive, otherwise you're comparing apples to plastic oranges. Screen coverage for _actual_ free look would cost many times more than an HMD, take up many times more space, and it will _still_ be feeding the same image to both eyes unless you use 3D goggles which is yet another expense (a very significant one if you don't want your framerate to crater because you've just cut your display Hz in half).
> It gives you the exact same freedom of input
This is blatantly false. Freedom offered by motion tracking is restricted to screen space. A VR HMD integrates a full sphere of stereoptic screen space, something that you're deliberately ignoring.
You don’t track 1:1 that’s the entire point. You’ve no clue what you’re on about. An array of monitors would make tracking moot if I had such a setup.
The only major point where TrackIR shines is price. Other than that it doesn't compare well to VR. A flat screen, no matter how interactive, can't compare to a VR HMD for all encompassing immersion. TrackIR on its own is also limited entertainment wise. Its most common use case is for sims, while VR is more versatile.
Eh, that's the state of it at your work. The VR headset I have and others have is a temporary ticket to a visual entertainment experience.
For me, the only experience I found absolutely amazing was Half Life: Alyx, though I'll play Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand grenades a couple hours a week. I would never do it at the office, though.
That’s the state of VR today.
Whenever I do VR as a social activity there’s never anyone leaving unsatisfied. And I’ve “sold” plenty of headsets that I hear reports about still getting regular use several years later
And now with oculus quest it’s an even easier sell
Every time there’s any vr related post on HN, the most upvoted comment is about VR being dead tech, all the while oculus and valve have their headsets on constant back-order
Maybe consider that you’re not the target audience
I'll bet people were responding to the party, not the Vive. It's exactly the effect I reported: it's cool once when everyone is doing it.
> I hear reports about still getting regular use several years later
Yes, a percentage of the population is no doubt into it. My point is that it's honestly surprising at this point, given how good the tech truly is, how uncompelling the overall experience is. The vast majority of people just don't feel the need to come back.
> VR being dead tech
The tech is great and getting better all the time. But that's not enough for it to be transformative the way smartphones were.
And yes, I know, there's no requirement for AR or VR to be the next smartphone. But we do at some point need another paradigm shift in hardware to enable another wave of software innovation. This I think is why there is such animosity between VR proponents and skeptics: one wants to play some sweet games and the other wants a massive world-changing wave to ride.
How are you sanitizing the equipment these days? Just curious.
> nobody explodes for 6 hours in a row
I shudder to think of what happens when the party ends.
I've been hanging out in real life with a lot of people and nobody ever exploded. That seems to be par for the course, not something to brag about.
Two of those words are extremely important to your experience, "my" and "office".
That's basically the state of Nintendo as it exists today.
See? Means nothing and it's just as true as your statement, the thing is collecting dust.
“Every AR app is used three times:
when you first download it, when you show it to your friend, And when you show it to your other friend. “
It's telling that with all the limitations of first gen VR, I still sank tens of hours into Pavlov (a low res VR counterstrike) and had an absolute blast. I was also blown away by Half Life: Alyx. I would have abandoned VR if it weren't for the Vive deluxe audio kit and the wireless conversion kit, which shows that comfort alone can make all the difference.
There is a game variant in Pavlov that would not have worked very well on 2D screens. Basically most people are soldiers/police and a couple people picked at random are traitors. You have to guess who the traitors are. Since everyone has some degree of head and hand tracking, and microphones are on my default, it's a very social experience. You learn to use social cues to identify and kill the terrorists before they kill you. It's a thoroughly immersive social experience, and for a few hours the cartoon world becomes your real world, because you're playing with real people that kind of sort of look like real people. Everything else is literally out of sight and out of mind. VR's ability to teleport you anywhere with anyone will prove to be highly appealing to a great many people in the future. It will not just be a niche.
Maybe 3d displays(e.g Looking Glass Factory)will explode and kill VR before the devices get slim enough.
This flavor of trope really needs to die. Some people at Google may be smart, but it's pretty clear time and again that many at Google are not, and that Google as a whole is not. "Google is smart and I should trust them to make smart choices" is the kind of cancer that gave ML almost 3 billion dollars.
Do NDAs (like the one Kevin Kelly had to sign) ever expire? I'd love to hear the story one day of what was going on in that company that allowed them to raise so much money.
It's just not relevant or interesting to the mass market in the way that Magic Leap was able to lead investors to believe it would be.
I think it might actually be that simple.
Sure enough! (image link) https://images.ctfassets.net/wzcrdezk3u3k/4BYPBt61B2XnAsY3ys...
>> $2,295
>> What’s included? Magic Leap 1 (Lightwear, Lightpack and Control), Lightpack Charger, Control Charger, 2 USB-C Cables, ...
