Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/09/magic_leap_neither_magic_nor_leaping/

by zby • 10 years ago

203 136 10 years ago

theregister.co.uk

sometimes i get tired of all the fakeness in the world. it seems to corrupt every part of society and makes me sick thinking about it. theranos, magic leap, and a lot more. everything seems to be overhyped bs, while the only successful things are essentially avenues to cram ads down your throat and brainwash you to spend money you don't have.

hacker_94• 10 years ago

This is just what marketing looks like in the 21st century. You have to have a wow factor for people to notice you. I would suggest never trusting any announcement/trailer/teaser for anything to be honest; their aim is only to show you an 'experience' which entices you, something that makes you want to come back for more and spend money on it.

probablybroken• 10 years ago

I think it's certainly been the case with a lot of kickstarter projects and certain startups. There's so much pressure on people to realise short term success, and so many people willing to believe in it.

simonh• 10 years ago

Various brands of snake oil have been on the market for a very, very long time.

new29911• 10 years ago

I'd like to break this down a bit. Firstly, why is this so frustrating.

On a practical level, it's frustrating for engineers because to operate as engineers we have to work for these companies. It's not just the fakeness, it's the bad management that comes with it. They dilute the pool of possible good companies that we could work for.

They also increase the cost of doing something actually worth while. Salaries get higher, cost of living increases.

So that's why these companies are annoying to engineers. It's not just people being bitter exactly...

---

The next question is why does this happen?

Firstly, tech investors are not great at DD of science/basic technology startups. Maybe they hire external consultants to do the DD (due diligence). Maybe they rely on their friends (prior investments/contacts). So they roll the dice, invest in some company that looks safe (founders worked a Google etc. etc.) and their friends like.

Then you get one big investor who throws a bunch of cash in. A large number of other investors throw in as well. They assume that first, big investor did the DD.

This is an easy play for the investors. They don't have to do much work. It's easier than say, doing the DD on a smaller seed stage play.

Once it gets bit enough, I guess they assume that they can crush other players in the same area just because they have a stack of cash.

TL;DR: They don't do the DD, it's easier to make big bets than lots of small ones.

It would probably be better for us, if the cash that was thrown at Magic Leap went to fund 2000 seed stage investments. But investors would find that too hard to do...

That's my take anyway. I'd be interested to better understand what others think.

throwaway21jan2• 10 years ago

a16z hasn't been too lucky with DD lately. Not just Magic Leap, I've heard that Improbable was struggling to fulfil its promises, and was being sued as a result.

throwanem4• 10 years ago

to operate as engineers we have to work for these companies

Surely you don't mean software engineers. There's a whole big wide world outside the ongoing bubble, and in entire honesty I've never quite found "move to the Valley, work for a startup" to be the no-brainer it's so often been represented. In particular, the quality of life really doesn't seem to be there, at least not reliably; we hear horror stories all the time from people who've gotten hosed in what seem to be the same relatively small set of ways, at a rate that suggests there's more going on than random chance or sour grapes.

And the cost of living in that part of the country is no joke, too. Remote working would solve that, but very few companies take it at all seriously - many fewer than want to be perceived as doing so. It's understandable why they don't, but the transparent duplicity is a bad look. Without remote? Sure, the pay's probably better than you'll find almost anywhere else, but you either plow three quarters of it into cost of living, or spend four hours a day commuting.

Meanwhile, in the "enterprise" companies at which Valley biens-pensants smirk and sneer, one finds often enough that among the various fiefdoms, there's one or two with a savvy director and a team full of smart, capable people who have everything they need for the asking, and whose job is to solve problems the organization would otherwise find entirely intractable - sort of 18F or USDS, if you like, except in an industry context and with less politics to worry about, and as well or better paid. The trick is knowing where to look and how to bring value.

