Ask HN: How did Magic Leap become irrelevant? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did Magic Leap become irrelevant?

38 pointstreyfitty45 comments

I remember in the early 2010s, everyone was talking about how VR was going to revolutionize computing... and now that Meta is going down that path, why is no one talking about Magic Leap? Have they blown their shot?

View on HN

AR is a really tough problem. Go read this blog to find out why

https://kguttag.com/

It is very hard for AR to compete with conventional entertainment. The headset costs roughly $2000 and a $2000 investment in home theater is certainly going to improve most people's enjoyment of TV, movies, video games, etc. The $2000 headset doesn't have a lot of software, image quality doesn't compete with a $200 TV.

Like other companies in the field, ML has pivoted towards enterprise uses.

https://www.magicleap.com/en-us/

Certainly those exist and could deliver enough value to pay for the headsets. For instance if you could read the manuals on a headset while you work inside a jet engine that could be helpful. If you could see the plans for a building under construction overlaid over the building it might save expensive mistakes. On the other hand, Microsoft contracted to sell a bunch of Hololens 2 to the US Army and it hasn't worked out so well

https://www.roadtovr.com/report-microsoft-hololens-ivas-fiel...

Facebook has gotten dominant market share in VR headsets because it has sold headsets below cost. That's not a sustainable business plan. People are skeptical about their plans for both AR and VR and some think that this is mainly a feint aimed to distract people away from their current problems.

Won't surprise me at all if that hololens thing ultimately fails. I remember thinking at the time I first heard about it that it didn't seem like a value add. I was in the Army and I don't think anyone who hasn't humped around with a full gear kit understands how much those guys are already carrying. The plates, helmet, magazines, and camelbak are worth it, because they're keeping you alive. If you're gonna ask to have yet another 5 pound device mounted to that helmet, it better add a whole lot of value, and I don't see how it does. These wearable HUD devices will eventually become viable when they can be integrated with existing eye protection lenses and flight helmets without obstructing the view you already have or adding more weight, but they're gonna need to get a lot smaller before that happens. I'm thinking more along the lines of projecting an overlay onto a contact lens than the bulky headsets that exist today.

Edit: I should note that even the contact lens idea would fail for a lot of military applications. Ground troops aren't allowed to wear contacts due to sanitation issues. But they'd work well for rear guard headquarters staff and garrison maintenance techs.

What I heard is that soldiers couldn’t fire their rifles the way they usually do when wearing the headset and that’s a big problem.

The airforce probably wins the most badass use of AR: https://imgur.com/gallery/ZPJoF4Z

From my perspective watching their marketing, Magic Leap did over-hype / under-define the product's utility. Their original use-case appeared to be everything and their tech predictably missed it.

Contrast to the tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4f8ZZv_j_c&t=3390s that Karl G appears to give kudos to on his site https://kguttag.com/2021/11/19/awe-2021-part-1-tilt-5-was-ma.... It has a rough-edge which is overtly used as a product attribute: the "game board" is required ... detail: it is made of the common micro-spherical retro-reflective (road-sign) surface, leading to a relatively low $400 barrier-to-entry. These trade-offs appear to be smart.

Q: How did Tilt5 take the "smart" path and Magic Leap the "way of pain?" (whimsy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCNEzFpIrP8)

Personally I think the cultural demand of AR can be met by other means.

For instance a phone can lock on to QR codes in the environment and add content over what the camera sees. (I have content that is good to go for this model but I gotta learn ARKit and fight with the App Store to get it to you.)

I went to an interactive art exhibit (imagine some hippies are making Disneyland on a shoestring budget) that scanned a sand table with a Kinect and projected contour lines on top of them. Disney can reskin Space Mountain quickly by just projecting something else.

It seems to me that people aren’t doing everything they can with projectors either directly onto surfaces or using half mirrors like “Pepper’s Ghost”. These are mainstream for musical performances but I’d like to see somebody do a sketch comedy routine with one.

> Q: How did Tilt5 take the "smart" path and Magic Leap the "way of pain?"