Given the suspicious lack of demos except for closed doors events and silly CGI trailers, our guess back then was that the whole thing was somehow going to be a scheme to become some sort of patent troll of the emerging field - which would make giants like google want to be in - coupled with using the hype of getting investment by the big guys to increase it's value.
Nowadays, I still have no idea what happened in there.
(they had a mind-blowing cart-sized prototype called "The Beast" which is what wowed everyone, which they failed to shrink to wearable form factor)
It sounds like ML essentially failed to turn their technology into a product. I'd love to see a demo of what the beast could do.
The strategic points that have paid off are the laser commitment to consumer electronics and gaming. Ceaseless technical product innovation and release cycles. And the stellar relations with the indie game dev community.
I think looking at something like Echo VR, which is basically the Battle Arena from Ender's Game. I always loved the zero-G levels in Unreal Tournament and Quake Arena. But this an environment where "which way is up" is truly relative. It represents a new "VR-native" style of game play.
Is it? I saw that Valve also is getting much attention with Half-Life Alyx and Valve Index.
But in a perverse way, and this is probably a generational thing, I found the original PC-era Half-Life more immersive. Just could not stop playing until I reached the end. And was always rewarded with a narrative that got weirder by degrees. I think it was the novelty of getting stuck and seeking out trustworthy walkthroughs from some anonymous dial-up era phpBB forums ;)
You can only guess why he decided to delete them one decade after he stopped blogging. I believe, he didn't want to be seen as too much "new age hippie" type.
I keep reading my friends' goodbye messages to ML after being laid off and being amazed at how different they perceive their work than I do as a consumer. It's like the culture is closer to Jonestown than Cupertino.
I say that because I don't know how much koolaid you have to drink before the ML product that was released to consumers becomes impressive. The experiences available on their platform are not compelling. The headset is inferior and expensive.
Much of what I've seen exclaimed by ML employees as examples of their product and company's quality are things that I consider organizational bugs. Their tech stack is as deep as the Marianas Trench and they're too proud of it.
I don't think ML will be in business in 5 years unless they slim down, sell off IP, and relocate. They do have some really impressive tech and smart people, but I don't think the company as it exists today is viable.
I just want to be able to walk around the Acropolis in Greece (or any site) and see it in AR as it would have been throughout history. Have little digital scenes play out with people from 2000 years ago, show me buildings as they were before they were destroyed.
Instead of giving this one company $2.6 billion, the investors could have invested $100k in 26k different startups. They could have literally scrolled through the list of the top 26k open source projects on GitHub and invested 100K in each of their teams to come up with any kind of business related to their expertise.
Their success rate is bound to have been better. This money was just wasted. Investors are just too lazy to interact with so many companies. Too fat and lazy to make an impact.
This is not at all how investing works. It sounds like you're talking about some kind of charity.
This already happens, its called angel or accelerator funding. YC gives $150K to 200+ company every year. Some of these companies then raise more, then some more.
For founder with successful exits or other outstanding achievement, they can effectively start with series C and raise 50 million as the first round.
Thereafter everyone wants to bet on the winning horse.
It isn't that hard to get $20k in funding if your idea is halfway decent - that's not the value that YC provides. The value that YC provides is in the networking and connections, which I think a lot of people would argue is worth far more than the money.
> anybody who can't setup a functional profitable business with $20k funding is unfit to run any company
Not quite. Good luck setting up a profitable hardware business with $20k of funding, tooling costs alone are going to dwarf your seed capital.
It's very hard in most countries - Coming from someone who has been applying constantly for 10 years. At one point I even managed to get invited to some events and conferences where a specific seed stage investor was going and I approached him enough times at different events that I was eventually able to secure coffee with the guy; took 2 years from when I started trying to get investment. Then this investor encouraged me to apply to their incubator... Then they just rejected me. My open source project was one of the most popular in Australia at the time. I had worked on it for several years and I had a solid business strategy and I could really have benefited from $20K and any kind of support network (I was never asking for YC level business connections, just some help me get 1 foot in the door with 1 B2B customer would have been great).
BTW my project was more than 'halfway decent'. As proof, today my project powers multiple mainstream tech projects and several major blockchain projects and I'm collecting forging rewards on one of them. Did it with $0 funding and most people I met actively working against me instead of helping me. Got screwed over so many times.
I don't think my case is unusual. What happened to me is just average.
The thing is that in spite of it being so difficult to secure a mere $20K, this whole experience did not make me believe that fiat money is valuable. It did the exact opposite. So now I'm dedicating my career to the fight against fiat money.
> IMO, anybody who can't setup a functional profitable business with $20k funding is unfit to run any company.
Your business is either unproven, then it has a high risk of failure no matter how good you are at running companies, or it's proven, then everybody is already doing it and it's not going to be very profitable.
I'm surprised this didn't leak during the last couple rounds of headlines about laying off staff and more recently raising money. Is Magic Leap really good at keeping secrets or was this a last minute change to funding outline?
Guess what happened?