>>gumby+(OP)
It's too expensive.

>>gumby+(OP)
I bought one second-hand a couple months ago. It's neat and all, but between the poor software and the severe extent to which it darkens the rest of the world, it's a pretty resounding 'meh'. I still have hopes for using it for productivity, but it honestly doesn't hold a candle to the original Hololens. (Can't speak to the Hololens 2 yet; going to get one in a little while though, hopefully!)

>>gumby+(OP)
I didn’t even know they had gotten beyond vaporware!

Why would someone spend $2,300 on this equipment other than as a developer kit? I assume there is virtually no compelling content or services available to make a consumer interested in shelling out that amount of money, or even 1/10th that amount of money.

>>gumby+(OP)
For as cool as this is, cost is the problem.

$2300 is an expensive experiment, one that might not be for me.

You want to get developers to bet on new tech, to innovate, then get the cost way down. Make me as an individual developer willing to take the risk that I might not have the time or the mindset to follow through.

I can't imagine that the cost of production is more than $500... start selling them at that price point.

>>daeken+82
As someone who was a bit underwhelmed by the original Hololens, this assessment is utterly disappointing. Don't get me wrong, a lot about the Hololens was quite interesting, but clearly far from being ready for primetime.

>>gumby+(OP)
Karl Guttag estimated in the same range last month: https://www.kguttag.com/2019/11/10/all-magic-leap-patents-ha...

His whole blog is a pretty compelling read on the current and near future state of AR.

>>gumby+(OP)
This is an early beta product for wealthy tech-savvy trend-following early-adopting VR-wanting consumers. That's a tiny market.

Classic case of a company having no idea what they're selling and who they're selling it to but expecting billions just for existing.

>>RenRav+Z1
$2300? Yikes.

Curious if the quoted 100k-unit estimate was for the so-called "Creator Edition" (clearly targeted at devs and early adopters), or if it was supposed to include a more mass-market unit that hasn't shipped.

>>Chicag+w2
The original Hololens was underwhelming in some regards, but they got a few things very right: text was crisp in most circumstances, the contrast was great, and the software mostly Just Worked (TM). All of these things are absent on the Magic Leap. The only advantages it really has are the controller (which is ... okay, I guess) and comfort.

>>zaroth+a2
It's likely selling to developers. You'll probably see Magic Leap experiences get demos at conferences or popup events. And maybe some niche use cases in industry.

>>gumby+(OP)
The thing that got me about the Magic Leap is I couldn't find a reliable video of what it looked like through the lenses. Everything was clearly a CGI overlay or recreation. Reviewers claimed they were prohibited from showing video through the lenses.[0]

I can understand not wanting their product misrepresented, but all the secrecy and censorship about it makes me believe it is bad, and I'm not going to spend money on something I believe is bad.

0. https://youtu.be/TfzlU7nW23Y?t=34

>>zer00e+u2
I agree that $2300 is a steep price for an experiment but I'm not sure you would want to base your price on the cost of production - why is that any better than any other arbitrary price?

>>zer00e+u2
The original Microsoft HoloLens was $3000-$5000 and sold 50,000 units in two years. Now the US Army is paying them $480 million for 100,000 units. The problem isn't the price IMO, but the fact that Magic Leap hasn't been able to make a case for what exactly it should be used for. Random enthusiasts aren't going to shell out thousands of dollars, but a company or government definitely will.

>>zer00e+u2
>I can't imagine that the cost of production is more than $500... start selling them at that price point.

You can't imagine that the cost of custom bleeding-edge hardware produced in four-digit-volume runs is more than $500?

>>zer00e+u2
Maybe they don't want to sell very many yet? If the software is rough the last thing they want is a lot of unhappy developers complaining about the state of things.

I wouldn't panic just yet. I bet for every order of magnitude they reduce the price they will increase sales by an order of magnitude. Get it under $100 and the will sell millions of units.

>>gumby+(OP)
How are we even surprised. They are the Theranos of AR. They pushed the 'fake it until you make it' mantra a bit far, and now reality is biting hard.

Hopefully they will still trigger a revolution of some sort... but this was predictable.

>>blh+14
Why not follow the model used by consoles and cell phones? Sell the hardware at a loss and take a 30% cut of software sales.

>>zaroth+a2
It's still vaporware. I want whatever it is they were suggesting with the whale-in-a-gymnasium demo.

>>daenz+X3
Its not bad but it wouldn't make sense really. Microsoft built a custom camera rig to show off the Hololens which they could have done.

>>vassil+m4
The difference is their product works (to some degree) as opposed to being total vaporware like Theranos.

>>daenz+X3
The problem is that a video through the lenses isn't going to tell you anything about the experience of actually wearing one of these things.

>>gumby+(OP)
Let this be a lesson:

Working prototypes trump all theory.

I heard all silicon valley gurus stating they were "bearish on VR, bullish on "AR". This proliferated as a mantra throughout the industry. I thought they were wrong then, and believed the opposite - because I had a working VR headset that was awesome, but had only heard somewhat meh things about existing AR prototypes.

Until great AR hardware comes out, I'm still sticking with the same opinion.

>>vassil+m4
This is way overblown. They have at least a Hololens equivalent, and if you value occlusion, they're ahead. And that's without Microsoft's reach. Equating them to vaporware isn't fair at all.

>>zer00e+u2
I strongly suspect $2300 was at or below their breakeven cost, even not including amortization of R&D, NRE, or CapEx. They are presumably well aware that building a platform dependent on applications requires network effects that can only come into play if you have a large install base of units. I don't imagine they attempted to sell the hardware at a profit, which would work against that.

As other commenters have noted though, the problem is not so much the price as not having a real target use case or audience. Hololens is similarly expensive, but Microsoft cleverly did a late pivot before launching the first one to an audience that actually had a need for it.

>>rory09+d4
In theory a lot of this funding should've been spent securing sales so they wouldn't be producing the items on a bespoke scale but instead would've been able to get the cost per unit down. I'm sort of amazed at the funding this has received when it seems to be performing like an underwhelming kickstarter.

>>paxys+34
The problem is that it doesn't work, it's bad. You can make a bad product with a company with a "valuation" in the billions, we need to start to understand that. And there's good alternatives to the product that actually do work better at a similar price point.

This is not a "product market fit" problem, this is bad tech being pushed down the pipes until it makes it out of a fucked up company.

>>mo1ok+V4
This partially comes from the SV all-or-nothing attitude: you can have AR on all the time (and thus revenue stream all the time), but you can't do that with VR.

>>cridde+B4
That won't work here, nobody would buy software for this thing because it's really underwhelming.

>>daenz+X3
it's a bit better than the hololens, but it's a much less slick piece of hardware.

>>gumby+(OP)
Occlusion is cool and all but Microsoft ate their lunch.

>>cridde+B4
This would be really sensible especially giving the funding they've been floated - that said maybe their debtors are coming home to roost and they've been given pressure to avoid setting any more money on fire.

>>jayd16+85
Have you used one?

>>mo1ok+V4
The units i've used have worked reasonably well. but nobody is paying $2300 for them.

>>daenz+X3
Overlayed content is sharp enough, not great. Ghostly opacity. Biggest blocker by far is field of view vertically. Images outside the "screen" get badly cropped and look very unnatural.

>>mo1ok+V4
It depends on your definitions. You don't need a headset for pretty interesting AR. If I could just point a phone at things and get genuinely useful information as an overlay, I'd consider that a pretty decent AR application. Sure, the same thing in a pair of stylish glasses might be even better but it's not strictly necessary.

>>jayd16+85
Also, from the reviews that I have read their software seems to be pretty good, at least when it comes to spatial awareness and surface detection.

Most reviews are positive but main problem seems to be the price and the fact that the overall end-to-end experience still feels pretty rough.

>>gumby+(OP)
The very big disappointment comes from that they promised (kind of) that they would get Fiber Scanning Displays working. What I gather is they had a sort of, more or less working, giant machinery prototype (The Beast) that was very impressive for the few who got to try it. But they never actually managed to make the tech viable in a headset form factor. Also unclear if they had more than one color... Still very curious about what they managed to accomplish on that front but I now doubt we will ever know.

>>gumby+(OP)
Magic Leap One has been for sale for 6 months. At $2.6B in total funding, thats $433,333 per unit for 6,000 units. The sticker price is $2300 per unit.

By comparison the Nintendo VirtualBoy was for sale for one year at $180(in 1995/$300 in 2018) and sold 770,000 units[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Boy

>>1MoreT+U4
Neither is an artist's conception.

I think that this is inevitably going to be a serious problem for selling a product like this to a generation that still remembers Virtual Boy.

>>gumby+(OP)
I think all of these things are true:

AR is really hard and anything that does it at all is impressive and could, believably, be the precursor to a revolutionary product.

All current AR tech is more expensive than seems sustainable for a consumer product. It's also difficult to develop for and has few (if any) compelling experiences. These things are endemic to early stage products, but it is also possible that they will endure long enough to cripple AR as a product in the foreseeable future.

Everyone in the AR industry is guilty of overhype. Moreso than early tech start ups in general. That said, Magic Leap seems to have behaved significantly worse than its peers.

Part of the effect of the hype machine is that it's hard to get any depiction of what it looks like to look through the lenses of the products. This comes, as far as I can tell, from the likely true idea that the experiential qualities of AR cannot be captured through 2D video and such video would be somewhat deceptive. To me, it seems like the practice of releasing visualization videos is more deceptive but reasonable people can disagree.

