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Comment by mnglkhn2 | Hacker News Reader

Now it makes sense that Google just announced that they're stopping Glass from being sold retail. They did not want to have their device compared to the new product from MS. Actually I see this new device as more prone to success than the Glass. These devices are competing for the same markets: healthcare, education and entertainment. And here Glass is somewhat underpowered.

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Google's response would presumably be their partnership with Magic Leap.

1 year to product announcement, but the whole retina-projection thing might be game changing.

I met a guy in 1998 who had done his Ph.D building full color direct to retina projection. He was doing VR with it back then. That's how long this technology has been in development.

He did it at MIT and if I understood correctly, the US military bought everything (he had no say in the matter).

"holographic", "cinematic reality" - all just words used to describe augmented reality.

Do any of the Google Ventures investments ever have partnership terms, or cross licensing?

Google's investment wasn't through Ventures.

One is sci-fi reality, the other is putting a screen right in front of your eyeball.

Do you mean that there are spies informing Google about Microsoft's new product?

It's possible.. they dropped their hugely incomplete Google Wave rotten egg on the public only a day before Microsoft announced MSN's Bing rebranding. Various project domains (waveprotocol.org) were only registered 2 weeks prior. Wave seemed like a weird and frivolous product until you look at it from this angle, at which point distraction seems like it could have been the only reason it was released.

There has been things in the past that indicate that large tech companies are somewhat aware of the big announcements before they happen. Look at Google & Amazon timing their cloud pricing announcements within 24 hours of each other, for example.

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