And unicorn valuation isn't the only startup bubble, either. From where I sit, comfortably outside it, the whole tech entrepreneurship scene has gotten amazingly up itself in the last few years, just like it did in the run-up to the last bust. Buying into the mythos might feel nice, but unless you're a founder it also makes you easier to exploit than you might otherwise be, and even if you are, it ties you to a sector that's itself beholden to more or less every vagary of financial fortune. Sure, engineering is a profit center in a company like that, whereas in the enterprise world it's usually a cost center. But next time the market takes a nosedive, who's in better shape? Someone in a profit center of a company that found its runway suddenly shortened to negligibility and collapsed for want of money? Or someone in a cost center of a company with the cash reserves and ample profitability to get through lean times effectively intact?

grabcocque• 10 years ago

That these guys are a bunch of snake oil merchants has been obvious from day zero. Sometimes the overwhelming stench of bullshit is a little too difficult to ignore.

skc• 10 years ago

But one wonders why there has yet to be an exodus of talent from Magic Leap.

I suspect the work is interesting for the engineers but nobody has the heart to tell the C level execs that what they are trying to sell the public is bullshit.

hacker_94• 10 years ago

A job's a job, and with the funding ML has got it's probably a pretty safe one for now.

pyb• 10 years ago

I see that they are based in Florida. Maybe part of the problem is that they just couldn't recruit the right tech talent in the first place.

new29911• 10 years ago

They're based in Dania Beach, Florida. I'd guess the job market is not quite as liquid as in the Bay Area.

People get locked in, family commitments etc. etc.

_h_o_d_2• 10 years ago

There has already been an exodus of talent. I know one personally, and know of a lot more. They lock them down with non-disclosure settlements. Bad management, internecine politics, the whole caboodle. A pity, because it could have been very good, but they went with exactly the wrong team, and insisted people move from the Bay to Florida, which didn't help with retention.

aphextron2• 10 years ago

But one wonders why there has yet to be an exodus of talent from Magic Leap.

Was there ever an ingress of talent in the first place? I haven't seen a single technical blog, white paper, conference talk, or anything else of any substance from their engineering department. Every time I see them at a trade show it is nothing but marketing folks with zero technical information. Who is even really working on this?

DonHopkins9• 10 years ago

"And there's another factor involved, which is that you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company. Netscape's early success and rapid growth caused us to stop getting the former and start getting the latter." -JWZ Resignation and Postmortem: https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

edblarney3• 10 years ago

"But one wonders why there has yet to be an exodus of talent from Magic Leap."

Mostly because they are getting paid :).

And it's not entirely implausible that they get 'something' to work, and are able to sell that.

DonHopkins9• 10 years ago

What makes you think that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY

iklos55• 10 years ago

This was amazing

new29911• 10 years ago

Wow. Do we know for certain that Magic Leap isn't KLFs new project? They have a track record:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...

ryandamm6• 10 years ago

Dada capitalism at its finest.

ggame5• 10 years ago

Wow that TED talk really explains everything. I get it now.

Too• 10 years ago

For those of you who don't want to waste 6 minutes of your life: Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz trying to play rockstar by starting his talk with 4 minute silly buildup music, then he comes in wearing a space suit trying to look cool and staying silent for another 1 minute trying to buildup to something even more, then just repeats the word "fudge" 15 times accompanied by shitty punk music. Essentially it's just a very long "fuck you everybody".

fuzzfactor• 10 years ago

Ringling College who is sharing the video with us, of course is an institution founded philanthropically in early Sarasota arising from earnings made by the Ringling Bros. Circus.

Long associated with Barnum & Bailey, this is the legendary traveling spectacle whose touring will soon be permanently cancelled for the first time in over 100 years.

Anyway, when it comes to Magic Leap, I don't see any way that PTBarnum would be disappointed in their profitability so far.

Without even touring or entertaining very many people at all, they've brought in enough money to start a number of colleges.

imode• 10 years ago

I keep getting Magic Leap confused with Leap Motion.

though at least the latter has a proper, released product...

ENGNR• 10 years ago

Leap Motion with a DK2 even is actually really good!

rocky1138• 10 years ago

Especially after their Orion release last year. I'm really excited [1] about Leap Motion 2.

[1] https://johnrockefeller.net/leap-motion-2/

argonaut2• 10 years ago

The first video was known to be fake back in 2015, when they released another video that explicitly stated no visual effects were used. And my guess is the second video isn't fake, but it's using their non-miniaturized technology. This is not news.

Unlike Theranos (where people's health was also at stake), if/when Magic Leap fails, their investors will lose their money and capitalism will go on - this is how things are supposed to work.