-----

It feels to me like a lot of AR discussion comes down to people asserting that one of these genres of view is true in response to someone else expressing a different one of these views.

To me, it feels like it's hard to talk usefully about the current state of the industry. The promise is very cool, the products are early stage. So many factors legitimately excuse current failings. Do people feel like we the tech is public or mature enough that we can talk about the real limits or likely arc of the tech at all, or are we trapped between hype and development?

>>daenz+X3
There was a twitter video that comically showed their marketing demo of the whale and then the real life example of the product (with related music).

It appears to have been scrubbed from the internet though because I was trying to find it a while back to show someone and I searched for a while, but couldn't find anything.

Magic Leap seems like a case study of how not to release a product, but maybe they were more focused on raising money?

Either work on your thing in public, shipping units (Oculus/FB) or work on it entirely in secret (Apple), but don't loudly and continuously talk vaguely about how amazing your thing is with no real public examples for years. This plus all the fake marketing video demos - if you're going to do this you better be as good as you're pretending to be.

Someone that good probably wouldn't need to show marketing videos, they'd just show the product itself.

I finally did get to play with one (friend who personally knows an investor had one) and it was pretty disappointing. AR seems likely to be the next computing platform, but the hardware is not ready yet.

Magic Leap reminds me a lot of the General Magic documentary - crazy hype, right general idea, but too early and bad product.

I'm not sure if they have the same talent General Magic had though.

>>zaroth+a2
The tech they were hyping (FSD) never materialized and is very much vaporware. Every one following got disappointed when they pivoted to hololens-like stuff...

>>maniga+H2
Isn't it more a classic case of a company underestimating the challenges of bringing a prototype to market? Didn't magic leap's tech demo work on like a supercomputer strapped to the user's back?

>>munk-a+o5
Securing sales for an alpha prototype?

>>donpdo+O6
Man, a Virtual Boy comparison is just the deftest diss one could possibly offer here.

>>goneho+g7
I believe this is what you're referencing:

https://twitter.com/fernandojsg/status/1017411969169555457

>>sheepd+K6
Exactly. We never got the Magic Leap. I remember reading that surgeons were already using the tech so it 100% existed and just needed to be productized. I figured google-ers had taken a close look and had a pretty good idea about how to productize it. Maybe it is worth a billion, I thought to myself. What we got was a Hololens clone. It should be called the Magic One because there's no technological Leap in it.

>>pvaran+G5
Doesn't that depend on how big of a loss they are willing to take? Say they started selling to developers for $1000 with the promise that the price to consumers would be $99 six months from now. I think that would ignite a lot of development.

>>1MoreT+U4
It's going to tell you more than a CGI artist's impression nonsense.

People were able to film through the lenses for standard VR glasses. I can't find anyone that tried it for Hololens but given that they also cost several thousand dollars it's probably not that surprising. I have used the Hololens quite a bit and I can't see any reason why you couldn't film from the eye's point of view.

>>zaroth+a2
Same. The only times I've ever heard Magic Leap substantially discussed, including user experience, was on HN. I was under the impression it was still in something like a closed beta.

>>defter+y7
The VB also makes me wonder if AR isn’t practically impossible for the foreseeable future since lots has changed since then, but not the vaporware of this stuff.

>>daenz+X3
That's just how it goes with AR, you can find some amateur clips people have tried to shoot through the lens themselves but it's very difficult. Even Microsoft doesn't shoot through the lens and has gotten similar flack. Best they can do is composite imaging, which actually looks worse than through the lens.

>>mo1ok+V4
I still think this write up by Michael Abrash (from 2012) is still the best argument about why AR is hard: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-...

Though there has been some progress since then.

>>mo1ok+V4
I've tried Hololens and it is honestly pretty amazing. The field of view really sucks but I'm sure they'll improve that, and it doesn't actually matter quite so much for AR.

But it is still a less compelling proposition than VR. The main market is games where seeing the real world is kind of pointless. Good VR is much more immersive, and being taken to another world is much cooler than seeing some floating planets or fish or whatever in an office (even though that is cool).

>>IshKeb+y8
Notice that zero VR companies show you through the lens footage. This is not restricted to Magic Leap. You can find amateur attempts by owners to shoot through Magic Leap, Hololens, and various VR headsets if you go on Youtube and Twitter. But no company does this at all. Just another misunderstanding by people here who think they've found another reason to nitpick at Magic leap, but it's a widespread industry issue. VR is actually the worst about this because they only show straight from the PC output with none of the limitations you actually experience like FOV and screen door effect.

>>MBCook+O4
The original product is still vaporware.

>>nrp+C2
He's underestimating (though not by a whole lot probably). The 6k numbers from the above article refer to the first 6 months sale. Guttag is talking about the last 18 months. Also doesn't account for the headsets that have been seeded to devs.

>>gumby+(OP)
The Information has been unlocking the occasional article for HN users for a while now. I asked if they'd do that for this one and they agreed. Thanks!

(The submitted URL was https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/06/report-magic-leaps-early-d..., which made sense while the original source was behind a hard paywall. Changed now.)

>>gumby+(OP)
I won a unit from Twilio conference. I haven't touched it in a year but I often think about turning it back on. I really hope they get more content for it.

>>goneho+g7
Yet everyone was so optimistic and believed the hype. And it happens again and again! Whenever some early stage company/product gets some traction on HN that looks like hype-ware, the default reaction always seems to be excitement and optimism, rather than doubt and skepticism. Nobody's learned from Theranos. It's like we all adhere to that X-files poster "I WANT TO BELIEVE" over and over.

>>daenz+X3
I thought the same thing. Even with VR people held cameras up to the displays, or projected what they saw onto a monitor. With magic leap it was sooo secret.

I assumed garbage. I'm still not sure what I would be supposed to do with them.

>>MBCook+O4
Mind that the advertised technology relied on Fiber Scanning Displays and extensive computing power – and I'm not aware of this having been refined to a producible and marketable item.

>>Holoma+e9
The thing is that for HoloLens and VR sets we did have people showing it as best they could in a camera and for vr projecting into a monitor. Magic leap held it all secret and we'd be told how magical it was.

>>gumby+(OP)
Ok I knew it was bad, I didn't know it was that bad.

Lesson for the day, these guys have an excellent team when you need to fundraise, not so much when it comes to execution.

>>gumby+(OP)
AR is a somewhat difficult sell, particularly with limited software available for it. Just imagine playing the interactive games they promoted in their demo videos, it would cost $10,000 in gear alone to get a 4 player game going.

To me, AR sounds great when you are mobile and apps can supplement reality with useful information. Playing Minecraft or some kind of space invaders game in my kitchen isn't that much more appealing than playing a game in a full virtual environment.

>>mo1ok+V4
I think it's coming sooner than later but Magic Leap definitely coughed up their lead in the space and spent a ton of money in the process. Microsoft have an equivalent product and I think we'll see Apple Glasses in a year or so.

>>donpdo+O6
That’s not how funding works. If you believe the product is worth exactly what you pay that’s not funding, that’s buying. Funding is the belief that at some point the ownership will be worth the wait given the investment.

>>goneho+g7
There was some overlap, and both had lots of "Magic" hype, but there were some really great people working at General Magic, and not nearly as high a level of narcissistic bullshit and self aggrandization and utterly dishonest marketing as from Magic Leap.

I mean, come on:

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

>>gumby+(OP)
Magic Leap is proof that first mover advantage is fictional (or at least it's not an iron law that guarantees success). They spent large sums of money to put out the least half-baked AR product on the market. They would be in better shape now if they hadn't grown so fast.

That being said, AR truly is the future. In a few years there will be multiple digital universes overlaid onto our world. Magic Leap should be commended for their technical accomplishments, but can they stay solvent until their dream of the future is realized? I honestly hope they pull through.

>>gumby+(OP)
They need to start advertising like Occulus is doing, buying up literally all the ad slots on Youtube.

By comparison, I haven't seen a single ad for Magic Leap anywhere on the internet. People aren't buying it b/c they've never heard of it.

>>ryandr+Sa
Not everybody believed the hype. The first time I saw their original TedX video I knew for sure that Magic Leap was totally full of it.

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

>>LegitS+mb
I'd love to know how close the shipping product is to what Kevin Kelly and other journalists were shown under NDA before release.

>>1MoreT+U4
But the fact that they absolutely will NOT permit developers or reviewers to post a video through the lenses, and they tried to pawn off totally fake "artist conceptions" as live demos of actual software they run daily at the office, does tell you a hell of a lot about what the actual experience and the company itself is like.

Magic Leap originally lied about the concept video they posted to youtube, then retroactively white-washed it after they got caught by Time Magazine.

The most infamous misleading video that currently claims to be a "concept video" was originally deceptively titled "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap" and described as "This is a game we’re playing around the office right now". Only AFTER they got busted, did Magic Leap retroactively change the title and description so they were not so blatantly false and misleading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM

Before they got busted and white-washed the lies, a skeptical Time magazine reporter didn't think it looked real, and asked Magic Leap about it directly. The official Magic Leap company spokesman mendaciously lied to him that "the video was authentic":

http://time.com/3752343/magic-leap-video/

>It's unclear whether the video shows an actual game overlaid onto a real-world office space or just an artistic rendering of what the game might look like in the future. The way the gun rests so realistically in the gamer's hand certainly raises suspicions. Still, a company spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo that the video was authentic.

