Magic Leap 2 | Hacker News Reader

Magic Leap 2

magicleap.com

156 pointsppjim174 comments

I'm a VR/AR developer, and here's my experience with trying to buy a Magic Leap 2 to check it out:

See the PR announcement that they're shipping. Go to their web site. Click "Where to buy". Go to the first link to "Insight US". Place an order. Get a call from a representative to confirm the order. Ask the representative to clarify that Magic Leap 2 is in stock and shipping. They responded "yes."

Wait a few days. Check on the status of my order: "Stock: 0", and the estimated ship date is just an automated date that increases by 3 whenever current date equals estimated ship date. Call up Insight US to ask is it in stock or not. They admit it's not in stock and won't be available until maybe December/January.

Call up Magic Leap (they surprisingly have a phone line to call) and ask their sales representative if anyone has stock. They respond they don't know and to try the second supplier. Ask them what the supplier's phone number is to confirm stock. They say they don't know and that supplier only communicates through e-mail. Supplier responds via e-mail, "of course we have stock! Place an order to get an estimated ship date." I'm doubtful.

So there you have it. Magic Leap 2 shipping now, maybe?

Their go-to-market / sales channel management people need to get their act together if they wish not to become a very expensive failed startup. Can't have sales be an afterthought and business culture lacking fiscal discipline until the money runs out. IYAM, paradoxically, the more money is thrown at a project, the worse the returns because there's an atrophying of resourcefulness when there's not as much survival pressure.

They're basically guaranteed to be a very expensive failed startup. Microsoft and Google have already proven that industrial AR is a small market. Way too small to support a 1000 employee company.

I'm not suggesting Magic Leap are necessarily going to succeed, but a competitor 'proving' that a market is small isn't really a sign that the market is small - it's just a sign that the competitor couldn't (or wouldn't) grow the market. And launching a startup that's trying to take some percentage of an existing market is a bad idea anyway. With every single startup the goal should be to make the market bigger. Its much, much easier to persuade someone to buy a product they don't already have than it is to get them to switch from a competitor to you. Growing the market also makes your competitors less likely to get defensive because you're not eating into their business. That helps a lot at the start. You really don't want a price war with Microsoft or Google.

You're right that the current industrial AR market can't sustain Magic Leap, but hopefully Magic Leap know that and have a plan to get more companies using AR somehow.

I disagree, AR could be very useful - much more than VR IMO - but it’s very hard to pull off. You need a killer app to begin with, and the product needs to be good enough. HoloLens is great at the AR tech part but bulky and expensive without a clear use for now.

I'm not yet convinced Augmented Reality has proved its case for people and that AR is chasing big numbers and companies without showing what they would actually use it for every day.

I will give Magic Leap some credit on their marketing for the article link in that they show some persons in non-office settings such as laboratories and what presumably are hospital settings.

But for me what's missing is seeing it actually used productively by the persons or testimonial stories about how AR integrates into their workflow.

People are resistant to change even within the face of pretty cool technology. I would position many people don't know what they want to improve their workflow and can only define such wants as complaints about the current workflow. That's my experience working with customers where they have a complaint but just don't know what to search for to see if there's a solution.

To show how I think this should work, when I add a new tool to my workflow usually I can pinpoint exactly what I don't like about something and I have specific terms that help me find it. For example, my org uses Teams, and Teams is unfortunately linked by the hip to Sharepoint which I cannot stand. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest issue is that Sharepoint tries to load everything in-browser, even if it cannot. Eventually it will show you a download link, and for the content I am working with, I don't want Sharepoint to try to load it, I just want to download the file and use the appropriate app to work with it. In business rules, I want all Sharepoint links to automatically convert to download links.

Armed with this, I could search for browser extensions to redirect links to another link, and I found Redirector: https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector I cannot sing the praises of this tool enough, and it saves me tons of clicking and waiting by letting me write rules to handle specific link formations and redirect them to another. It was a perfect fit because I could _describe my annoyance_ and the preferred behavior, and armed with that, I could know whether a tool met my needs or not.

This is what is missing for me with AR. As someone in tech, I can describe a ton of my issues with daily workflows quite easily. I can define my problems and how I prefer it works. What I can't see is how AR helps me. Like many, I imagine that persons like technicians, mechanics, anyone who needs their hands available to work on complex hardware/items might benefit from AR, but what I don't see are testimonials from these people that some AR company demoed their product with them and found a way to make their workflow better. I'm not a mechanic; I can do basics with cars or house-hold appliances, but I'm not a professional, and I imagine the AR companies out there aren't either. Why there aren't field tests with discussions and interviews with the proposed target audience for AR is beyond me.

Instead I see people in offices on conference calls, I see random stock photos of people in lab outfits, and I see marketing copy telling me that AR is limited just by my imagination. Thing is I can imagine quite a lot, and I don't see proof AR can do any of it.

If AR has a product ready for betas, this needs to be in the hands of people who might actually use it and developing case studies. The technology is interesting, I'm not denying that, but I want to read stories about actual use cases and testimony from someone who honestly feels "this made my life better." Until that happens, I'm not confident AR is going to take off in a meaningful way for work related purposes instead of recreational.

Here are things I would like to have in an AR/VR environment.

1. More monitors. I can only fit 2, maybe 3 monitors on my desk. If I could easily reposition 5 or 6 virtual monitors that would be great.

2. Whiteboarding. I like to draw things when I have some discussions. Doing that in VR is a pretty decent workflow.

If I could start a Slack 'huddle' with someone and instantly be able to start drawing or have us both interacting with the virtual monitors, I think that'd be enough for me to justify paying.