Pica_soO3• 10 years ago

The problem is that this kind of "learning" experience propagates from CEO talk to CEO talk. Making a whole branch of technology a No-Go-Zone, even if the problems that stopped it, get solved.

"We could do that, and end up like Magic-Leap.." will be the Standard slogan at every pitch.

Analemma_• 10 years ago

Fortunately Microsoft is not only working on the same thing but already has a shipping product, so even if Magic Leap goes under I don't think it's going to take AR with it.

edblarney3• 10 years ago

"this is how things are supposed to work."

No - the information from ML boils down to falsehoods - this is not how 'capitalism' should work :)

Granted, it does sometimes happen this way.

More limited investment, with reasonable hype, a longer time frame might have worked better - as a lot of the $$$ spent on ML today will be on marketing, overhead, unecessary staff.

Granted, even if they do go bust, they'll have made some tangible progress that will be leveraged elsewhere.

Google is a big investor - it could be that if ML goes bust, the Google can take hold of the IP, and probably end up hiring a bunch of people and carrying it on. That said, since Alphabet they operate differently.

argonaut2• 10 years ago

Company lies to sophisticated investors. They fail. Sophisticated investors who did not do proper diligence lose their money.

Yes, that's how capitalism works (technically, America's mixed market).

Now, if Magic Leap were a public company that lied to the public, yes I would be totally in favor of regulatory/civil, maybe criminal, investigations.

soneca• 10 years ago

I believe that will be a lot of frustation when they finally launch something. But I dont believe that Microsoft Hololens has "fallen short" as they say. I believe the Hololens demo was great and transparent on how the tech is, how it shows, what it takes to produce. Not a "magical" new sci-fi world made real, but definitely more close to reality than flying cara.

hacker_94• 10 years ago

Are you joking? Just watch the Hololens announcement trailer [1] and tell me it's as good as that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aThCr0PsyuA

ericd8• 10 years ago

Nothing looks at all like that when actually using the Hololens.

xorcist• 10 years ago

It's easy to fool those who want to be fooled. The likelyhood that these people developed electronics 10x smaller with 10x performance is roughly the same as my cold fusion reactor in my garage delivers free energy for all. If someone pulled that off they wouldn't need to fleece investors for their money.

joelg• 10 years ago

Quick guide to spotting non-existent tech
- Refusing to give a launch date
...
- Confusing working hard with making progress

Some of these are valid, but some are inevitable for any tech that is actually revolutionary. Magic Leap's actions seem so far to be consistent with both theories. It's kind of unfortunately true that it's impossible to distinguish between the exaggerated-for-media-coverage-sake case and the actually-world-changing-but-really-technically-difficult case.

curiousgal• 10 years ago

"In general, signal theory says if you have a good way of proving something and a noisy way of proving something and you choose the noisy way chances are it's because you couldn't do the good way in the first place."

camus2• 10 years ago

This comment is interesting :

If you were investing millions into something, would you not request a personal demo where you actually see the demo for yourself, in your own time, and see how it works?

I know I would.

wodenokoto• 10 years ago

The article mentions a large helmet. Any pictures of it around?

DonHopkins9• 10 years ago

The best thing we have so far is this revealing illustration tweeted by Rony Abovitz himself:

https://twitter.com/rabovitz/status/807077358624772098?ref_s...

tyingq• 10 years ago

I believe this picture from wired is supposed to be of "the beast" that they use for demos: https://assets.wired.com/photos/w_1200/wp-content/uploads/20...

There are drawings of something more helmet like in their patents, like this one: http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?Docid=D0758367&homeurl=http%3A%...

Kiro• 10 years ago

The author of this article needs to try Hololens. The technology is definitely here.

m_fayer• 10 years ago

Hololens was always somehow the thing that made me suspicious of Magic Leap. Because Hololens has the smell of "amazing things we can actually do." It is indeed amazing, and at the same time dorky looking and quite imperfect, much like VR is today.

Hololens is where our state of the art is - and I'm quite happy with that, it's imperfect magic! So when someone comes along and essentially says "we're doing all the magical stuff we can do today but somehow removing ALL the really hard limitations, and no we won't tell you how!" it just smells like wish-fulfillment hucksterism. I can just point a finger at Hololens and say "hey, this is what today's reality ACTUALLY looks like."

endorphone2• 10 years ago

HoloLens is being pushed with much of the same rigged demos. As a review from a few days ago mentioned-

"Maybe Microsoft is saving all the wow factor for its keynotes, but my demo was a less refined and less capable version of what we've seen in on-stage demos. My experience, while impressive, felt like child's play AR compared to what's been in Microsoft's keynotes."