>"This is a game we’re playing around the office right now," Magic Leap wrote on its official YouTube account.

The "game they were playing around at the office" was actually called "lying to the public and investors".

>>goneho+g7
Magic Leap reminds me of Theranos. The companies with vaporware seem to have very similar playbooks that are pretty obvious with how in your face they are while never actually showing the product.

>>DonHop+Rc
Completely agree. The GM people were competent without being arrogant. They failed only because cellular data networks were not good enough at the time.

>>tootie+Kc
I think we will most likely see a true first generation AR device the next year or so. Apple Glasses will at the very least be 4 to 5 years out imo.

>>keenma+bd
> In a few years there will be multiple digital universes overlaid onto our world.

I think applications like HUD displays on car windshields is an obvious place where it will be big for regular consumers. There are a bunch of interesting applications for commercial use too. Other than that, I have a hard time seeing much interest in regular people until they can eliminate the need for glasses or goggles.

>>LegitS+mb
VR allowed the signal going to the headset to also be displayed onto a regular monitor since the signal was the full image. With AR, it's just overlaying something onto a lens you see through to be able to see the real world. That signal displayed onto a regular monitor would probably just show the object with a matte or essentially the object over a black background. Think of a transparent PNG but in motion. That's not very exciting.

>>daenz+X3
TFA says that they've shipped around 6000 units so far, how come nobody has made an independent video of the product yet? Surely some of these early adopters have a Youtube channel?

>>pvaran+R5
Both.

>>gumby+(OP)
>He still personally signs off on new hires, who are told that it’s harder to get a job at Magic Leap than it is to be accepted into Harvard

I doubt that. South Florida isn't crawling with engineering talent, we all left. Having known, studied, and worked with several people who work(ed) there, I sincerely doubt they can claim to have such a deep bench of talent.

>>daeken+82
I haven't gotten a chance to try Magic Leap myself, but if you think that Magic Leap doesn't hold a candle to the original Hololens, then in it is dead in the water imo. I was somewhat annoyed with how small the field of view was on Hololens, and overall it was a pretty janky experience that I wouldn't recommend to anyone except those who just want to try the first "real" AR headset product out here and attempt writing code for it.

Hololens 2 is already publicly available, and I had a chance to play with it for a bit. All I am going to say is, if you thought the original Hololens was decent enough, you will be blown away by Hololens 2. It is leaps ahead of the first version, both in terms of the UX and the tech. Even everything auxiliary about it just feels "right", stuff like the flippable visor, easier head mount, etc. It is the kind of a device that I would legitimately consider using occasionally at home to read news and do other stuff while lazying around doing other things.

It isn't at the original iPhone levels of "whoa, we are entering a new era of how people use their personal computing devices" yet, but the overall experience is such a large step up from the original Hololens, it is clear as day to me that AR is quickly getting closer to the point where it will be dominating personal computing niche currently occupied by smartphones.

>>gumby+(OP)
>He then told employees to “stay the course” and “protect the company” by keeping confidential information “under lock and key.”

Classic. Instruction to team to not leak info get leaked.

>>ogre_c+4c
AR for games is an even harder sell IMHO because it's very hard for the game developer to make use of your space in a compelling way since they have no idea what it might look like, at least for home use.

I could see it as a carnival or arcade attraction where the AR application is tightly coupled with the space it is in, but this is a niche application.

>>simias+He
There are plenty of independent videos available. Here's Tested's in-depth review from last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrq2akzdFq8

>>dreamc+Vd
Bill Atkinson is the humblest, sweetest, most astronomically talented guy -- practically the opposite of Rony Abovitz! I think they're on very different drugs.

The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson, as told to Leo Laporte.

"In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California." ...

https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp...

Full interview with lots more details about the development of HyperCard:

https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=f...

Bill Atkinson's guest lecture in Brad Meyer's CMU 05-640 Interaction Techniques class, Spring 2019, Feb 4, 2019:

https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...

Including polaroids of early Lisa development.

About PhotoCard:

http://www.billatkinson.com/aboutPhotoCard.html

PhotoCard by Bill Atkinson is a free app available from the iTunes App store, that allows you to create custom postcards using Bill's nature photos or your own personal photos, then send them by email or postal mail from your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.

Bill Atkinson, Mac software legend and world renowned nature photographer, has created an innovative application that redefines how people create and send postcards.

With PhotoCard you can make dazzling, high resolution postcards on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, and send them on-the-spot, through email or the US Postal Service. The app is amazingly easy to use. To create a PhotoCard, select one of Bill's nature photos or one of your own personal photos. Then, flip the card over to type your message. For a fun touch, jazz up your PhotoCard with decorative stickers and stamps. If you're emailing your card, it can even include an audible greeting. When you've finished your creation, send it off to any email or postal address in the world!

>>gumby+(OP)
Is anything else expected out of it? I mean, the way the company has rolled on, starting with a lot of in fighting, then releasing a bunch CGI videos about experience and never actually releasing any real use cases. They ended up launching the product without really showing anyone what the experience will be. People want to see what it is before spending an obscene amount on it. I fully expected it to fail.

>>dylan6+Ud
I have some VC friends tangentially related to the deal. Apparently the original demo was wild, like real magic bonkers. Everyone who tried became a believer. The projected light streams onto the user's eyes so instead of seeing an image overlayed in an intermediate layer as in most AR, the image was projected onto your retinas through this very advanced technology and optics. The issue is that the advanced technology demo used an entire room of computers and sensors for a single user, and it didn't allow the user to move around at all, just sit in a chair and have this thing projected onto your eyes. The goal was to scale this working crazy but impractacle thing into a consumer experience but they just weren't able to, so they pivoted to being another "smart glass" maker. Their tech and patents still actually work, they just aren't able to make a product out of it.

>>gumby+(OP)
Haven't they learned from General Magic [1]?

>“Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.” [2]

If you call your company magic then the product most likely is not just at the brink of your understanding but so far out that it is impossible to close the gap by hard work alone.

Steve Jobs mentioned in a very early interview somewhere that he wants to build a computer for everybody. He waited years and decades patiently until every duck was in line and he could launch the iPhone.

This thought doesn't lead to a meaningful point. I am just wondering why he and Apple (e.g. the A7[3]) got the timing right several times but many others push too soon or wait too long.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/547452-magic-s-just-science...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21704954

>>ryandr+Sa
I don’t think this was ever the case for Magic Leap. All threads were always full of ‘I think this is waaaay too much funding for something we haven’t even seem yet’.

I’m just confused how the press and investors were misled in such a miraculous way.

>>keenma+bd
First mover is an advantage, but it can't overcome the problem of releasing a product before its underlying technology is ready. It's not first mover so much as the company that moves at just the right time.

Magic Leap smells a bit like the Apple Newton. Too far ahead of its time to be a market success, even with so much effort behind it.

>>soared+t7
Yea honestly - that's the only way to do it when you're going out on a limb like this. That's why business often prefer more conservative incremental changes. These folks took a giant risk making such a drastic tech leap and they just need to reap what they've sown. They're selling units to the public so we're out of alpha, they're trying to pawn off alpha units as a finished product, or they really don't know what they're doing. Either way signs aren't great.

>>ryandr+Sa
I think this is generally a good thing about Silicon Valley culture.

It’s the reason you get successes like Tesla or SpaceX and it’s generally good to bias towards optimism over pessimism - you get more people able to try more things and successes that have exponential returns make up for the failures.

Otherwise you get stagnation which ends poorly for everyone.

That said, optimism still requires a plan that makes sense and shipping a real product.

>>cridde+oe
> eliminate the need for glasses or goggles

What is the other option? Implanting projectors in our eyeballs? Having some drone flying in front of your face that projects stuff right onto your eyeballs?

>>gumby+(OP)
This 2015 story did already sent the wrong message, blatantly ripping off other people in the industry.

Magic Leap Ripped Off Those Awesome UI Concepts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8974976

>>daenz+X3
I'm torn on this, on one hand it's a bit shady, on the other I get why they're doing it. The only impressive bit about this piece of hardware is to actually experience virtual 3D objects projected onto the real world. If you capture a 2D video of this through the lens you're effectively left with very mediocre 3D models in a darkened environment. There's simply no way it can look good without cheating. It'll look like VR but worse.

>>gumby+(OP)
I was very skeptical about this company, but I actually got to demo the technology a few nights ago, and I have to say my mind was blown. There are definitely a lot of kinks to work out, but I would say that the experience was not too far off from the whale video they used to have on their homepage, probably better. In the demo I saw, you are immersed in a sort of coral reef, but it's all within the confines of your living room. It basically looks like you're living room has turned into a fish tank. It feels real enough that I wanted to reach out and touch the fish swimming around in front of me. Yes, it wasn't perfect at mapping the room, but the technology was much more impressive than I imagined. And the fact that it is augmented reality rather than virtual reality made things much more interesting, because you're interacting with the real world and the virtual world at the same time.

>>gumby+(OP)
Am I going to drop $2300 sight unseen? No. I’d be willing to go to a Microsoft store or Apple store to try one out. The technology might be great, but they need to work on their marketing.