The tech still has to go further. For multiple monitors you'd really want to offload rendering and I think that current VR goggles are still just too heavy, they need to get cut down to maybe 20% of their current weight, at which point I think they would be comfortable enough to wear for a large portion of a workday.

The benefit of AR would be that I can seamlessly switch between "real life" workflows and "virtual" workflows. For example, I want to get up and grab some water, but I can take one of my virtual desktops along with me so that I can keep watching a conference talk or whatever.

I'm thinking the killer app might be more along the lines of personal use. A HUD for your car or directions to that Egyptian spice I can never find in the grocery. Or measuring the height of your refrigerator to see if will fit under you cabinets. What about hooking it up to my door camera so I can see who's at my front door while I'm in the garage.

Then there are general functional improvements, like dynamic magnification. I would love to read the tiny text on my prescription bottles. Or integrate it with Alex/HomeKit to provide a visual output for those services: "Alexa, what does Brian Singer look like?"

I know "professional" use is easier to sell to, but I think AR won't really be successful until they start making it useful to normal, household users.

All of these can already be done with a mobile phone and only navigation could make the case that it is better with an AR HUD and even then I’m not sure I really buy it based on my personal experience doing so.

I'm not aware of any attempt at AR glasses by Google. Google Glass wasn't AR, and ARCore, while very cool, is not head mounted.

> I'm not aware of any attempt at AR glasses by Google. Google Glass wasn't AR…

Trying to treat augmented reality, mixed reality, assisted reality, and <insert other non-virtual reality here> as technologically distinct verticals with clearly defined boundaries feels like an exercise in madness.

At any rate, Google announced[1] a few months ago that they were planning to start trialing new augmented reality glasses in public.

1. https://blog.google/products/google-ar-vr/building-and-testi...

These are meaningful distinctions at both a technical and practical level.

Google glass created a passive screen independent of the environment. This allowed the hardware to be really simple but essentially turned it into a tiny hands free floating screen because it couldn’t block most of your vision without preventing you from walking around.

Augmented Reality maps out the environment so it can selectively replace part of your vision with what it wants to show you without blocking important things. This lets you say designate a large chunk of a wall as a TV but if you turn away the TV stops blocking your vision.

At this point the limitation of augmented reality is really more on the software side of things. Building hardware that in theory adds NPC style names over peoples heads at a party is straightforward, writing software to identify people and insert their names after someone introduces them in conversation is probably decades away.

The mic plans to ship 5000 unit waves of Microsoft Hololens AR, the first wave is expected next 12 month.

That's dreadful. That's the kind of confidence drop like a cliff buying into a product / company.

If they can't ensure a solid shipping line then they surely can't make good on replacements and/or warranty issues.

It's the exact same story with Intel Arc GPUs. The ASRock A380 is nowhere to be found. People have to import the Gunnir Chinese models if they want one. Shameful.

It was always a test run

Reading that back, it sounds like a complete scam you might encounter from the lowest reaches of the web.

For me, Magic Leap used up any good will by over promising and under-delivering on their initial release.

The number and quality of WTFs connected to the name Magic Leap is hilarious, I wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole.

This reminds me of my Eve Spectrum order experience.

I just cannot fathom how billions of dollars are spent into developing a product -- that is just marketed so poorly. The call on the landing page is "Where to buy." Buy what!?!

There is not a single, cool, "everyday-relatable" use-case presented on the web announcement. I wish I could have a reason to purchase this.

I'm craving just a single video or even GIF -- that depicts even the slightest, animated hint of what the interactive experience will be like -- if one were to put these MLs on.

I’m guessing the people buying them are surgeons who cough up that much for lunch ($3300). From the photos.

It’s targeted for enterprise and not normal consumers if that helps explain the marketing.

Reading the marketing spiel my impression is that they've upgraded the hardware and the SDK but still haven't figured out what it will be useful for. So they sell it as a platform and tell industries to figure it out themselves. When I worked in digital agency we used to get sent a lot of experimental devices like these and asked to partner with brands to make cool demos. Gadgets that did really impressive stuff (haptics, holograms, AR, gaze tracking, wearables). We came up with cool novelties but I don't think any of them ever had mainstream success.

They don’t have enough mindshare, which is why they had to pivot to enterprise. Imo it’s a death knell. Their product is just too expensive for the little that it does. It will continue to do little compared to competing products because there’s no developers because no one paying $3300 for a device to experiment on. It’s easy to justify spending that much for Apple Reality, but not for a low visual fidelity device that does less than a Quest 2 at a much higher price point. Even if it was closer to Quest 2’s price point, it’s still hard to justify

For $350 this would be pretty easy to justify. That’s about an afternoon of SWE labor.

No one buying this is giving a SWE an afternoon. The pitch is consulting companies will probably buy a handful of dev units, pitch projects to industry partners, then sell them 7-figure custom software projects and the client also buys a few dozen headsets. The addressable market is very small, but they'd expect small number of lucrative deals from customers that have R&D budgets. Engineering isn't even the bottleneck to any of this, it's design.

Surely you're correct, but I never understood this. This kind of marketing-speak comes across as low quality, tacky, and weasely. Why would such qualities appeal to enterprise purchasers? Can't they see through it just like everyone else?

Enterprise sales often involve a lot of communication where there’s ample opportunity for the sales team to send less polished but more practically useful demo videos and such.

My initial thoughts exactly. I have never heard of it before, and after scrolling down the page I still have no idea what it is.

You’ve never heard of Magic Leap?

They're not well known outside of the valley, certainly not outside of tech.

Sure, but they are well known among HN commenters.

No, I have not. I work in tech in the mid-western US and am a frequent and long-time HN user.

