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