>>IshKeb+b9
Isn’t it the exact opposite? Only with AR can you turn everyday spaces, like a home or an office, into games... with VR you’d be bumping into walls and tripping over things

>>IshKeb+b9
I think good AR is most important if it can be sufficiently miniaturized. I can totally see myself wearing AR glasses if they don’t look like I’m wearing Godzilla on my head.

>>cridde+oe
There are many applications that, together, may make it worthwhile to wear AR glasses:

- Laptop monitor replacement or augmentation

- Indoor and outdoor navigation

- Identifying an available self-driving cab and dropping a waypoint for it to navigate to

- Immediate POV recording + sharing of ephemeral events (many people will like this, even if the HN crowd won't)

- Shared viewing of footage, large 3D graphics, or news items with your friends no matter where you are

- "Digitalized" brick and mortar fashion stores where you can easily identify clothes that fit you or that are in your price point. An enhanced view would show additional information, such as online reviews of each item.

- All the filtering features of the digital world can be brought into real life, including filtering out of advertisements

- Games games games. It sounds comical to say, but Pokemon will become real. People will run around with poke balls that release increasingly intelligent digital creatures. In Harry Potter AR, people will be able to cast digital spells by waving their wand in a certain way and saying the right thing. WOW or Runescape players could dawn their achievement capes irl

- Aesthetic landscape transformation. I imagine there will be a "default view," "modified view," and "off view" of the world. If you go to Times Square and enable the default view, you would be immersed in a digital world curated by the brands that advertise there. If you use a modified view, you can see whatever you want, whether that's anarchist graffiti or cyberpunk renderings. In the off view, all advertisements and all screens would be rendered invisible

- Usable IKEA instructions

- Non-boring meetings at work with interactive holographic renderings of enterprise projects

- Remote guidance and instruction (enabling emergency plant maintenance by people who have no clue how to repair a broken pipe)

- Digitally enhanced classrooms. Imagine a physics lab with a 3D rocket or roller coaster sim overlaid with force diagrams.

- Multilingual digital tour guide bots that can explain every nook and cranny of a city for free

- Guided construction of elaborate, ML-generated Lego structures

That's just the beginning. There are probably use cases we couldn't even imagine yet, kind of like how some technologies that are out today seemed like science fiction 10 years ago.

>>Aeolun+Uf
The most convincing "argument" for them was "well, they fooled Google into giving them a half a billion dollars, so they must have something there."

>>fullsh+q7
Yes, but I argue that's the same thing. The end user defines the product. They could've developed and sold the original technology is a different way (stationary entertainment, movies, etc) and be far more successful.

>>gumby+(OP)
AR fundamentally can't work.

To work, it has to understand the world around us. It needs to be full AI.

There's also no reason why we would want it. Nothing. As we develop ways to augment our world a simple phone can deliver the info.

VR has a use case for entertainment. It has no business or education case.

Work is done by reducing dimensions and abstracting things not adding dimensions and unabstraction.

But at least entertainment will propel the VR industry forward so we can see if anything else pops out.

Magic Leap faked all use cases from day one. It was obvious on multiple levels it was vaporware

>>nabdab+Mc
That sounds like buying with extra steps. I agree its a flawed comparison but still interesting

>>ghaff+i6
Agreed. I think that Google/Apple have the right idea here. I am especially fond of Google's applications of AR in maps and translations as those use cases are both common and useful.

>>ryandr+Sa
Definitely not. HN is more pessimistic than any other forum I'm on besides Slashdot (the famous iPod burn, of course).

Are you forgetting Dropbox / "that's just rsync" and various other skeptics? No one likes anything here that seems flashy. And that's a good thing.

>>unlink+3f
South Florida doesn't need to have all that talent. Pretty much none of the people I know who were considering offers from Magic Leap, with some eventually accepting them, were from Florida at all.

>>Andrew+68
Oh man I'd forgotten about that edit.

Cracks me up every time.

>>pvaran+s5
In what way is it bad? From the various video reviews I’ve seen, it seems to work a lot better than the Hololens circa a couple years ago.

>>aaron6+fi
I have a feeling this comment will be linked on HN eventually (in about a decade) the same way people link that one infamous comment about Dropbox being an unnecessary thing that no one needs or wants. Or the same way people in 2019 mock those from a couple of decades ago who were saying that internet was "just a fad" that will go away sooner rather than later.

>>gumby+(OP)
I kind of called it 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13972212

>>goneho+g7
I don’t know if any are at Magic Leap, but other General Magic alumni include Andy Rubin (Android) and Tony Fadell (iPod) so at least some of them did ok eventually.

>>bumble+Tf
On Apple (as opposed to Magic Leap), I believe a lot of it is figuring out a customer need and audience that can be satisfied by a set of technologies that are just at the edge of mature, and then not shipping the product until it actually satisfies those needs. This means not shipping a technology as a product just because it may be useful in the future, and it means resetting a products at the prototype stage often.

Both are hard for startups to take on. The former because many of the founders are heavily focused on a technology they came up with and attempt to shoehorn it into products that don't quite make sense. The latter because it requires either very patient investors or a big bank account.

Both are also hard for established, mature companies to take on. The former because they seem to believe that innovation for innovations sake is a useful thing to do, and for whatever reason the tech press seems to encourage them. The latter because they are focused on delivering quarterly results over building long term platform and ecosystem value, and because politically a cancelled project can be career ending.

>>Dylan1+i9
Pretty sure they had an original product that was definitely not vaporware, the issue is it turned out to be not scaleable at all.

A product that is obscenely expensive and therefore can't be sold as a consumer device is not vaporware.

>>gumby+(OP)
It’s expensive, and it’s incredibly difficult to convey in video what it’s like to wear one.

If you get a chance to try one, I HIGHLY recommend it. It’s an incredible experience. Even just the demos.

>>nabdab+Mc
That’s not how funding works, but it is how profit works.

>>gumby+(OP)
Lol at "Dented Reality". I would prefer "Demented Reality" though.

>>tomp+nh
A large point of video games is escape. AR takes that away. Plus, most people’s spaces aren’t set up for a game. For example, I couldn’t play Minecraft: Earth in my apartment since there isn’t a good flat space.

>>DonHop+pf
Thanks for that. Bill's been a hero of mine since I did Mac development on a Lisa using photocopied binders of Inside Macintosh mailed to me by Guy Kawasaki. Those were the days.

>>ericd+qj
Other reviews in this post say that it’s not even as good as the original Hololens

>>filole+Nj
AR has been around since 1990. VR decades before so times ticking on what a fad is and you have to make a case why this decade AR will start?

Plus I did premise it on full AI to understand the world to augment. Technically we already augment with the 100 year old phone allowing us to talk to someone far away anywhere-ish.

Your case why in a decade we want AR which is a overlayed response and a camera that can analyse the world using real technology. What will it do? Sci Fiction movies struggle to come up with more than ads or more intrusive notifications ;) Magic Leap made beautiful whales that looked pretty, cost a fortune to produce and would have worked equally well in a movie which is how everyone viewed it, in a 2D advertisement. There was no reason to AR it even if you could afford to do it in the wild.

Most museums, a place of high structure and high value struggle to even create simple voice overlays of art work.

>>tmh79+Bf
If I could get something like that as a desktop monitor replacement, I would be ecstatic. (Assuming appropriately high resolution and refresh rates - but if it's doing eye tracking that'd have to be the case)

>>daenz+X3
VR looks shitty in video through the lenses too, but it's actually really cool. I wouldn't have been put off buying a Vive by lackluster video captures, because people were saying really good things about it (or, at least, a lot of the things I wanted to hear to convince me to be an early adopter).

I guess Magic Leap's problem is that their product is thoroughly meh. Nobody is raving about it (that I'm aware of), and nothing I've seen makes me feel like going out of my way to try one.

>>dang+ia
That's nice! I noticed a modal but I closed before reading it. I could parse (not in time to avoid closing) that it was welcoming HN users.

I am curious now what it was saying.

EDIT: Got it again, it says:

"Welcome Hacker News Readers

Before you quickly exit out of this popup, consider subscribing for $10/month for your first 3 months"

I was quicker than they expected lol

>>IshKeb+b9
Gaming is like the lowest on my list of applications for AR... At the top is some kind of AR desktop environment that makes spinning up and managing arbitrary virtual monitors/windows a snap.

>>soneca+Rp
Welp, at least my copy was on point.

>>pvaran+G5
That's like launching a game console with no games on launch day then. Even worse of a blunder from Magic Leap.

>>gumby+(OP)
>Employees started receiving free headsets earlier this year, with some managers telling staffers it was because the company couldn’t sell enough and had extra inventory, said multiple people.

I applied for their developer grant program, and got offered a consolation prize of a free headset - that they wanted to send me a 1099 for the full price! Would have had to pay $600-1000 in taxes on it, so had to reject. Nice tax write-off opportunity with a bonus of good PR!

>>zer00e+u2
Even worse they had a $2300 headset that they're selling to developers and they weren't showing real footage anywhere. I'm a be enthusiast and I watched all the videos and "news" on it and was thinking "show me the money". Turns out he had money it's the product they said they had that they didn't.

>>dylan6+pe
It would at least show fidelity and detail. Instead they showed nothing so I assumed it was vaporware.