I guess this is possible if you’re completely uninterested in anything AR/VR related, because Magic Leap stories have been posted literally hundreds of times in the last 5 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Magic%20leap

But if that’s the case, what made you comment on this submission?

My comment was, relatedly enough, made in reply to someone discussing how poorly it is marketed. Specifically, how terrible this landing page is at being a landing page.

It's like Duke Nukem Forever, except not shipping.

Have you considered that it’s because they’re trying to hide what little it does?

Videos are hard because they're either entirely synthetic or some kind of video through the glasses. The glasses themselves are fairly neat as far as hardware goes. There's no killer app to show, though.

If they cannot figure out how to convey a single value add use case over the internet then they are toast.

It sounds like they aren't ready to mass produce these for the masses yet, in which case it's kind of a waste to advertise to you at all

If you want to know what they're like, imagine wearing a motorcycle helmet and seeing phone/computer-style windows popping up in the real world. So far as I know, nobody has made anything super useful out of this tech yet, but it theoretically could be awesome

I think the most practical use in consumer cases would be a portable replacement for desktop and mobile displays. Using everyday apps for desktop and mobile that are already established, as well as interesting AR apps for entertainment and productivity.

As with a lot of cutting-edge tech, it seems the most immediately useful application is beyond consumer tech in the world of military tech. Being able to send critical information to soldiers in the field and integrate with weapons technology has been a major focus of AR since its early inception. Early HUDs have their roots in fighter jets.

If you think about it, a lot of things we credit to the high tech industry had their beginnings in low-key and often confidential military research, from the internet to computers themselves. Although, an app for motorcyclists that displays speed, engine, and navigation data in your field of view would be seriously bad*ss and successful if it worked in a clean and functional way.

As with a lot of emerging tech, its usefulness often depends on the ingenuity of early pioneers. People thought the internet was a useless, passing trend as late as the 1990s.

Imagine silently controlling a fully-featured AR displayed system with a brain-to-computer interface and zero peripherals like some Ghost in the Shell futuristic tech. That would be pretty awesome and legitimately useful.

It makes me wonder what got mobile phones to gain critical mass when they were still whale phones. I guess it was a case of a device further reducing the friction of an existing killer feature (voice calls).

Sometimes I think the killer app of AR will not be a fancy high end headset, but rather a more fashion friendly device than Google Glass was (which I'll bet Apple will attempt), but with the similar limited functionality that reduced friction around existing smart phone killer apps (text, calling, photos, maps).

The killer use case of smartphones was the integrated camera, combined with a large screen and touch controls to zoom in and scroll through galleries.

People LOVE taking pictures - mostly of themselves.

Snake

There was already a market for mobile phones—car phones, suitcase phones, etc preceded the pocket sized mobile. So it was a natural progression to just making them smaller. Even phones themselves were improvements on other prior forms of communication.

Every new invention builds upon what came before it in some way, right? Like, perhaps when Daguerre was developing his earliest cameras, people wondered why we would want to capture pictures like that. I think not, though, because there was already analogs in the form of paintings and things.

This is completely new territory, and it feels a bit like a solution looking for a problem. There really isn’t a prior analog that I can think of! But maybe there is, and I just am missing it. But I could imagine it being transformational, if it is eventually found.

It's not new territory.

Plenty of prior art.

An obvious one is, "bring your TV / computer screen with you". A video of me watching TV, I turn my head, the TV turns out to be just a VR projection.

More fantastic, we need to be inspired by Sci-Fi. Holograms/holoprojections become possible with good-enough AR. The Expanse series is full of them.

Or some form of "structure projection" onto reality. Where does this road go? What's behind this building? Where is the patient's bone broken? What does the full puzzle look like?

Bottom line is, this is either a very amateur team, or a Theranos-level product.

I’ve tried the Magic Leap before. It’s super cool. In the demo I saw, the software scans the room and gets the shape of the area. It then sets up a coral reef in the middle of the room and you see a giant coral structure with fish swimming around in the air. The field of vision is a little bit limited but overall It’s pretty clear to me that anyone who tries this on will say “wow!”.

The problem is that while it’s a cool toy there’s nothing available that’s im aware it that would make me want to spend much money on it. Right now, it’s more of a cool toy to show off at parties.

So the issue with a video on the website is:

a) it would be hard to have a video that doesn’t oversell or undersell it. Imagine advertising a TV in a magazine to an audience who has never seen a TV before.

b) more importantly, if the goal is to sell enterprise then you are now a sales company, not a marketing company. For b2b businesses a website just needs to look professional enough… No one is actually going to look at it. The sales process is higher touch and will be done either offline or via email brochures.

I saw a short video the other day where someone was showing off some VR glasses that appeared to be Magic Leap. They were using it in an aircraft repair bay, where the magic leap would overlay 3D schematics of the internals of the aircraft over the entire aircraft itself. It looked like some kind of x-ray vision.

So basically it sounds like this is starting to roll out for use in niche professions.

If we're thinking of the same video, that was an OG Hololens I think.

I’ve tried it at a friend’s place. It felt like an amusement park ride. You’ll say “wow!”, but there’s no reason to go back again.

I think they are marketing to dentists. Dentists can afford it. They are already quite technical, most of them. Most of them want to be "real" doctors and surgeons, like the ones shown in the marketing. And the stakes in dental operations are relatively low, so trying out new tech is relatively low stakes too. So they are thinking: at best, this will help my practice, at worst it's a fancy device my kids can inherit to play games.

Against this hypothesis is the fact that dentists already use analog optical headgear, and this would prevent that. Also, it's not clear what software they would use to make their work better/easier.

Anyway, a 1000 person company puts out an announcement like this for a reason - maybe to measure public interest to secure a new round of funding? Presumably they feel it's worth misleading people about availability in order to do that.