Microsoft unveiled it well over a year ago, and still when people can actually try the device the demos are a fraction of the myth presented in their keynote. And of course these things always rely upon the development of technology, but we often get 80% and think the last 20% is the easy part when really it's the extraordinarily difficult barrier between realistically credible and a toy.

The projection technology (the field refraction grid) is very interesting, and the environment mapping is fantastic, but the resolution of the device makes the demos farce out of the gate -- the total overlay resolution is 1268x720 max (in most realistic scenes much less), so when you see someone demo something like a web browser in their AR display, if you ever see the demo it's just entirely unusable (far too low of a resolution) unless you move directly in front of the projection occupying the majority of your FOV, at which point what is the point.

The technology will improve, obviously, but right now it definitely falls in the category of gimmick to me, with several generations before it's remotely as usable as being pitched.

Sologram5• 10 years ago

It is used by NASA and they are stupid as per your post.

Where did you see the "rigged demos"? It works as shown in the demos if you even understand what it can do and do not. Your 20 minutes on hand demo never shows/teaches you any thing.

DonHopkins9• 10 years ago

Sounds like Magic Leap developed schpilkaz in their genektagazoink. The demo was like buttah. Like a big stick of buttah. I love Rony Abovitz, but he's a little ibaboodled in the kebbie. Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping. Discuss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJkANps0Qw

Neliquat2• 10 years ago

You see, this is the type of comment that tears me on HN. On one hand I actually lold, on the other, it added nothing but some humor to the discussion. What is the guideline here? We sure don't want to become 'insert failed or failing aggregator here'. Or the race to the bottom, who gets the 1st clever chuckleluck comment in, contest of internet points and paid marketing. So I made this comment instead.

DonHopkins9• 10 years ago

Good meta-discussion. I assumed the article's title was a reference to the SNL skit, but there weren't any more references or allusions to it in the article, so I though other people who didn't recognize the skit might appreciate a reference. I hope my other post linking to their TEDx talk balanced out my frivolity! ;)

Geee• 10 years ago

It doesn't matter if their tech doesn't yet work. Augmented reality is inevitable and someone will make it happen. Now, the logic is that whoever pours the most money into it will win the race and with patents be in a monopoly position. It's a gamble, but they have a likelihood of succeeding with money and hard work. That's what they've sold to their investors.

Neliquat2• 10 years ago

It seems that putting all your eggs in one tech basket counters that strategy, which is what it appears they did. In an ideal 'throw money at it until it works' situation, you would need to fund multiple new technologies to have a non trivial chance at success.

edblarney3• 10 years ago

"Augmented reality is inevitable and someone will make it happen."

True.

"Now, the logic is that whoever pours the most money into it will win the race and with patents be in a monopoly position."

This is not quite true :).

My bet is that the quality of AR that we see in their hype videos will not be possible on a consumer scale until after the core patents have run out :).

This is a 'disruptive' technology but it's still way behind practical applicability.

We see this in every industry - and sometimes it takes quite a long time for products to come to fruition :)

ggame5• 10 years ago

I'd hazard a bet that augmented reality already peaked with Pokémon Go.

CydeWeys• 10 years ago

Pokemon Go isn't real AR though, it's just a phone app that uses the device's camera. You need dedicated hardware to do real AR. I'm withholding judgment until I see that.

quatrian• 10 years ago

Perhaps for gaming, but I see augmented reality's main use in replacing TVs, projectors, monitors, displays, phones. I think VR is for gaming, I think AR will be one of the biggest productivity tools ever created.

jaypaulynice2• 10 years ago

The problem is honesty isn't rewarded anymore. Someone working hard will be beaten by someone who tells all the fancy stuff...I know a lot of startups that raised millions, but their tech and growth is totally non-existent. I did some research and a lot of companies have little to no social media presence, yet are "growing" crazy. How do people find them?