>>TrentL+y5
Also the potential markets affected. VR really only affects the games & entertainment market, which is big, but best case you're revolutionizing Hollywood. AR is applicable to a wide variety of B2B markets - surgery, piloting, hazardous waste removal, firefighting, the military, mining, tourism, deep sea exploration, science, space colonization, etc. - which collectively have much more money spent on them. Your total addressable market is basically the amount of money you can capture if everything goes perfectly, which is dictated by the amount spent on substitutes. AR has many more substitutes than VR.

Same reason cryptocurrency is hot - it threatens the financial/insurance/ownership industry, which as a $13T behemoth is currently the biggest economic prize on earth.

>>DonHop+Zh
Well, trust by proxy is what makes civilization work. But having some percentage of the populace that's always skeptical of the trust imparted like that is also essential.

Usually, Google being willing to give a company hundreds of millions of dollars is enough, because you assume whoever's job it is to give out all that money takes it seriously. Unfortunately, sometimes the more money is involved the harder it is for skeptics to get their own message out, since nobody wants to believe that all the money they've invested has been a poor choice. Just look at Uber. Any company that didn't have so many billions invested in it would have failed because of the internal problems they have long ago.

>>DuskSt+4o
I know that "light going into your eyeball" is how your eyes work, and that conventional monitors are not suspected to be great for your eyes, but "shoot light directly at your retinas" always makes me nervous.

>>tmh79+Bf
Miniaturization of multifocal projection-based technology seems inevitable. What's the best way to keep track of progress in that field, and do you know when it might hit the mass market?

>>jayd16+Re
I can't see how you would really take their implementation of occlusion seriously, what's it useful for? it's so laggy that it's not even tech-demo worthy.

>>gumby+(OP)
There's a lot of discussion here of how this was predictable given the absence of a visible prototype for so long, and the over-the-top secrecy of the project. However, for me this was a predetermined failure when I first read an interview with the founder. Classic Super-Visionary snake-oil salesman. He could say nothing about the product, except for how it would change the world more than the world had ever been changed in the history of world changes. Sure, ok. I don't remember Larry and Sergey being like that (because they had a real product). Or Bezos, etc.

Frankly, I'm shocked at how the investors couldn't see past this CEO.

>>daenz+X3
Another dimension to consider: if it's good, how long is it good for?

I just got done writing a long thread on the history of 3D as a novelty: https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/1203074623232851970

But the basic summary is that since the 1850s, people keep coming up with exciting 3D innovations that sell lots of units for a while, but that never make much of a difference. Stereoscopic 3D is interesting and fun; we all loved our ViewMasters. But once the novelty wore off, we put it on a shelf and rarely picked it up again. The ViewMaster is basically a slinky for our eyeballs.

I've talked with quite a number of people who have bought VR systems, and I have yet to find one who uses it with the sort of frequency that people use their gaming consoles, PCs, laptops, or phones to play games. Maybe this wave of innovation will eventually take face-mounted VR from "novelty" to "daily driver", but it doesn't sound like it's here yet.

>>nostra+hs
The really big market being found for VR is in fitness, that could have a much larger impact (to general health even: than if it were just used for games and entertainment.

>>khazho+ju
I think it's pretty common for investors to see someone as a Snakeoil-salesman but still invest. It only matters if they think they'll get a return.

>>fastba+Dk
A prototype is not enough to stop something from being vaporware.

Edit, to people that disagree: Did they have an even half-finished form? Did they offer it for sale?

Was it "announced to the general public but never actually manufactured nor officially cancelled"?

Vaporware doesn't always mean it's a scam. Sometimes it means there were intractable tech problems. Coming out with a fundamentally different product doesn't negate the missing product.

>>wpietr+Nu
FWIW, I left the 3D turned on with my 3DS, but I recognize that I was in the minority. I liked the 3D well enough, but OTOH I don’t really miss it on the Switch.

>>pvaran+Ft
It seemed fine for static object geometry. Throw a virtual ball behind a couch and its gone. AR toys can fall behind tables. It does add to the experience. I don't have the most up to date view but has the Hololens significantly improved over that?

>>ghaff+i6
I think this is actually why it's so hard. I can experience AR today without buying an expensive and clunky piece of hardware.

If I couldn't get a demo, it's a cool enough concept that I might be tempted and they would get revenue and also the refinement that mass usage can help fuel.

>>mo1ok+V4
What they are referring to more than likely is not the technology, but the business case. AR has more compelling / lucrative use cases than VR. While everyone is waiting for the killer Consumer VR app, Enterprise AR is blowing up.

>>SkyMar+kd
Imo, they are not really trying for the Consumer market right now, and these units are aimed at Developers, who are needed to create content for the platform. Kinda big point that was skipped over in the article, but it still paints ML into a corner.

>>donpdo+O6
> 6,000 units

This number gets more mind-blowing the more you think about it.

It's small enough that one needs to start considering the units bought by management, employees, investors, suppliers, competitors, et cetera to say nothing of their friends and families.

>>gumby+(OP)
All these talks on AR VR and I still haven’t seen a single killer app that would make me want to buy it.

>>onlyre+Yv
Well, I don't have all the data points, but it seems to me that snakeoiler should stand out as an anti-pattern. Maybe VCs see it differently. Maybe they'd inform me that the snakeoil CEOs are sometimes frauds, but the non-snakeoil CEOs always fail (not enough energy, not charismatic enough to attract talent, etc).

("Huckster"... that's the word I was looking for)

>>whoiss+kg
And as if blatantly ripping off other people in the industry wasn't enough, then there was also the sexist company culture and blatant nepotism of Abovitz hiring his old high school buddy Eric Akerman as vice president of IT, who is but one of the many people they have to thank for the lawsuit about the hostile sexist work environment, and the fact that their leadership, design team, marketing material, and target demographic excluded and insulted women:

https://www.vrandfun.com/magic-leap-settling-sex-discriminat...

>Magic Leap Settling Sex Discrimination Lawsuit with Former Employee (vrandfun.com)

>[...] It’s quite alarming to see Magic Leap make headlines for sex discrimination lawsuits rather than innovation and technology.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14310144

https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discriminat...

>This is an action for hostile environment sex discrimination and retaliation brought by Tannen Campbell ("Campbell" or "plaintiff"), former Head of Strategic Marketing and Brand Identity and, later, Vice President of Strategic Marketing and Brand Identity, against her former employer, Magic Leap, Inc. (“Magic Leap” or “defendant”).

>"Eric Akerman, vice president of IT, is a high school buddy of Abovitz. He is a loud and outspoken and several misogynistic comments have emanated from his department and from him."

>"Vice president of IT Akerman, on Nov. 8, 2016, told a large group of people who asked why he voted for Trump that it was 'because Melania is hot.'"

>Campbell, one of whose responsibilities was to help Magic Leap with the “pink/blue problem,” had to endure hostile environment sex discrimination while proposing ways, not only to make Magic Leap’s product more woman friendly, but also to make the workplace more diverse and inclusive. Campbell was terminated after (and because) she, like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who blurted out that the Emperor was naked, challenged Magic Leap’s CEO, Rony Abovitz, to acknowledge the depths of misogyny in Magic Leap’s culture and take steps to correct an gender imbalance that negatively affects the company’s core culture and renders it so dysfunctional it continues to delay the launch of a product that attracted billions of investment dollars. Campbell also raised concerns that what Magic Leap showed the public in marketing material was not what the product actually could do—admonitions ignored in favor of her male colleagues’ assertions that the images and videos presented on Magic Leap’s website and on YouTube were “aspirational,” and not Magic Leap’s version of “alternate facts.”

>Campbell met September 28, 2016 with Magic Leap CFO Henry and Head of Operations Tina Tuli for a conference call with the CFO and leadership team at R/GA, an award-winning international advertising agency that was Magic Leap’s advertising agency of record. During the call, Henry said of the product under development, “I’m sitting here between two beautiful ladies. They’re not going to want to put a big ugly device over their pretty faces. And I have an office with glass doors, I don’t want people to see me with these beautiful girls with ugly things on their faces.” Later, one of the male R/GA executives on the call asked Campbell if Henry frequently made sexist comments like he had made. A female executive at R/GA also was offended by Henry’s remarks.

>As an example of more egregious comments, Campbell told Abovitz of the “Three Os” incident and Vlietstra’s lack of any meaningful discipline in response. As an example of unconscious bias, she told him of an IT employee who was helping Campbell a new logo into the email system. Cognizant that she was taking up a lot of the employee’s time with minor changes to get the logo “perfect,” Campbell apologized for taking up so much of the employee’s time, to which he responded, “Oh, don’t worry, I get it. You’re a woman and you care that things look pretty. I’m a man. I just get the work done.”

>Euen Thompson, an IT Support Lead, on November 16, 2016, gave a tutorial to a group of seven new hires, including two women, how to use Magic Leap’s IT equipment and resources. One woman asked Thompson a question in front of the group and Thompson responded, “Yeah, women always have trouble with computers.” The women in the group, in apparent disbelief, asked Thompson to repeat what he said and Thompson replied, “In IT we have a saying; stay away from the Three Os: Orientals, Old People and Ovaries.”

> During Campbell’s last four months at Magic Leap, Abovitz—who always had been pouty and prone to temper-tantrums, began to dig his heels in even more in the face of dissenting ideas and to explode ever more frequently into child-like fits of rage, threatening retribution when he didn’t get his way, felt betrayed or was portrayed publically in an unfavorable light.