> Most of them want to be "real" doctors and surgeons, like the ones shown in the marketing.

The missing link between real doctors and barbers: behold the dentist.

> "Most of them want to be "real" doctors and surgeons"

I'm a doctor. No. They don't. Dentists make more money and work less. Their training is rigorous, but generally shorter. They don't take call, don't work weekends and don't have any emergencies.

Given the memes around dentists and expensive cycling gear, perhaps they should tap into that market too. Make it lighter and integrate it into a helmet. Display navigation and performance metrics on 3D graphs in the environment. Hazard detection. Then it's a toy that can really have a life outside work.

I'm mostly joking, but the more I imagine it the more I want one for my PEV helmet.

See also Karl Guttag's review at SPIE [0] (in particular read the "Conclusions" section) and HN discussion from Feb 2022 [1]

[0] https://kguttag.com/2022/01/31/magic-leap-2-at-spie-ar-vr-mr...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30170924

Isn't this the company world famous for not delivering upon their breathless hype for over a decade?

They remind me of Star Citizen. Both have been fundraising since 2010.

What “delivery” are you expecting from Star Citizen? A version of the game that is branded as “final”?

The game is playable and looks amazing. Everyone who pays for it gets to play it and gets in-game items such as a starship.

I agree that the model is pretty novel, the never ending scope creep is odd… but it’s nothing like Magic Leap with its institutional investors and a sub par v1 release.

Last time I played Star Citizen, and granted, this was 1 year ago, it was so unoptimized and buggy that, when I went into an elevator in the star port, the floor I landed at hadn't loaded yet, and a fell through the geometry, into space, and asphyxiated. This was.... oh, about 5 minutes after starting play for the first time, on an i7 machine with a 2080 and 32 GB of RAM... Not a wimpy machine.

Star Citizen needs a release deadline, if for no other reason than it would force them to button up, fix bugs, and for godsake, optimize.

I regularly watch Star Citizen gameplay videos on YouTube, it really progressed a lot in the last year. There are still some minor bugs with elevators, shafts, floors, etc. but overall game mechanics and the world they are building is unprecedented.

Have a look at more recent multi-player battles, prison escapes, salvage missions, just planet exploration. I was so impressed the images kept coming up in my dreams.

That's not really the problem. Even developers as incompetent as Hello Games are capable of tacking endless bonus content on their space sim - the issue is that Star Citizen continually lied about the features it would have and the date it would release. That, combined with the endless addition of things that nobody asked for has led most of the community to become completely disenfranchised with the game.

It's safe to say this game is stuck in development hell. Here, let's list all of the major features that hit the game in the past 3 months:

- Made many adjustments to the speeds of ground vehicles

- Window Interior Mapping Shader

- Added New Ship: RSI Scorpius

- Lighting Polish Pass for Hurston Volumetric Clouds

- Paints can now be stored in personal and ship inventories to allow players to move them around the PU. Added paints filter to inventory tabs.

I'm not sure if you've ever worked on a major software product before, but if this is the changelog for an entire quarter at your multimillion-dollar game studio, your project is doomed.

I don’t know anything about game dev, but if you look at other major software products, such as Windows, MS Word, VSCode, Photoshop, Spotify, are their 3 months changelogs more impressive?

Calling Hello Games incompetent is pretty unfair and kind of petty.

I guess so, I do feel a little bad about it. On the other hand though, their faked E3 demo and Sean Murrey's enthusiastic IGN interview will go down in history as the easiest-to-avoid mistakes in the industry. They've done a good job at turning around their reputation by dedicating themselves to NMS, but it's still a shell of a promised game. Sorta like Star Citizen, if CIG ever had the gall to release their game.

> They've done a good job at turning around their reputation by dedicating themselves to NMS, but it's still a shell of a promised game.

Sidenote: I don't know about the last time you checked out NMS, but by now it has way more than what was originally promised. And not just in quantity, but in terms of actual qualitative features and things to do.

"Incompetent" is a charitable framing. Less charitibly they deliberately and blatantly lied in order to generate hype.

Not really. They did pretty well on delivering what they promised. The problem is that they started selling the game multiple years before it was ready. That's not incompetent development, and I would not say they blatantly lied when promising future features.

Promised single player campaign? No game breaking bugs or crashes? More than 50 players per shard in the MMO?

I'd take any of those 3

> I'd take any of those 3

Well you're in luck, they recently started running servers with between 75-100 player slots open. Guess that's at least one of 3 ;-)

2013 backer, I am looking for my single player campaign. I could care less for MMO. It was promised for 2014. So....

I'm hoping you're trolling. I funded Star Citizen when it was announced on Kickstarter in 2012. As of the email I got yesterday, development status is at "Live Version ALPHA 3.17.2". If I'm being generous, it's at what other games would call "Early Access" and is barely playable as a cohesive "game" rather than a tech demo. At this point, I'd even settle for an actual beta.

You're lucky! I Kickstarted Star Citizen and Animusic 3.

Animusic 1 and 2 were great. Glad I never knew about 3 until I found it was just a money sink.

While Chris is definitely a visionary, he has also historically been a really bad manager / producer. His games normally don’t come close to completion until c level execs at Origin or EA put their foot down. Now in his own company there’s no one to draw a line for Chris so there’s never ending feature creep being funded by vaporware capitol ships

How much have you actually played of the game? I bought it ten years ago too and it has more than enough entertainment value to last me the ten years, it basically cost me like 5 dollars a year.

Kind of scary how effectively the software industry has trained an entire world full of users to pay for something and not expect a finished product in return. Now this mentality is creeping into the world of hardware devices.

Some software is closer to art - not finished, only abandoned.

