Magic Leap Secures $542M Led by Google

http://www.roadtovr.com/what-we-know-about-magic-leap-rumore...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/science/taking-real-life-s...

It would be interesting to see how this works in practice. The eye can't focus on something that close. For an example, imagine a speck of dirt on your glasses - it shows up as a blob in your vision, not as a dot.

The quality of developers and ideas coming out of this town hasn't been that great, or (as I hope) I am having a terrible time finding the right community.

Here's how I would read this if you're not located in a major tech hub where VCs readily fund companies and have offices:

1. Attracting a $500mm investment from Google or any other institutional investor is an outlier case regardless of where you're located.

2. You need to have groundbreaking, path forging technology and an amazing team to get on the radar when you're far outside of a major tech hub.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/10/17/interactive-m...

If a VC is looking at investing in a startup in a location where they have no activity then they're going to have to do trips out just for that specific startup (for due diligence, board meetings, etc.) and they're also going to have a harder time providing value-add (lack of local contacts, etc.)

Hence for a startup outside of a cluster to be worthwhile it has to be significantly better than the local dealflow and the deal has to be of a significant size. So such deals are always likely to be a rarity.

(Having a founder who's already built and sold a billion dollar company also helps immensely; if you're in that small category of people you can probably raise money regardless of where you're based)

http://recode.net/2014/10/20/look-who-else-is-joining-google... "People familiar with the company say Magic Leap was having trouble convincing Silicon Valley types to drop everything and move to Hollywood, Fla., where it is based... So it recently opened a Palo Alto, Calif., engineering office..."

They're currently hiring engineers in Palo Alto: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/14797737

And their engineering VP for "perception and core software" is based in Palo Alto: http://www.linkedin.com/in/garybradski

Of course in reality, its mostly pre-established relationships that would raise this money, not buzz.

This seems to be a consensus opinion on HN. I have no idea if it's a majority opinion, but it's fairly typical. The "journalists are lazy/stupid/inept" argument generally misunderstands what journalists do, how they work, and how they pick (or, as is more often the case, how they're assigned) their coverage. If anything, it gives some journalists too much credit, and for the wrong things.

I'm not a professional journalist, though I've written frequently for some major and minor publications. My typical process looks like this:

1. Pitch a bunch of story ideas to my editor.

2. Have 99% of those ideas rejected for various reasons: too narrow; too wonky; not enough meat on the bone [1]; not timely enough [2].

3. Settle on a topic that is somehow deemed acceptably timely, broad, approachable to general audiences, and well substantiated by some degree of data or prior coverage.

The astute reader will start to see how objections [1] and [2] come into direct conflict. By definition, breaking something new means covering ground that hasn't been covered before (or at least not often, or not in depth). But having prior substantiation often means being able to point to pre-existing coverage, as proof that your topic is of some interest to the public. [3] Also, you have to sort this all out on a deadline: anything from the end of the day to the end of the week, per story. (As an exercise: try investigating, substantiating, and beautifully composing an in-depth story in a single working day).

[3] The public, as typically defined, is a very broad swath of readers. Even major tech sites, like TechCrunch, now have a very broad readership -- with highly varying degrees of technical sophistication, subject-matter expertise, and topical interests.

On the flip side, look at any of the blogs or publications that HN readers respect. Chances are, they write in greater depth. They are not afraid to get into the wonky, technical details of their coverage. They don't just give you charts and infographics; they give you their statistical reasoning. Niche publications can do this.

Broad publications theoretically can, but often choose not to, out of the belief that the effort/payoff ratio just isn't there. It's a lot of effort that will appeal to only a sliver of their readerships. Deep coverage, or investigative coverage, or breaking new ground, requires a shitload of hard work. It is extremely tough on a standard deadline. It often requires a dedicated budget, and a broadly extended deadline, just to ensure that the writer(s) can afford to develop it.

Bottom line: I don't disagree with you. Most tech journalism sucks. That said, I don't blame the writers per se. They are the proximate end of a very long chain. Maybe some of them are capable of writing the stories we'd want to read. Maybe not. But they don't get the chance in the first place.

Before we impugn the entire field of journalism, let's be clear which publications, and which branches of journalism, we're impugning. It's silly to paint the whole field with one brush. I'm not saying the ratio of wheat to chaff is a good one, in the aggregate. But there is definitely wheat to be found. For every two dozen tossed-out, deadline-harried stories you find, I can point you to one or two amazing pieces of long-form writing. Sometimes the former and the latter are produced by the same writer. It all depends on the publication, its business objectives, and its beliefs about the demands of its average audience. The stuff you read in TechCrunch, for example, is meant to be consumed and immediately understood by almost everyone: you, your non-technical friend, and even your Baby Boomer parents. There's a certain type of material that fits that broad audience's tastes. Chances are, it's not the type of material that moves readers like us.

The same might be said for most people in any job, including developers. There are good devs and good journalists too.

That doesn't follow. If that is true, then it would be very easy for a company to be able to stay relatively secretive while raising a huge amount of funding; with lazy journalists as you describe, a company could raise funding by networking and so long as no one involved issued press releases, they would succeed in being secretive.

These seem to be some sort of standard conditions that many jobs cut-and-paste from somewhere. I wonder what the original source is. But they seem very out of place for an HR position.

I definitely didn't want to offend anyone and I hope I didn't.

"All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to ... disability ..."

I have concluded that much of the 500 million is going to employment lawyers.

"Magic Leap and Weta Workshop are collaborating on a truly next-generation Dr. Grordbort’s first person shooter on a world-changing new platform in an effort to defend Earth from robotic overthrow"

There's other work to do the same thing to the retina - throw a lightfield at it which simulates the proper wavefronts to focus a 3D image at a short distance.

Of course this is all kind of begging the question of what this company is actually doing: for example, the big problem not answered is where they get the portable processing power to make this work, and what the actual resolution is? The Oculus Rift already tells us 1080p is not enough and even 1440p will be imperfect.

Of course you could try to end run around the problem: I've been curious what you could do with 3-color lasers shone through an interferometer setup mounted on piezoelectrics, so you could add or subtract interference peaks by advancing the mirrors a few nanometers and then scanning the output over the eye (or, as one company is doing - using a DLP mirror chip). Focus that laser beam small enough, and you'd be addressing individual rod and cone receptors in the retina, granting infinite focus to any projected image.

EDIT: Looking at that jobs page, a laser and fiber optic engineer being top position seems very intriguing.

It's interesting to note that the speaker now works at Oculus.

If they gave $500 million to this company it must mean it is either better or have better perspective. As simple as that.

There are interesting biomimetic things in display tech derived from butterly wings, which the wikipedia page conveniently mentions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomimetics#Display_technology