>[...] the “Wizards Wanted” section of its website. Indeed, given that a “wizard” generally is defined as “a man who has magical powers,” and virtually without exception images of wizards are male, Magic Leap’s recruiting verbiage contains a not-so-subtle “women-need-not-apply” message.

>Senior Engineer Eric Adams sent out an email December 4, 2015 through a company email list serv for social activities for Magic Leap employees and their families, which email bore the subject line, “Board (sic) Wives at home while you are loving it at the Leap,” which stated:

----

Hello Leapers:

My wife is starting a Google group outside of the Magic Leap locked domain.

It is called “Magic Leap spouses” and should be findable as such.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/magic-leap-spouses

It is sort of a social meeting place for all the spouses that have been displaced, alone in the daytime and are new to the area, would like to have lunch with or just to have someone local to hang out with when their significant other is slaving away at work thru-out the 12-Hr day. Or are they just nagging you because you moved here?

Please forward this Email to your wife if she would like to get better acclimated to South Florida. The group is not public and is reasonably private (by email invite/accept) as to not accidentally disclose any Magic Leap secrets.

----

>The gender-neutral reference to “spouses” notwithstanding, implicit in the subject line and the reference to “your wife” is the assumption — which is not too far from wrong — that all the employees were men with wives who didn’t work outside the home and were “alone in the daytime.”

>Sadly, because Magic Leap seldom hires and does not actively recruit female candidates, the company loses competitive advantage to products like Microsoft’s Hololens. Microsoft, which employs far more females on its team, developed its similar product on a faster time line with more content that appeals to both genders.

>>crypto+bA
I work at a 3d company that's starting to land some contracts for AR. I don't think you're going to see consumer reasons for a while; instead look to colleges and other training platforms. AR and VR are gonna be huge in the medical fields - learning from a 3d model is so much easier than a textbook image.

>>jrumbu+Zx
Agreed. A reasonable model is that there's a really cool AR app that runs on a smartphone that you could imagine being cool^2 if it ran using a pair of stylish glasses instead.

But that doesn't really exist. There are some AR-ish apps like Google Translate that IMO fall into the better than nothing/sometimes useful category but there's certainly nothing in the "How did I live before this !?" camp.

>>goneho+U8
Interesting article. Here's Abrash's wry summary of the problems facing AR:

Leave aside the issues associated with tracking objects in the real world in order to know how to virtually modify and interact with them. Leave aside, too, the issues associated with tracking, processing, and rendering fast enough so that virtual objects stay glued in place relative to the real world. Forget about the fact that you can’t light and shadow virtual objects correctly unless you know the location and orientation of every real light source and object that affects the scene, which can’t be fully derived from head-mounted sensors. Pay no attention to the challenges of having a wide enough AR field of view so that it doesn’t seem like you’re looking through a porthole, of having a wide enough brightness range so that virtual images look right both at the beach and in a coal mine, of antialiasing virtual edges into the real world, and of doing all of the above with a hardware package that’s stylish enough to wear in public, ergonomic enough to wear all the time, and capable of running all day without a recharge. No, ignore all that, because it’s at least possible to imagine how they’d be solved, however challenging the engineering might be.

Fix all that, and the problem remains: how do you draw black?

>>dylan6+Ud
> Magic Leap reminds me of Theranos.

Even if Magic Leap dies on the vine, I don't think they're anything like Theranos except for both being unsuccessful VC-funded companies. Theranos tried to sell fraudulent health care services. Magic Leap is trying (and failing) to build a real product. You can buy one and see what it does, and nobody's health is impacted if their experience just sucks.

>>goneho+g7
Google did the same thing with Glass. They had super slick concept video that went viral, and the real product couldn't be anything but a disappointment after that.

>>saalwe+3t
Right?!! What could possibly go wrong?

>>Andrex+Wq
Sounds like VR would be better for that

>>daeken+Q2
And the double FOV area no? If I remember correctly it’s even slightly bigger than hololens 2 that went out something like 6 months after magic leap one.

>>LegitS+Bb
Not really. Remember that before their device launched they were ridiculed for being too honest and showing the rock throwing guy demo. This was months before you could buy it: https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/273280-magic-leaps-first-...

>>JumpCr+Fz
Honestly, with high priced dev kits they just need to be given out for free like Valve did with the Vive. Magic leap has given out thousands just to get devs on board.

>>MarkMc+UB
Oof yeah. Crazy as it might sound, it seems like the easier path to a complete solution is some sort of neural lace interfacing with the optic nerve. We're obviously not there today, but maybe by the end of the century?

>>saalwe+3t
I suspect in about 20-30 years that method will be considered antiquated, and brain implants with direct access to the user's visual cortex will be far more sensible for that kind of thing.

>>gbear6+in
I would call bullshit on that. Just the double FOV would make it barely usable compared to completely useless like the first hololens.

>>heyits+dE
I think this is one of Neuralink’s long term goals.

>>fastba+mj
Likewise. The same meme was also used for trashing the sorry state of No Man's Sky release in 2016:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5jWtz3rzco

To their credit, the developers diligently kept working on the game and I've heard it's quite polished now. I kind of doubt we'll see the same turnaround story with Magic Leap, but who knows.

>>seanmc+Ev
Nope. Porn.

>>awestr+wC
But VR would prevent you from interacting with your real environment. For instance, with AR you could still grab your tea mug without switching context.

>>cacony+Np
One major difference between VR and AR content is that VR can do blacks. Current AR is limited to overlaying more light onto a piece of your visual field. It has no way to make any spot more dark. This is fine for VR, since there should be no other light leaking in apart from what is produced by the unit. AR at the least needs a projector that can compete with the amount of light in the your scene already.

>>DonHop+Zh
My understanding is that sergey wanted to do it and he can effectively write checks right off the balance sheet. Google Ventures passed, as folks were always eager to tell me.

>>daenz+X3
This is why we always said “shot through the glasses” at CastAR.

>>kaibee+bF
You could make an occlusion shutter but I haven’t seen a small lcd with the requisite speed and resolution.

>>gumby+(OP)
The main problem with ML is that they don't have enough apps, that could practically be usable with AR technology. They marketed with Whale and GoT app, which is nothing compared to the spatial awareness and real world tracking they could have presented.

>>Holoma+e9
> But no company does this at all.

CastAR/Tilt5 all demos. We also allowed the press to film through our hardware.

>>ericd+qj
It seems to be significantly worse than the Lenovo AR toy lightsaber thing that clips onto your phone (similar to Meta’s design).

>>dang+ia
Thanks dang! I specifically used the TechCrunch article for that reason and am glad you were able to get a hole cut in the paywall.

>>gumby+eF
Sounds like that's the same way Google Glass got funded, too. I wonder what Sergey Brin thought of the nepotism at Magic Leap that he funded, documented in the sexual discrimination lawsuit?

http://valleywag.gawker.com/meet-the-google-founders-mistres...

>Since Google Glass launched to our awe and horror, the company's co-founder, Sergey Brin, hasn't been spotted without a pair. He's placed himself atop the privacy-eroding project, publicly, and inside Google's secret labs. Maybe it's because he's fucking the Glass marketing manager, Amanda Rosenberg.

>According to a startling report by AllThingsD's Liz Gannes and Kara Swisher, Brin and his wife of six years, Anne Wojcicki, are no more, now that he's found himself a PR girlfriend at Google. AllThingsD also reported this girlfriend was recently attached to another (totally coincidentally departing) top Googler, Hugo Barra, to make Brin's relationship with the recent San Francisco transplant behind the backs of his wife and children all that much worse.

https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discriminat...

>"Eric Akerman, vice president of IT, is a high school buddy of Abovitz. He is a loud and outspoken and several misogynistic comments have emanated from his department and from him."

>"Vice president of IT Akerman, on Nov. 8, 2016, told a large group of people who asked why he voted for Trump that it was 'because Melania is hot.'"

>>ianai+L8
The Virtual Boy was VR, not AR. VR is suffering a “hype hangover” of its own these days, sure, but I’d say not to the same degree as AR. The tech works much better (it’s just a screen with a fancy lens in front), it has at least one solid use case (games; mostly played at home, so less worry about the social awkwardness of wearing something on your head), and millions of VR headsets have been sold.

>>joejer+vC
I'm sure they have software interlocks to make sure nothing bad happens with the energy levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

>>wpietr+Nu
>I've talked with quite a number of people who have bought VR systems, and I have yet to find one who uses it with the sort of frequency that people use their gaming consoles, PCs, laptops, or phones to play games. Maybe this wave of innovation will eventually take face-mounted VR from "novelty" to "daily driver", but it doesn't sound like it's here yet.

I pretty much fully agree with your assessment, with the caveat that I've seen a lot of folks really getting in to their Oculus Quests in a way that never happened for the tethered unit. I'm certain many would spend even more time using it if there was a larger software library.

(And yes, the success of the Quest genuinely surprised me, too. Having now gotten to play with one, I have to say tetherless with good controllers is the biggest single improvement in VR since the first modern headset.)

>>csalle+4C
I was disappointed that the one I tried, I couldn't even get the UI to respond properly. Maybe it was just that unit but I could swear I recall reading of others have similar issues with the interface.

>>aaron6+kn
>AR has been around since 1990. VR decades before so times ticking on what a fad is and you have to make a case why this decade AR will start?