I thought the point of Star Citizen was to never be complete. The original Kickstarter literally said that they didn't want a static universe and that it would be continually updated (as opposed to static releases like yearly). When someone says they want to create a universe that is ever expanding I wouldn't envision a product that can ever really be "finished." You're paying for a product that continually updates.

Let’s not pretend like that’s a magical concept and because it’s getting continually updated that it can’t ever release. A lot of games have done that concept and they see releases.

World of Warcraft, for example, is still seeing regular releases since 2004, when it launched a game that gave a sense of “complete” while still seeing updates. So many updates that Blizzard re-released the original game. Final Fantasy 14, which originally released such a trash version, re-made the game, released A Realm Reborn in 2013 and still sees updates to this day. League of Legends, a free-to-play game, released in 2009 and still sees regular updates, without expansions, and which you can play without paying a single dime to this day.

Being a “never finished” project isn’t a good excuse.

Final Fantasy 14, btw, began development in 2004-5, was announced in 2009, was released in 2010 as a trash game, then that awful version of the game was maintained and even updated while a complete remake was developed and released in 2013 as “A Realm Reborn,” a critically-acclaimed expansion. Even crazier is that Square Enix has released and heavily supported the game for PlaySation 3, PlaySation 4, and PlayStation 5, as well as the PC version.

It’s pretty pathetic that this game has received so much funding and is still in alpha over 10 years later.

In the tech industry, it used to be that the real customer was the investor and the real product was the user (e.g. Social media monetizing users to meet the needs of investors).

Nowadays, the real customer is the founder and the real product is the investor (monetizing investors to meet the needs of founders).

And this is in the area of zero interest rate. Image 5% interest rate.

Increased interest rates make it more difficult to get funding. Ie poor ideas have a harder time than genuinely economic interests.

Where do companies like this get their money? Another one I was recently surprised to still see ticking is Nikola. Who is giving all these people money? Where is the money coming from?

I believe Nokia’s handsets are now made under license by HMD global (some Chinese holding company). They also make a number of non consumer products like mobile base stations which you might have even used recently. Magic Leap on the other hand is more of a Money laundering/ego laundering scheme than a business.

The company is Nikola, an EV company more famous for the founder creating a gravity powered smoke and mirror show than for any actual products.

This (https://i.imgur.com/YtW12iD.png) is an awful marketing pic.

It's an AR headset. What's requiring him to take them off? If he has to take them off to look at something, something's wrong.

I think the point is -- its a headset that's so easy to use or just slide up on your head if you don't need .

You're probably right, but quite literally the first thing to pop into my brain when I saw that wasn't "oh hey I can put them on top of my head if I need to." It was:

> Why would I have to take them off while working?

Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I imagine I'm not the only one who'd wonder.

Very correct. I’ve used many many different types of AR headsets and the ease of being able to come on and off is important. Because when I’m working on something with it on, I may need a more keen eye to inspect or maybe the overlays get in the way or maybe I need to write something down…..

Haha I thought the same thing with the surgeon picture. Presumably he’s operating. And that surgeon isn’t wearing any eye protection in fact which does happen but isn’t something you’d advertise.

I just noticed the surgeon one. Good catch.

Why am I taking these things off? Isn't one of the main use cases for AR that I'm augmenting my reality with added context when doing something very concentration-intensive and don't want to break my focus to know a relevant detail? (like a HUD in a car?)

As I recall the Magic Leap 1 was darker than typical AR to be more immersive like VR.

Yes, I've tried the original demo they gave to investors and if I recall, it was like 20% window tint in cars. Pretty dark.

It's not for immersion it's because the light from the display is too dim compared to the light from the real world.

> Magic Leap doesn't lock developers into a closed ecosystem. Develop and ship solutions faster and across multiple channels. No app review, no approval for listings.

Thank goodness. More companies should be like this.

Seriously, trying to "capture" devs with closed ecosystems just stifles creativity and limits potential with corporate gatekeepers and walled-off technologies.

The open source mindset, like with Android, is a big reason why it dominates the global mobile software market. Security is one thing, but blocking functionality and self-publishing only drives away good developers and innovative apps.

> like with Android

Most people when they think of Android or the Google Play store they think of a cesspool of ugly inconsistent amateurish trashware.

Very strong feelings lol, coincidentally that's how many Westerners think of every country outside the USA and Europe.

Doesn't change the fact that Android has the largest market share worldwide in both hardware and software.

Expensive doesn't mean quality, and a lot of developers don't want to work with a company that makes billions on child labor and similar practices. Apple has plenty of useless apps, but like anything else, users filter the best apps. Besides, developers today often deploy identical apps on multiple platforms.

This pretentious attitude is very isolating, I am just glad that ad-blocking and privacy is an option I have as a user. Additionally, I don't have to shell out for huge margins on overpriced gadgets to feed a tech monopoly that violates basic human rights for profits.

That's the last comment I'll write, because there are already enough Android/iOS flame wars polluting the internet. You had your word, I had mine, that's as civil as I can be.

> lot of developers don't want to work with a company that makes billions on child labor and similar practices

Wait? Which company is using child labor?

I think the problem is that phone makers mix up the concepts of Content-Filter and App-Store. They are orthogonal things, and should be separate.

Exactly my thoughts on the subject of the iOS store. Disclaimer: I use iOS.

I’ve never seen more creativity unleashed more quickly than the apple apps store. The play store is fine if you stick to known apps but it’s just full of shit otherwise. But that’s the point of an open ecosystem.

Check out this free epilepsy test!

Can I flash a custom ROM on Leap 2?

I'm really skeptical based on the technical specs they publish. This company promised an amazing experience and completely failed by all accounts. And this crowd knows they failed in a way where most talent left.