Im a huge fan of Jeri Ellsworth, but even Tilt5 didnt have a "smart" path despite using a cheaper approach to doing AR by orienting more for a projection screen approach and focusing on games - they started out as a kickstarter for CastAR (as the Technical Illusions company), went through the VC path with Playground Global, had issues with that path and went out of business, then Jeri (and possibly partners) bought the distressed assets of CastAR at auction to relaunch as Tilt5. It's been a nearly nine year or more journey IIRC.

Listen to https://theamphour.com/394-jeri-ellsworth-and-the-demise-of-... for more info.

The best use cases for AR _are_ enterprise use cases, IMO. AR seems to be a natural way to interact with design, instruction, warnings, etc. it is not obvious that the same features yield much for the entertainment user, because AR provides an interface and information.

I think AR is the natural heir to things like turn by turn navigation, but in cases where visual aids can help a process.

The irony with Karl’s blog is that he’s done nearly a 180 on Magic Leap with the debut of their second product. They’ve ironically becciome relevant again, just not in the consumer space at all.

Yes, they have blown their shot at it by failing to launch a compelling product while the rest of the industry was not paying attention. The rest of the industry has had a few years to figure things out and whatever advantage they had five years ago, no longer exists or is greatly diminished.

I wouldn't count Meta as the victor though. So far, all we have is a lot of vapor ware and a lot of rumors about what Facebook Apple, Google, MS, etc. may or may not do. We'll likely get some new generation of goggles in the next few years but beyond that, I don't think there is much of a plan.

This smells a lot like the late nineties when the battle was on for who would own the best walled garden. We had Compuserve, AOL, Yahoo, and many other contenders. In the end none of those walled gardens survived and However, people instead pivoted to using the products of completely new companies (like Google).

I think we'll get a repeat of that and somebody will find a use for those shiny new goggles (beyond games and porn, the traditional accelerators of any new thing on the web). I don't think that's likely to come out of the corporate headquarters of big public companies.

This is funny. "the best walled garden" "late nineties"? I was pissed off in 94 that I learned about the Internet so late. I bet this was being talked about in off the Internet on media that you had to pay for and did not include a search box, because I never heard of such a thing.

Magic Leap was AR not VR. VR blocks your view entirely with a screen. MagicLeap overlays onto the real world.

I’ve tried Magic Leap and HoloLens, and in my opinion, the tech is just too early for a successful consumer product.

The very first Oculus made me think “I want this now”. Magic Leap made me think “Interesting, but I don’t actually want to use this until it’s far more advanced, which feels like it’s probably decades away”.

The first Oculus made me think "interesting, but I don't actually want to use this until it's far more advanced". The Vive made me think "I want this now".

I understand if it took until the Vive for you to want it, but the gap between the Oculus DK2 and the Vive was only two years. You could see the Vive was not “far away” from the DK2 when using it, it was incremental improvements quickly within reach. And since then the Index and Quest have continued to make huge improvements, and it feels like Meta’s headset pipeline will continue to advance dramatically over the next handful of year.

Magic Leap, meanwhile, 4+ years later, still feels like we are several breakthroughs away from getting the kind of device quality one would need for a mass market device.

Have you seen the breakthroughs that Magic Leap 2 has achieved? Still not at the price point for consumers but it pretty much solves all the annoyances of the first device or HoloLens for that matter. No longer looking through a tiny FOV, holograms no longer transparent, usable outdoors, first device able to display black. It is quite an achievement.

Interesting. I have only tried the Magic Leap 1, not the Magic Leap 2. Glad to see they are making progress. I am still skeptical that it's not 5-10 years or more away before being something consumers might want, but I won't judge without trying it first.

Price needs to come down and it needs to be wireless. I would wager 3-5 years just for wireless. Could be a decade for price to come down under a thousand. But I also think by then the separate processor wont be necessary anymore, either using your phone or cloud.

I think it was obvious the Vive was "not far away" to you because the Oculus was good enough for you. The Oculus was still on the wrong side of that for me, so I had no belief that incremental change would make it a "have to buy".

The MagicLeap, on the other hand seemed like it needed a higher FOV and resolution. Ideally black pixels behind/instead as well. Those seem like incremental pieces. I would have taken and played with a free MagicLeap/HoloLens (although not purchased one).