By that metric, we had smartphones at least since the early 90s. They didn't make any significant impact on the world at all until at least late 00s. And now, look at the world we live in these days.

>Your case why in a decade we want AR which is a overlayed response and a camera that can analyse the world using real technology. What will it do?

Everything a smartphone can do, but in a much more seamless, unobtrusive, and superior way, as well as many many other things that we cannot even think of now. If you think a tech that can completely supplant smartphones (as well as offer many more things that smartphones cannot do) isn't gonna be desired by people in the future, then I think there isn't much one can say to convince you otherwise.

>>rl3+JE
Nice video explaining No Man Sky’s evolution: https://youtu.be/uzvxn6l50co

Anyone who has worked in software knows the difference between expectations/projections and real life. Everything takes 10x longer once you dig into the details. So it’s great to see a gaming company able to adapt and continually release through those down moments and eventually produce something great.

It makes you wonder how much better other games could be if they took an incremental approach and continually expanded the world available to users.

>>pabo+7F
At this stage, I honestly think it would be easier to get pre-modeled tea mugs that your VR headset can track than to have a good experience replacing your desktop with AR. Even just modeling it yourself and gluing a vive puck to the bottom seems pretty easy. I understand that the mug is really just one example, but for almost any given problem VR seems like it's ready to be adjusted to deal with it far better than AR is ready to even create the fundamental experience of being a desktop monitor replacement.

>>JumpCr+Fz
A friend worked for them and (if I recall correctly) employees got a free unit. Not sure if that’s included in this number.

>>tigers+TD
It's 45% bigger in area, rather than to a side (~4x overall area) like most people think when they see "double FOV". It's an improvement, yes, but not one that actually substantially changes its utility. If I could trade my Magic Leap for my old Hololens, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

>>filole+af
How was the comfort level on the HL2? That and the low FOV were what killed the original for me, as my use case is replacing my screens. I'm actually getting ready to commit to working 100% through VR -- Quest -- and AR -- currently ML1, but seriously considering the HL2...

If I didn't have a toddler to watch while I work much of the time, I'd probably just go all-in on VR (I'm currently working 30-50% through the Quest), but being able to see the world is kind of essential for those times haha.

>>madeng+QE
I don’t really see that at all. Facebook just bought Beat Games, not PornHub.

>>rl3+eE
AR brain implants in 20-30 years? We can't even cure hemorrhoids. No way that timeline is accurate.

>>gumby+nF
You actually can't do that: People have tried, but the plane of focus makes the LCD too blurry. It's an unsolved technology problem.

>>jdminh+0C
Theranos failed to sell automatic blood testing machines to the military so they pivoted to providing services of questionable repute.

>>wpietr+Nu
You are confusing tech deficiency for the lack of interest. Imagine if the tech was available so you can see 3D content covering the entire human FOV in 8K resolution that with almost no weight on the head just for $500, would you not buy it and use it full time? Things have came long way and still long way to go but our biological construction demands 3D tech and it's not going to change anytime soon.

>>dmix+3I
I didn't get No Man's Sky until this August when they released the VR version. I got it on sale fully expecting to spent only 20 minutes with it. I just wanted to see it in VR. I ended up spending 20 hrs. I felt like a little kid pretending to be in space. It was awesome. About 15hrs in I tried non-VR for a moment. Couldn't take it. There are many things I'd change about the game but being in space in VR was amazing.

>>MarkMc+UB
Surprisingly enough all of the above is fairly well solved (or at least has the illusion to have been solved) in HoloLens and it turns out that not being able to draw black isn't a huge issue because AR is designed to interface with existing world and all virtual objects are ok to have grey instead of full black. If you were going to watch movie or play classic games, this would be an issue but that is not interfacing with the existing world and AR is not targetted for those use cases.

>>daeken+VI
I like the “goggle” frame of the ML better than the HL1. I am excited to try a HL2 and see how much more the FOV improves over the HL1. I hated the postage stamp feel of the HL1.

>>davidw+5z
> Enterprise AR is blowing up

citation?

>>DonHop+Rc
you know that's not even the worst ted talk i've seen

>>MarkMc+UB
> Fix all that, and the problem remains: how do you draw black?

This concern is technologically narrow-sighted. We already have VR headsets with forward cameras built in. If the real world image is a projection too, you can draw whatever you want, including black.

>>wpietr+Nu
Well then you can come meet me and about 150 other friends.

I pretty much play VR only at this point. Any time I try a typical flat screen 3D game something is missing. The frustration of having a camera stick. The boringness of having to "press the action button" instead of just reaching out and touch the thing I'm supposed to interact it. And of course most of all the feeling of "presence". The Citadel on the horizon in HL2 (old reference sorry) is a pretty picture but nothing more. The volcano in Farpoint is 3 miles high with a 15 mile high plumb of smoke and I feel that as though I was there. It's like a picture of the grand canyon vs actually being at the grand canyon. They aren't comparable and I can't go back to not feeling like "being there".

This isn't a "gimmick" like 3D movies where they stick things in your face or throw stuff at you just show off the tech. It's qualitatively different.

If there was more content I was interested in I'd spent even more time in VR. Unfortunately there isn't that much AAA VR content and worse for me I can't take horror in VR, it's way to intense, so I probably won't be able to play the new VR Half Life coming out in March.

VR today is like an Apple Newton in 1993. Everyone laughed. Heck in 2007 PDAs where just for geeks. Then in 2008 Apple's PDA shipped, the iPhone, and now everyone has a PDA in their pocket to the point that's you'd be considered strange not to have one. It might be a while, it might even be another 15 years but VR will happen. It's just too compelling when it's good.

>>ghaff+i6
> If I could just point a phone at things and get genuinely useful information as an overlay, I'd consider that a pretty decent AR application.

Layar [0] was an attempt at that a decade ago on Android. Seems to be completely dead now though.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2009/10/layar-android-hands-on/

>>ghaff+i6
I see phone AR as a pointless gimmick. Like comparing a 1970s video game to PS4 video game. Yes both can be fun but pong is not really comparable to GTA5. Phone AR is so far off from Black Mirror AR. I can imagine every teenage girl spending all their time playing with their friends in AR, having their friends appear in their bedroom instead of just on Facetime. With AR glasses, some future version where they are no more intrusive than normal reading glasses, I can't imagine them not doing it. I can imagine all the youtube AR cooking classes will just project directly on your kitchen counter where you can either stand directly beside the chef or cover the same space, have your friends appear on the sofa next to you for facetime, etc... When it actually gets there it will be compelling in the extreme and non-geeks will flock to it like they did to iPhone. Until then it will stay in the realm of Apple Newton.

>>Holoma+XD
It was hyped for a long time before that. That they released the underwhelming demo is just them failing. But they kept what it actually displayed confidential for a long time.

>>Baeocy+aH
Yeah, I got to try the Quest as well, and it's what the experience should be like. No cables, no beacons, no markers, no nothing.

But the resolution and framerate is too weak right now. Needs 8K in 60fps, so it's just a matter of time.

>>ianai+L8
https://www.tiltfive.com/

Edit: Adding a Tested review...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jse-GwkcYgI

>>6gvONx+3K
Not saying it'll be commonplace by then, just that the technology will probably exist.

As I understand it today, Neuralink already has a surgical robot that can thread electrodes in between individual neurons with minimal damage.

>>gumby+(OP)
I’m actually surprised they’ve sold any. Are there any practical uses/games/anything useful or enjoyable you can do with them?

>>tmh79+Bf
That makes sense. Because I heard on a podcast, this week in tech, I think, from a VC on the panel that was an investor and the rest of the panel was comparing it to Microsoft's ar product and he was adamant that he had seen things that he couldn't talk specifics about but that it was a total game changer.

>>Andrew+68
Thank you for that link haha

>>henrik+kN
Hopefully more than 60fps :) It's currently 72fps, and the Index is 120/144, which sounds close to ideal. I've been pretty happy with the Quest's 72 for now though.

>>dmix+3I
For me it's a very conflicted project. All they've done since release has been admirable, and NMS is now a good game well-worth the fee. Thing is, most of that work should've been done before release, and is it right to commend a company for marketing creme-filled donuts and then sending us the creme in the mail eighteen months later? Even so, I would've said yes it is, except for one issue: they still refuse to apologize for deliberately lying to us about launch features. They deflect, they say they got too excited, too ambitious. What they don't do is admit the moral failure inherent in marketing features they hadn't even begun adding to the code base. They didn't even start to try until after they got caught lying and they still refuse to admit it.

>>sytelu+1L
I don't think I would. I already have the experience of immersion with current screens. I don't think strapping screens to my face will improve anything. And given the metaphorical and literal headaches of trying to fool the human vision system, I don't expect that I'd enjoy anything in the facehugger category.

This might change for me if we could bypass the eyeballs and the limbs, of course.

>>khazho+DA
Seems to me one person's snake oil has often been another person's cannabis oil, in oil terms I guess where neither type of oil may actually be useful to a particular consumer.

But if you've got a truly persuasive and aggressive salesman who can really get things done and actually sell virtual snake oil like few others, especially for much more than it's worth if genuine to buyers who don't actually need the product or as much as he is selling them; well that salesman needs to be incentivized with excess genuine product to sell, and appropriate adult supervision and probably legal counsel and you can reach goals more impressive than most top salesmen who are themselves very productive.