A few years later what do they advertise as v2? 120Hz, 2000 nits, 2.4Ghz, 4MB of L3 cache, 2 RB+ (Render Backends).. Who cares? I can't find any videos that convince me the experience is good.

I’ve always heard magic leap referred to as the Theranos of VR

That's just mean :)

I interviewed at Magic Leap in 2017 when it was a mysterious secret company. Flew down to Ft Lauderdale and interviewed for a whole day. At the end of the day was a demo of their product, an area with 20 feet curtains across from Rony’s glass office. They put a tethered headset and the rest is complete and utter awe. Magic Leap’s tech has mimics accommodation of a real human eye (‘accommodation’ is a technical term related to depth + scale perception). They put on two demos. First one was cyberpunk brass mosquito and another was to overlay the wall in front of me with a massive theater screen. I was totally blown away by the resolution and clarity. It was like AR but with 20% window tint. Magic Leap somehow mimics accommodation of your eyes so that a 50 ft theater screen looks not like a postage stamp, both occupy the same FOV in your vision, but actually make it feel like a 50 ft screen. It was unreal.

I couldn’t publicly say these things because of NDA but I don't think they give a shit anymore after 5 years and I don’t either.

Magic Leap’s failure was in manufacturing from what I’ve heard from other employees working there. They had set up a line at their Florida factory, buying an old Motorola facility, but it was really hard to mass manufacture optics at an affordable price. I was totally sold on the tech. I can see why Google invested $2B in Rony’s vision. I feel bad for them because they were so secretive and made huge bets on full stack: optics to headset to content. They wanted to go all in on production of exclusive content. Sort of like the PlayStation model - Take a loss on hardware. I saw a magical campus, full of animation posters and characters, kind of like visiting Pixar studios. I also feel bad for their employees.

Others are calling it the Theranos of VR but unlike them, they didn’t hurt anyone and it was worth a shot. I went on the factory floor during the interview (only a small section where calibrated optics). I saw all the stuff. It was not malice; I blame their stupid PR team that propped up so much hype that expectations were out of control. Blame Rony for that but also when you have a tech like that, I can imagine the confidence that it brings. Just remember, stuff fails. Don’t get nasty about it. There were real genuine people working there; I didn’t get the job but it was totally the right thing to happen to me in retrospect. Just sad to see what shitty PR strategy does to public - Rony probably learned a few lessons from this. I wish them good luck with this enterprise/industrial pivot. I am thinking of buying a dev kit.

I’m confused. From your comment it sounds like they’re out of business. But from the news they’re joining into something with Microsoft?

They didn't come out with a consumer grade headset for like $299. They failed to achieve their vision for mass manufacturing + a full blown entertainment studios. I haven't kept up but looks like they're going into enterprise space.

Speaking of enterprise VR, has anyone got experience with it? I always thought it was a big dog and pony show for next-gen innovation at some stupid bureacratic company like BMW or GE, something execs can make cool video about.

It wasn't worth a shot. It was a scam from day zero.

Even the best case scenario of the tech was a lie. There is no way that at any price that anything remotely like the original vision would be possible. Simply put, the optics and physics never could have worked, and anyone with any knowhow in the space knew so and said so loudly.

This is not a legit attempt that failed. It's a scam that's still going on.

What are you basing your opinion on? I’m basing it on things that I personally witnessed, not general hype. From what I can tell is that they failed to make their prototype (which garnered investment from VCs) into a real product that is miniaturized and manufacturable at reasonable cost.

Scam do happen but here it is not the case. WSJ would pounce on that.

Theranos failed to miniaturize the needed blood sample size.

They committed fraud: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/us-v-elizabeth-holmes-et-a...

Comparing Magic Leap with Theranos is disingenuous in two ways: 1) Severely underplaying the severity of Theranos' crimes. 2) Overblowing Magic Leap’s execution failure as fraud.

It’s just completely misplaced.

I worked for a small precision optics company that made components for their development efforts. We made machines for fabricating unconventional optics for both MIC and commercial/consumer-oriented manufacturers. We thought it had a low likelihood of meeting the performance specifications at a reasonable cost.

Not much different than a 20th century Broward "opportunity".

Hundred years ago in Broward there were still some blatant frauds where the investors had put in money to purchase land but the "developer" just spent the money without purchasing any promising assets. But mostly by that time it was typically already more sophisticated and actual land would be purchased which would be impossible to develop without further investment, and even then might never turn out to be profitable. Before spending the rest of the money, trying to raise more money of course.

Hey but it was other peoples' money so it was worth it for the "visionary" to take his chances and go "all in". With the remote chance that any money might eventually be made, that would be great when starting from nothing. Without actual profits or even income, if the anticipated scale can grow into a few million for the one selling the dream, that's still OK even if the investors have put in dozens of millions.

Things have come a long way since then, in the last half-century especially.

When there are not so many legitimate sources of income for many decades with no end in sight, the culture tends to embrace the illegitimate.

In ways that are technically legal as determined by extreme experience exploring the edge cases.

The surprising thing about Theranos is that it wasn't in Ft. Lauderdale.

If the virtual 50ft screen would really have high enough resolution, and the headset would not be clunky, I could definitely try it as a replacement for the desktop monitor setup.

I tried magic leap once. They really hide it in most of their pictures by using certain angles but there's a tether between the glasses and another unit that's doing the computations. That other unit gets hot during operation.

When you wear it, the window in which the AR is active felt small. Like using really small glasses. And I have sight correction glasses and it felt small even for me, where I'm used to already see everything through smaller windows. It's small enough that you sometimes need to move your head to view things that you'll usually only move your eyes to see, and takes getting used to.