Add network effect and you get overly hyped stuff that don't deliver. I wish startup accelerators relied more on experienced, reputed judges in the startup's field instead of growth gimmicks. Online contests/challenges seem to be the way to find really good tech startups.

cocktailpeanuts3• 10 years ago

I see the same phenomenon and think it's the opposite.

Raising millions is not a reward. I understand why you think that way since I used to think that way too. But I learned the hard way that raising money is nothing more than the price you have to pay to get to somewhere you want.

So what IS reward? Obviously, if your business does well and "growing" crazy, that's your reward. That way you didn't even have to give up your control over the company and still managed to outsmart others who wasted tons of money and didn't even get anything done.

That's the reward you get for working hard honestly. I also used to think that honest people never get rewarded, and that was a couple of years ago when I was looking at all the pointless apps getting funded. Now if you look back, none of them are alive. Even the ones that were growing like crazy all die off, because most of the ones that grew like crazy were designed to grow like crazy in a synthetic manner instead of organically growing based on the value they provide to users.

So the lesson is, just look at your customers. If you see that more and more people are using and buying your product, that means you are doing something right. You don't need validation from investors and the press.

p.s. You can buy press anyway. Once you have enough money and traction just hire a PR agency and pitch a story for a guaranteed spot on relevant publications. This is much better than these VC funded startups wasting money doing the PR piece when they have no substance.

misnome• 10 years ago

Raising millions is not a reward.

They get paid for the X years it takes their startup to crash, probably quite well.

Afterwards, they are considered an "Experienced entrepreneur" and thus more likely to get their foot in the door to more negotiations, given press time etc.

What part of this is failing?

jaypaulynice2• 10 years ago

Agree with you! Thanks for elaborating!

mljoe• 10 years ago

The big losers in a VC funded snake oil are the founders. In the end of the day they waste years of their lives making starvation wages for nothing.

ggame5• 10 years ago

Founders can pull money out in later rounds and pocket a lot of cash. E.g. The Secret founders.

majewsky2• 10 years ago

The problem is honesty isn't rewarded anymore. Someone working hard will be beaten by someone who tells all the fancy stuff...

Wait. Are you talking about politics now? :)

nradov• 10 years ago

Social media presence isn't a useful indicator of growth rate for the majority of companies. In many cases it's a waste of marketing budget.

ismail• 10 years ago

I have a theory secretive + massive hype = emperor without clothes

redgc• 10 years ago

Benedict Evans doesn't seem like the kind of guy to fall for BS though, let alone defend it. And surely at least one of their investors had the technical due diligence capability to investigate how much computing power is in the demo "rigs" and be able to know if such power can be "miniaturized" into a consumer product by year X, perhaps allowing for a little software optimization on the way too.

DonHopkins9• 10 years ago

Well now he does seem like that kind of guy, apparently.

Sologram5• 10 years ago

It is so sad to see Evan B saying Marketing phrases trying to protect his investments.

aphextron2• 10 years ago

I lost any respect I had for that company when they released that whale video referenced in the article. Complete marketing hype nonsense.

ryandamm6• 10 years ago

I think what's missing from this discussion is the demo is apparently really, really good. Google didn't put ~$500m, and Alibaba something like $800m, just on a whim, or some investment thesis. And everyone I've spoken to who's gotten the demo is a believer.

I think this article suffers from an overly binary view of technology -- if it isn't market ready, it's vaporware. No, there's probably some real tech there (aforementioned demo), but miniaturizing / productizing is still a risk. I think the blowback has something to do with the marketing itself, and Abovitz's amazing idiosyncracies. Neither of those indicate anything about the tech, but (absent any public information) it helps fuel the hate.

And from what I understand about their likely approach, it's definitely more aggressive than the HoloLens. I don't personally think that nearfield focus in a headset is that valuable, but that's just a guess. If light field displays are the tech that takes AR over the top -- from curiosity to a new computing platform -- then Magic Leap is really well positioned, vis a vis a large lead and big IP portfolio.

Also, with ~$1.4 bn raised, they're too big to fail.

new29911• 10 years ago

You know... this thesis that they've raised 1.1BUSD so it /must/ be good just doesn't hold water for me.

It's almost an argument from authority, and it's not very useful. In particular, investors have made large investments in the past which it turns out did not have a strong technical foundation. So there's track record here.

