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Comment by breezeTrowel | Hacker News Reader

> Startups who made product claims which experts in their fields said were not possible.

Can you clarify what you mean by this? What aspect is considered impossible? Augmented Reality has been around for a while. There's the Microsoft HoloLens. Not to mention all the AR demos Apple does whenever they announce a new iPhone.

Check out this page, for example:

https://www.apple.com/augmented-reality/

especially the Snapchat one. You have rendered images being obscured by physical objects directly "in front" of them.

If anything, Magic Leap seems a bit ordinary with only its size being the standout feature. But, even there, it looks like they're already beat by Snapchat's Specatcles (see: https://www.spectacles.com/ )

So I fail to see how Magic Leap's product claims are in any way similar to Theranos or uBeam. If anything, their claims are not that impressive given the competition.

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I was careful to say "product claims" and not products. I don't doubt AR is possible, but that the claims Magic Leap made in their early demonstrations were not realistic.

I was thinking of the early demonstrations they had, where the lighting and occlusion just didn't seem plausible (e.g. the infamous whale demo https://youtu.be/LM0T6hLH15k?t=30). These early demos were called out by skeptics as being not plausible (https://www.theregister.com/2016/12/09/magic_leap_neither_ma... or https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-reality-behind-m...)

Is AR possible, sure, but it has restrictions and when Magic Leap's product hit the market those restrictions were obvious.

????

the hype was around their fiber scanning display patents, they were showing investors a totally new technology that projects images into your eyeballs. There are numerous articles describing the patented pie-in-the-sky vs the state-of-the-art, just one example here: [0]

> They don’t even have an decent brightness control of the pixels and didn’t even attempt to show color reproduction (requiring extremely precise laser control). Yes the images are old, but there are a series of extremely hard problems outlined above that are likely not solvable which is likely why we have not seen any better pictures of an FSD from ANYONE (ML or others) in the last 7 years.

Magic Leap was unable to improve and miniaturize this technology - its a dead end - so they ended up using the same tech as everyone else

[0] https://kguttag.com/2016/11/28/magic-leap-no-fiber-scan-disp...

What they lied about was the fidelity. They made demo video in 2015 that was a fully prerendered video of what they expected their AR experience to look like. Years later, the top of line headsets are fuzzy and very limited in field of view and have not seen any adoption outside of very niche applications.

https://youtu.be/ctUx3BzuQgQ

I wonder if Microsoft spent $2.5 billion to develop HoloLens.

https://www.spectacles.com/creatorform "The new Spectacles are not for sale."

The Spectacles aren't even an AR headset, although they do include a cheap-looking VR viewer. They're primarily a 3D camera you can wear on your face.

Clearly you do not know of their history leading up to the release of the first ML device. Hype, magical promises, and fake demos galore.

> Clearly you do not know ...

Your comment would work just as well and could be just as informative without the personal attack

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