Already discussed a couple of days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33041677

I expected to see a whale jumping out of the body of a person on the operating table. Missed opportunity.

Load the page, tons of images of the device, none of what the device can render and how the results look.

Based on their history my guess is overpriced and underwhelming.

Exactly, this. Instead, the primary call to action is "Where to buy"

Is there a good video that shows what the experience is like for the wearer?

Consumer :

https://youtube.com/shorts/-Osv14WIopw

Design / Archviz :

https://youtu.be/nJ65SbAaEBA

https://youtu.be/v1-miutMA60

Your first video is Magic Leap 1 unless I missed something. The second two are about what you can expect, though, and pretty close to what you got with the Hololens 2 a couple years ago, except with better FoV and performance. For me personally, it's very much still not "there" as more than a novelty or tool for very specific use cases.

> Create innovative solutions for complex problems with the most immersive enterprise AR device

So, uh, what is it? Have we figured out what to do yet after 10 years, 11 funding rounds, and billions of funding?

The smartest people in the world attacked this question ("what do we use it for?") in the 90s, and nobody was able to come up with a killer app (as in, widely-applicable-once-mass-produced) then.

I don't know what's fundamentally different this time, which is why I'm skeptical that the outcome will any different.

Way way way too expensive

You have to cut your profit if you want to penetrate an already difficult and competitive market

They pay themselves huge salaries without customers, red flag if you want to invest

https://www.comparably.com/companies/magic-leap/executive-sa...

Too expensive for what market? And what products do you believe they’re competing against?

They’re price competitive with other waveguide enterprise devices.

Competitive as: it's going to be a booming market with a lot of actors, if you are not aggressive with your pricing, it'll be hard for you to find customers willing to test your products, it'll slow down adoption, giving enough room for other actors to get ahead of you

Apple's iPhone for example, a new kind of device, and their pricing was pretty aggressive, and they didn't use the "enterprise" argument to raise their price, quite the opposite

Same when their launched their ARM laptops, aggressive pricing to catch people

But it doesn't matter, they made the same mistake when they released Magic Leap 1, and they double down on that same mistake

I'm not an investor so i don't care, but if you are, you should be worried

They're doing the same pivot that Microsoft did with HoloLens. It's too expensive to do at a price point the consumer market will bear but businesses have an entirely different use case where cost is defrayed by the utility and/or productivity gains.

> Compute Performance - 3x Performance

What does this mean?

> Price - Starting from $3,299

So what's a use case justifying blowing that kind of money on this?

I don't see how they will foster an active developer community with such a starting price

I think there's a use case for all kinds of price levels, but there's a sweet spot.

Anecdotally. I bought a 3D printer when it dropped below 1000 bucks. I bought the Emotiv Epoc when at 300 bucks. I bought a Saleae logic analyser at the same price level if I remember correctly. Same with other tools or toys. The HackRF, the Kinect, the Quest, etc.

The higher the price the more you'll have to explain to people how they can justify the costs. You'll have to explain how much personnel hours are being saved, etc.

The more I'm in this space (of manufacturing electronic devices) the more I'm convinced Bill of Material (BOM) and in general Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) optimization is essential. Companies that can do this in a lean manner without excessive engineering costs to do so can truly drive the price down.

If there is this operational excellence, then you can truly give most power to your strategists in the sales and marketing departments. Otherwise, they have no tradeoffs to consider and are just victims of sloppy (non-cost conscious) engineering.

I actually was offered a free one by them, but because they would have given it as a 'gift' vs. an 'extended loan' I would have had to pay like $1k in taxes for it so I passed, knowing that I probably didn't have time to actually implement anything and that the market would be so small anyway (I had already tried one at a couple conferences).

If I'd use something like this for work, let's say ~8 hours a day for a year, how are the eyes affected? Are there studies around this?

Probably not a great idea. Simple answer: no. Most of the people working for these companies don’t wear these things for more than 10 minutes a week.

I’ve tried this on my face and it’s very cool. I can’t say there’s any mass market for it but it is not vaporware.

This is a pretty solid AR headset as they come. Definitely a step up from their first release. The optics/display are much better and they have patched some of the worse UX bugs that made the original really hard to use. But this is still a useless product. The price point isn’t the issue. It costs less than a Next cube (adjusting for inflation). Ask the serious question: among people who work for companies like Magic Leap (who get a unit for free) how many hours a day do they use it? In my informal survey the answer is about 0.01 hours a day or about 5-10 minutes a week. I have frequently encountered people with several years of “experience” with AR headsets who are not aware of basic ergonomic issues with the display. The reality is that even people who are paid to use these things don’t get much use out of them. We still haven’t discovered the killer app? A great excuse but we have then clearly found a lot of things that are not the killer app so subtract that from the projected TAM. If these is going to be used all day every day then you would see a lot more people using this all day everyday right now.

Their mistake is shipping a whole computer with their display. It may still be successful in enterprise settings, but externalizing the CPU/GPU to an iphone would make this device so much cheaper.

So plenty of images of people wearing it but no images of what I see when I wear it?

Does not inspire confidence. I'm assuming the user experience sucks. I'd be really happy to be wrong!

Again, where's my splashy whale?

Waiting for pivot to cold fusion

<title>Device</title>

Fancy fancy... Magic Leap knows how to use the title tag...

Theranos.

Fancy looking equipment that can't do what they say it can (at the high level) with mockups that are essentially fake.

Demo -

https://www.tiktok.com/@danieljtrujillo/video/71473953160298... (They can't even create a solar system demo that doesn't really really suck)

https://www.tiktok.com/@dilmerval (This one is funny because they can't seem to find anything to show except the unboxing, but you look cool like a hacker)

why did I have to vouch for this -immediately- after it was posted? Every single post by this account is this way.