Yes, there's obviously something. There's obviously a team of people doing something. That's not the argument, the argument is that a 1.1B USD investment isn't really a reasonable thing to do (and that it harms the engineering environment as I noted below).

ryandamm6• 10 years ago

While I think the money raised is a vote of confidence from the investors -- and it's only a vote -- my point about "too big to fail" is actually more a sunk-cost argument. With that much funding, the worst-case glide path for Magic Leap might be to stumble along, sucking in continuation funding until it gets a product to market. (It's no Theranos.)

To be clear, I'm not making predictions about ML specifically. I don't have a clue about what they're doing. My general point is that huge sums of money have both momentum and gravity of their own. (I'm not saying this is rational, good, or just -- just that it seems to be true.)

ebbv• 10 years ago

Your faith in Google and Alibaba's judgment is weird to me. Google squandered a lot more than $500 million on terrible projects in the past (Glass and Plus for example.) I see no reason to think Alibaba is run by infallible geniuses either.

They may indeed have had a very slick demo. That doesn't mean the tech is anything special. That story has happened many times.

There's also no such thing as too big to fail.

People made all the same points you're making about Theranos.

ryandamm6• 10 years ago

You're right that I'm assuming there's a thorough DD process associated with those investments. It's possible ML just showed them smoke and mirrors, too. But I don't think so (partially because I've spoken with people who've seen the demo -- they're under airtight NDA, but they're clearly not skeptical of the company).

After some introspection about why I think this way, perhaps it's the sum of money that makes it seem less risky... and but it could be an artifact of scale: most investments of that size are growth capital or PE. Instead, we're seeing risk capital assigned to a potentially enormous market, so it's scaled up, too. Almost like the world's biggest seed funding? (Take that, Clinkle!)

jacobolus• 10 years ago

Friendly pedantic usage note: you mean by means of or some synonym (via perhaps?), not vis-à-vis. The latter literally means “face to face”, but can more broadly be used to mean something like “compared to” or “in relation to”. Your use here is unidiomatic/ungrammatical.

ryandamm6• 10 years ago

You're right, thanks! I'm usually the one with the grammar pedantries, but I have a lot of blind spots. I'll leave it uncorrected as a warning to the masses...

cmiles74• 10 years ago

It sounds like Magic Leap has already given up on marketing whatever it is that they have been demoing. The Information reporter who managed to see the demo without signing the NDA said...

"The demos that I tried had some good attributes and some bad. The good - they were high resolution and they were able to focus the images at any depth - but only one focal depth at a time - so that they appeared very clear even when they were very close up. That said, the demos used a completely different type of technology from what Magic Leap ultimately wants to build. "

"Oh, and as I mentioned in the article, the bad was that the objects didn't stick very well. They were blurry and jittery when I moved my head, despite the fact that the device was connected to a desktop computer. That was one of the most difficult parts of building the HoloLens, but Magic Leap said it would figure that out on its final device. "

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicleap/comments/5hgtll/im_reed_a...

Fricken• 10 years ago

Facebook bought Oculus for 2 billion, and what were they buying there? Oculus had a prototype cobbled together using off the shelf parts by a teenager in his garage, a successful kickstarter campaign, and John Carmack jumped on board.

And that made Oculus worth two thousand million dollars to Zuckerberg.

The acquisition sent a strong signal, though. Shortly afterwards a bevy of competitors, big and small, started throwing out offerings.

Maybe signalling is the only reason to make these outrageous investments. Google thinks AR is important, a massive bid on an early frontrunner can kickstart an arms race which generates talent and knowledge, and even if ML fails, so long as AR in general succeeds, a consumer tech company such as Google will be able to benefit from it.

moron4hire2• 10 years ago

The acquisition sent a strong signal, though. Shortly afterwards a bevy of competitors, big and small, started throwing out offerings.

In the case of the HTC Vive, given the timings of product development cycles and marketing campaigns, that was just a coincidence.

istorical• 10 years ago

They had a lot more than that at the time of acquisition.

maverick_iceman• 10 years ago

Huh, at first I thought ML means Machine Learning.

moron4hire2• 10 years ago

I gotta raise a whole big stink about "but so-and-so said it was awesome and they can't be wrong".

I've been hearing the same things about the Meta 2 (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/meta-view#/entity) for months now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxwrXacMe6Y

And then I got to try it two days ago. And it was decidedly the worst AR experience I've ever had.