As for a "mass market", I think that's more a function of price point. The MagicLeap (and HoloLens) are really expensive. Which means there's not just a technical issue but also a disposable income issue and killer app issue.

Quest 2 is vastly different from the Rift and even Quest 1. You should try it. I moved from the Vive Pro to Quest 2 and I haven’t looked back.

Seems to be simple math. To render a 4k screen that looks to be 10 feet away on glasses a few inches from your face you need an order of magnitude or two pixel density more than the screen. Then you need portable hardware to render it and a battery to power it. All of those are far ahead of what we have now.

If that's the true reason, what explains the huge funding they had. Wouldn't the investors also know?

I think the simple answer is that they released an actual product after years of magical hype. The reality was a such a distant shadow that everyone stopped paying attention.

There are some companies researching micro led displays integrated into waveguides that have much better brightness, fov and size characterizes than anything MagicLeap has ever had. We could be seeing every day useable AR glasses in the next few years based on this tech.

Problem is that you had people that had seen a demonstration of the tech and were talking about how mind blowing it was.

I don't think Magic leap is out of the game yet. Microsoft, Meta, and Apple are all coming to the AR table though, and they're probably also spending boatloads on the problem. They're trying to create new hardware technology here.

I think they'll probably continue to be a player to some degree, it's just hard for me to picture what the AR competitive landscape is going to look like for the consumer space. Everything we've seen so far is pretty expensive and lackluster.

I think looking at who is relevant in the AR/VR space currently is like asking who was relevant "pocket computer" market back in the mid-90s.

There are some products in the market, some people use them, but functionality is limited, and there isn't a killer app or use case yet.

Many people are saying resolution, or other tech is what is holding AR/VR back, and that may be partially true, but PalmPilot unlocked the early handheld computer market by restricting use to what was possible at the time, and having a few killer features for a small subset of users.

Blackberry then extended on that, and we thought that was the market. Decent quality email on the go was such a huge draw they owned the market.

Microsoft was making some inroads with PocketPC, but Crackberry really owned the market, and thought they'd own it forever.

Then came iPhone and Android, fullscreen devices, touch keyboards, real internet on the go. It wasn't even the apps at first, but the ability to use the web, and not a half-assed version.

So, is MagicLeap irrelevant? I think they probably are, not because of technology or hype, but because they didn't find the killer app that will make the market valuable.

Hey don’t forget Motorola flip phone, Nokia and windows phone with metro ui.

Technologically, social media could have come a decade before it was made popular. Similarly for AR (agreed) I don’t believe there is a technological hurdle here. There will be some magic app or use case that will get everyone to jump onboard, maybe like how everyone jumped on the iPod. It wasn’t about the device even though it was impeccable.

But maybe the world just needs (wants) light weight “They Live” sunglasses creepy that meta might be the company that actually makes it real.

They hyped up their tech and when they discovered it didn't work, they gave up and made a hololens clone

Making the same ridiculous claim as the rest of the industry, from Intel to Microsoft, but not having earned the same trust as others.

Microsoft has been riding a wave of bullshit, sorry of "vaporware", for decades with advertisement that show no relationship between what they sell and what they actually deliver. Yet, that managed to own a market through entrenching themselves via lock-in, bundle sales and lobbying. So even if you do hate Microsoft then in practice you are stuck with it as your staff is trained on it. Intel didn't do it as much but if you do look more carefully things like volumetric capture or what more powerful computing "could" enable, it's pretty close. At least they could blame the lack of progress on others.

Anyway MagicLeap did the same but as a newcomer people do wait, try, shrug and move on simply because they can. To dig a bit more :

- over-promise, the infamous whale without headset and complete field of view - trying to shift developers to new tools rather than rely on a well known stack - believe they have enough funding and skills to make their own OS

Honestly what they did in few years is actually impressive. Going from nothing to an actual headset, OS, framework and even content is a tremendous feat. Unfortunately the value delivered in term of actual experience for the end user is just not sufficient. Again if you are Microsoft and you can afford this entire billion dollar exercise as a marketing campaign to show you are innovative then sell yet another spreadsheet license to a government, that's fine. If your core business itself is not perceived as good enough then, totally different story.