Why do I find black-holed accounts so often?

Probably due to the heavy shadow ban censorship.

That needs to stop. Not one of the accounts I've come across has done anything outside of the guidelines and often are contributing substantive comments.

> Not one of the accounts I've come across has done anything outside of the guidelines

How do you know that? (And/or how do you know the multi-account history of the people using the accounts?)

Some might also be caught up in IP-address-based bans, but for accounts like this I expect there’s a reason they remain banned.

If someone's turned over a new leaf and hasn't committed any infractions on this new account, then we have to ask ourselves: is putting a permanent stain on their IP going too far? It's communicating that you're so odious we think you'll never change and those in your household will also be the same.

You are not going to be able to see any flagged comment in a user's comment history, unless you responded to it yourself prior to it being flagged.

Edit: Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

There's a flagged and dead comment elsewhere on this page that shows up just fine when I view the user's comment history.

Weird. I also have 'showdead' set to on, and I would say that for 80% of the banned accounts I see, it is immediately obvious why they're banned, because it's right there in the dead comment.

Another 10% are 'huh, this is an insightful substantive comment, why is this person banned?', and I usually find it a couple of pages deep in their comment history; usually something along the lines of someone who writes substantively on a number of issues but has one that they just spew insane malicious vitriol about every time it comes up.

And finally, yeah, there's 10% or so that seem to have been banned for no discernible reason and don't even seem to be aware that they're banned.

Forgive my ignorance - "vouch for"?

It means that anything this user says has to be 'vouched for' by someone more popular in the community before it can be seen by all accounts. It's a button next to the "X minutes ago" field on a post that allows users like me to signal "this one's okay to be seen". You should have this ability already, as your account fits the requirements for it.

Interesting, thanks for clarifying. Can't say I've seen it pop up before, and I don't see it now.

Happy to share. That's curious that you don't have that function.

The "vouch" menu option only appears when you drill down on the timestamp of a dead comment. Which means you need to set the "showdead" setting on your HN profile to "yes", otherwise you won't see the comment in the first place.

Oh damn. I want work to buy MagicLeap ASAP. VR is cute for gaming but AR is where it's at. (Our AR is pretty weak IYAM.) At lot of coin was thrown into making MagicLeap but it needs to be consumerized in scaled-down products that can sell. Combine something like Oculus and ML such that there's both AR and VR in one package that's essentially also a smartphone.

These are going to be the thing. Google glasses were too "smart" looking and frankly ripped off Steve Mann's design way too much. Magic Leap needs consumer options immediately with a focus on what Steve was doing with his glasses; truly altering reality.

This is going to be so powerful. When you have AI/AR you no longer need to learn. You can go directly from welding the perfect weld to performing the perfect adenectomy.

AI/AR is going to eliminate experts. It's going to be awesome.

You ever wonder if people have enough self-awareness to hear themselves talk?

I guess I can only let people smash head-first into the wall going at top speeds. Buckle up.

I wouldn't be so sure. Magic Leap doesn't even have OpenXR support yet, and you can't revolutionize the AR industry when you refuse to put up table stakes.

Strong disagree; magic leap missed the magic boat, the Ship of Relevance has now sailed and they aren't on it!

I'm still bummed, really wanted a better Google Glass. But it's been years with literally nothing to show us.

Google Glass was directly taking from Starner's work. You're getting your history wrong.

I wasn't aware of that. Thank you; just assumed Mann's was ripped off because he was so prominent in the space and well known.

https://www.theregister.com/2013/03/02/steve_mann_on_google_...

This article is what provoked the assumption.

Having worked with Steve for a while, I can assure you that he believes he was ripped off. Only a judge can decide for sure.

Didn't know this either. For anyone else curious, Starner + AR go back to the 90s [1]

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/google-glasss-thad-starner-wears-t...

The person Chatterhead cites actually has work that goes back substantially earlier, but it's important to point people to the right direction so blame for Glass isn't misattributed.

In the dark future there is only war between the Thadbots and the Manndroids!

Both welding and surgery are great examples of tacit knowledge, that is to say, knowledge that can't be easily transferred. Sure the theory of both might be efficiently learnable, but studying for it isn't going to make your first weld any less awful past a point. You may "know" what to you, but your hands aren't going to be able to do the right things with the right timing. You still need to practice the skill to learn it.

Why use hands? Why not a videogame controller? We have two whole generation well trained on precision videogaming.

You are correct nonetheless. It still requires skill; but that vastly shortened learning curve means access and affordability in everything from manufacturing to healthcare; just have to keep the next Google/Microsoft/IBM out of it.

> Why not a videogame controller?

For the same reason you can't effectively teach marksmanship using call of duty.

It's not just about precision of position, it's about precision of timing. Intuitively knowing what to do, precisely when it's appropriate to do so, as a result of combining numerous sensory details. If you know exact details about the metal you're welding and the machine you're welding with, you could program that in, but human bodies are too varied, surgery is damn hard. I'm bullish on AI these days and I still say the actual hands-on part of a majority of surgical procedures is a ways off from automation. Maybe one day, with enough data from tele-surgical procedures, you might be able to get that intuition into an AI. But I think we'll sooner be able to generate feature length movies from whole cloth with nothing but a one-sentence prompt than have most surgeries have the important moment-to-moment hands-on decision-making done by machine.

They already had a consumer product and it failed in the marketplace. We had one at work and I used it. It was decent, but not earth-shattering by any means. A colleague of mine worked for them and claimed they really do have some amazing tech, but they haven’t been able to bring it down to the consumer level yet. I’m not clear on whether that’s what they’ll be offering as a business offering.

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