I have a laser-cut box of acrylic from a Kickstarter here called the Seebright Ripple that was basically "Google Cardboard for AR" that I'm about to throw away and even that was a better experience.

You can't trust first-time user reactions to mixed-reality technologies. They get lost in the concept that they are seeing any image at all. They don't know the competitor devices on the market, and don't have any comparison to be made to properly evaluate the object.

In the Meta 2's case, the only thing they had over the Hololens was wider FOV. In every other aspect, it was worse: heavier, tethered to a computer, not adjustable enough to make the image comfortably visible, extremely bad tracking, extremely bad hand gesture input. And yet, Robert Scoble thinks this is the most important product demo he's ever seen. They could have gone out onto the conference floor at where we were and found better tracking running on an iPad [0]. It was embarrassingly bad.

So what is the Magic Leap? We won't know until they actually show us. There hasn't been any real evidence on it yet.

[0] And at this point, if you're going to be tethered to a PC, you might as well just use Vive's Lighthouse tracking. Save yourself the time, money, and bad customer reactions.

bobbygoodlatte• 10 years ago

I agree that Google and Alibaba pouring on hundreds of millions adds credibility. But my skepticism is more banal: I've never seen a successful technology startup built this way.

Startups need to be nimble. When you raise 1.4 billion from the outset and hire hundreds of employees, you quickly build an internal bureaucracy. That's a hard ship to steer.

Most startups need to make course corrections, both big and small, before they find product/market fit. The political & psychological difficulty of those corrections becomes quite high when you have 100's of employees.

Investment dollars are like gasoline. Too much too early and you can actually drown out the flame.

dchuk• 10 years ago

Also, with ~$1.4 bn raised, they're too big to fail.

So many companies have raised hundreds of millions/billions of dollars and then either completely blew up or became a shell of their former selves. Nothing is too big to fail, and that mentality is toxic.

Sologram5• 10 years ago

Theranos which had huge investments turned out be mmm a sad story. Big money from big companies does not mean it is true. They also fell for the hype.

Rony Abovitz must be a great salesman.

oelmekki• 10 years ago

Sounds like Magic Leap is making the same prelaunch communication errors than Hello Games did with No Man's Sky : creating high expectations without showing much, which causes expectation to build up when people imagination feels the gaps, and cause backslash in the shape of frustrations.

But to be fair, author does the exact same thing than he is accusing Magic Leap of : making claims without displaying anything to back them up. He states that Magic Leap won't happen, just like flying cars. Based on what, except his frustration of not seeing the product? Same there : "The truth is that Magic Leap cannot get its huge prototype working in a much, much smaller version". Starting a sentence with "The truth is" doesn't make it true by itself, we need evidences.

As far as I know, maybe author is stating exactly what will happen, but I can't agree with him given so few evidences.

rasz_pl• 10 years ago

What do you mean by errors? They both get to keep all the money = win.

drelihan• 10 years ago

It's unlikely that 500m or 800m investment is 1.) all in cash or 2.) given out on day 1. If there are proper investor controls in place, cash is likely staged in and noncash vests over time as milestones are hit. At least, I hope that is the way it is setup...

evo_9• 10 years ago

Similar tech, less hype, perhaps more 'real': http://www.roadtovr.com/realview-holoscope-ar-headset-hologr...

orasis• 10 years ago

I saw an AR demo earlier this week using a google cardboard type setup with a phone screen and it was fairly compelling already.

Based on this cheap setup I'm confident we'll see something mind blowing in the near future.

dicroce• 10 years ago

They have some interesting, cool tech. It may not be miniaturizable (or it may be, dunno). But the hype about them is way too big. They have essentially put themselves in very tough spot.

Walf• 10 years ago

But why do people think it can project dark?! I understand the dimly lit room demo video, where the ML graphics are all brighter than the environment, but how can you make dark whaleskin over light timber flooring by adding light?

norea-armozel• 10 years ago

This is why I'm steering clear of AR since no one wants to show off the actual prototypes for various reasons. And frankly, I don't blame them for wanting to protect their technology but the fact remains if you can't show us a live and real demonstration of the devices in question then there can't be a product to buy because it effectively doesn't exist.

Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping

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