PS: I have a MagicLeap ML1 in my office and had one since they sold it, so few years ago. I programmed for it. I also have a HoloLens2, VuzixBlade, Google Glass Enterprise 2 and few others AR and VR headsets. Overall they truly did a good job but compared to the expectations they set and overall needs, still a long way to go.

I was fortunate to try Magic Leap at Sundance in 2019. Super cool demo, but way too low resolution and limited field of view. I’d guess we’ll see a resurgence of AR in the near/medium term now that VR headsets have improved.

By being too protective of their tech and overhyping their own progress such that when it actually launched, it didn't seem to be such a desirable thing.

edit: typo

Yes. Magic Leap failed to ship a substantial product. They may have had a beautiful, perfectly working unit and just failed to actually get their ducks in a row. They may have been all flash and no bang.

Basically, regardless of what they had and could do, they didn’t ship. And others are coming to sell a product that Magic Leap Promised.

They were way too early. Think of it as the Apple Newton. Eventually everyone would carry around a mobile computer but miniaturization and wireless networks weren’t ready yet when the Newton came out. I don’t think AR popularizes until it can be put in something that looks like a pair of Ray Ban glasses. We are a long way off from that.

No, but the device market will eventually look like the smartphone market. Lots of competition and hopefully not too many different OS that it makes targeting all platforms a pain

Eh, my gut tells me it will look more like the 3D TV market when it comes to scale. Smart phones have way more main-stream utility than anything AR proponents have come up with IMO.

Try on the Hololens 2, that is the experience of the future, just need miniaturization.

Replacing secondary monitors will be the business case for AR/VR near term, but everything will go this way. The digital and physical worlds are already merging.

Do you really think in 100 years, everyone will be carrying around a tiny screen that acts as a portal to the digital? Or will the digital float around the physical world.

You are severely overestimating peoples desire to have something strapped to their face all day. And no, not "everything" will go this way. People in tech want it to go this way, but when you step outside the tech bubble, most people have no real uses for VR/AR outside of entertainment, which even then, isn't guaranteed to dominate that specific use case vs an unknown future innovation.

Neither myself, nor anybody else, has truly accurate insights into how humans will interact with tech in 100 years. Predicting the future is damn near impossible. I agree we probably will not be using the smartphone form, but I disagree that it will be replaced with something sprung from the current iterations of AR/VR. Again, id bet money on the adoption being similar to 3D TVs. Cool tech, not practical for mass adoption.

> You are severely overestimating peoples desire to have something strapped to their face all day

How many people wear glasses?

If you haven't tried the Hololens2 you haven't the context to evaluate the potential for the tech. I let my non-technical sister try it for 30 minutes and her response was "This is so cool! I'm going to go tell my friends I just tried the future!"

There are plenty of professional use cases for AR. Having a HUD or contextual menus next to physical objects will be highly useful. Doctors, assembly, construction, factories, navigation... the list is long. The Snap device is a much cheaper, though limited by comparison, device and people are finding uses in fitness.

Also, with no more need to have touch screens on every device, the cost savings will be huge

There is a middle ground between hardware being ubiquitous and being like 3D Tv that fizzled out just a few years after launching. VR has been growing exponentially each year since its consumer launch in 2016. AR will just open up the use cases even more and helps it continue to grow.

A related relevant question is about the huge investments they had. How did they manage to raise so much?

Someday, people may talk of Meta the way they (don't) talk of Magic Leap.

Have they even released a product? How can something that doesn’t exist be relevant?

People should really google this before asking the question multiple times.

> why is no one talking about Magic Leap?

Do they have a product yet? No? So that's why.

They did release a headset. It's just that it flopped.

They have two products. The second one has already been getting a lot of praise for two major breakthroughs— the ability to display black and the largest FOV in a see through optical headset. The whole topic of this thread is a bit of a straw man, as they’ve actually become relevant again, by making a compelling device and pivoting to enterprise. They’re just not in the consumer game anymore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com