IOW with that kind of salesman you don't need functional product anyway since you'll do quite well selling the sizzle alone, but if you do actually throw in a real steak it can indeed be relatively non-slimy.

So a product company might be able to slide more product out through a slick pipeline, but when you're delivering something of value you're still a product company.

The problem is a salesman like this who gets too close to executive rank can overcome the supervision and turn it into a snake oil company, and it can ruin everything.

Or with the right connections, found a new high-tech snake oil company where the most important consideration was not a product of value anyway. Unless dreams came true of course.

>>greggm+iM
I'm glad to hear there are a few people happy with the current stuff. But I'll note that in the 1990s wave of VR there were people who would talk exactly like this. It was amazing; they loved it; the tech and content wasn't there yet, but surely in 10 or 20 years, we'd all be spending all our time immersed. And I'll note that James Cameron, director of Avatar, has essentially the same belief about 3D movies: https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2428530/the-problem-3d-has-...

I'm still unconvinced. And I'll note that plenty of people get the feeling of presence from novels, from comic books, from movies, from games. Getting lost in a world isn't a property of technology. It's something humans have been doing since we were telling stories around a campfire.

When we want that, that is. As you say, we just as often want distance from our experiences. And quite often we're indifferent to immersion; it's not material to the experience we seek. Movie tickets sales are down 25% since 2000. That might be in part because some people have fancy home theaters that are nearly as good, the at-home 100" screen with 7.1 sound. But I think it's mostly because people are happy watching things on laptops and tablets and phones. They mostly don't want to "be there", however much that horrifies the Martin Scorseses of the world.

>>gumby+(OP)
I saw this coming long ago. I wrote this on June 7th 2018: https://arccompute.com/blog/why-augmented-reality-is-not-rea...

>>daenz+X3
When you're selling someone a dream, especially their own dream, fantasy always needs to be presented as reality.

Looks like they're making money from investors rather than customers, and the strongest marketing efforts are probably not focused on things which would appeal to ordinary buyers.

>>MarkMc+UB
What I find funny is that I believe he worked at Valve at the same time Jeri Ellsworth was there solving most of these issues.

Her new TiltFive system is "AR somewhere" rather than AR everywhere which allows it to provide a solid, practical, and affordable experience.

Here's a Tested review if you haven't looked into T5 before...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jse-GwkcYgI

>>sytelu+xL
It's worth reading the article. "How do you draw black?" is a teaser for a much more insightful and nuanced (and convincing) treatment.

Here's a bit more:

Given additive blending, there’s no way to darken real pixels even the slightest bit. That means that there’s no way to put virtual shadows on real surfaces. Moreover, if a virtual blue pixel happens to be in front of a real green “pixel,” the resulting pixel will be cyan, but if it’s in front of a real red “pixel,” the resulting pixel will be purple. This means that the range of colors it’s possible to make appear at a given pixel is at the mercy of what that pixel happens to be overlaying in the real world, and will vary as the glasses move.

>>daenz+X3
I went to a magic leap developer event and tried the headset first hand. It was truly magical. It made me giggle. Now, at the current price point it’s too high for me to buy as a toy and I haven’t really been struck with any killer app ideas to buy it as a dev kit, but I really think it’s an extremely cool piece of kit.

>>notjus+NA
I hope so, medical field is in a major need for innovation.

>>goneho+g7
Apparently in actual product, the whale demo was liked by many incl. Adam Savage[1]. It seems, magic leap was able to map the windows in a room and was able to bring in the whale from outside via the window.

[1]https://youtu.be/0N2HqCdsSGM?t=387

>>daeken+VI
No, it’s not. Hololens was 30 x 17.5 degrees, Magic Leap one is 40 x 30. Ignoring the solid angles and just naively multiplying the two dimensions we have 525 vs 1200. Two me the FOV area seems well above the double.

>>rl3+cO
Neuroprosthetics as a field has a fairly long history. It's fascinating. However, it moves slowly, like most everything else human body related.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroprosthetics#History

>>cridde+Bd
me too because people were raving about it. I wonder how much influence was peddled, given the billions invested.

>>jjeaff+jO
What podcast & episode was that?

>>simonh+Xj
Yeah, especially with the 87 million in 'quit quietly' money that Andy got for harassing his coworkers.

>>mumble+OQ
I'm not sure that this isn't solvable, having used a hololens, I don't remember this being an issue, and if it was, it wasn't one that impacted my experience.

>>Causal+EO
But when it’s Sony co-marketing can you really blame them?

It was their first time ever getting that kind of attention from a publisher and they screwed it up. That’s how I’ve interpreted it at least.

>>sheepd+h7
Fiber scan display in hi res would’ve required moving at 14× speed of sound: https://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/06/magic-leap-fiber-scanning...

>>khazho+ju
The hype, overfunding, bust is very Segway.

>>greggm+iM
> The boringness of having to "press the action button" instead of just reaching out and touch the thing I'm supposed to interact it.

but "reaching out" in VR equates to waving around a VR wand in space and pressing buttons on it, I'm not sure what's the difference?

>>Dylan1+6w
Except you can buy the Magic Leap One.

They promised light-field AR goggles, and you can buy light-field AR goggles.

>>wpietr+Nu
> I have yet to find one who uses it with the sort of frequency that people use their gaming consoles, PCs, laptops, or phones to play games.

Part of the problem the industry has with VR is unrealistic measures of success.

Does VR really have to be used with the same frequency we use consoles and have sales as high as smart phones to be considered not a novelty?

There's a huge gap between "another duffer like 3D TV" and "the new iPhone"

>>aeturn+e7
On the other hand the more modest AR in Pokemon Go has been a huge hit.

>>henrik+kN
As someone else pointed out the framerate is already way past 60Hz.

But is resolution that important? If had to list the areas where VR needed improvement it would be fairly low down my list. I'd put comfort and FOV higher and improving the screen door effect would also probably trump resolution.

But I think none of these things are deal-breakers. Content is king as they say. Previous new media have not been held back by quality issues. Early consoles didn't suddenly leap into mass adoption when the graphics improved. Cinema didn't mature when film stock got better. It was content and people's awareness that changed.

>>tripzi+i21
Your hands are in the same physical location as the object you're interacting with. It removes one of the planks of artificiality and improves the chance your brain will stop signalling that experience isn't real.

I don't entirely agree with OP. I enjoy VR even when it uses the gamepad. If the iteractions have a good "in-game" explanation - no matter how far-fetched - then your brain will stop raising the alarm. So if the game gives a good justification for pushing buttons in-world then that will do the trick.

>>wpietr+sP
Although VR is technically "strapping screens to your face" that description doesn't do justice to the actual experience. I sense from your jocular put-downs the scepticism of someone that hasn't tried modern VR. Would I be correct?

>>aspace+iY
Yes, you can, and if we don't hold this kind of behavior accountable it will keep happening.

>>lookda+cR
I think they are pretty cool but I wear glasses. Not entirely uncommon amongst their target market. Lens inserts kill the share-ability of the thing and mean that it's basically tailored to my personal prescription.

They made a really myopic decision to exclude the short-sighted.

>>gumby+(OP)
It will likely become the next WeWork

>>gumby+(OP)
I shot a video with Tom Furness from the UW a few years ago. He was totally burned by the UW on the patents sold to magic leap and didn't get a dime. Then in the interview Tom called the product total BS because they will never never ship the true waveguide system.

The demo in lab was shown to the investors. They were sold a bill of goods because the technology simply does not scale down to a headset size with proper heat dissipation and power needs. Ever hear of Microvision?

The bottom line? Magic Leap was completely arrogant and gave Devs the run-around. Then they hyped up the market with the fail whale videos that we're all CGI and served no practical need showcasing the technology helping to save time or fix a problem.

The dev kits shipped did showcase a lot of hard problems that needed to be solved and integrated. A cool glimpse of the future. However the waveguide system that they hyped investors on was never shipped in the dev kits. They used smoke and mirrors to fool people.

Magic leap is really based off of old Microvision hype with the great backroom demo for investors that will not manifest into a real product anytime in the near future.

Microsoft's going to own the Enterprise in this space with integrated cloud scale systems powering the headset.

I've tried the Magic Leap, HoloLens, helped launch the Gear VR, and was early in the old Valve VR room. Remember kids, don't believe the hype.

>>dang+ia
I'm not sure what "unlocking" the article, but assume that we should be able to see the full article. Currently, I can only see the two first paragraphs and the article ends with "with direct knowledge of the discussions" and then a "No subscription? You're missing out." ad. Seems to still be behind a paywall.

>>drcode+RK
So the whole light field techbuzz was just vaporware hype? Or no, but even that can't do black?

>>capabl+d81
Odd, I can definitely see the full thing. You're definitely clicking through from here on HN, right?

>>wpietr+Nu
Hey wait, I thought "Goofy Droopy Glasses" were a slinky for our eyeballs.

http://www.houseofrave.com/goofy-slinky-eyeball-glasses.html

>>tim333+w31
Is pretending to be something that you're not really "modest"?

>>saalwe+3t
Monitors are bad for your eyes because of the strain of long term focusing at a plane a short distance away - not because of the light hitting your retinas.

Lasers are dangerous to the eye because there's no real ramp up for the beam - you can produce an almost arbitrarily powerful pin-prick of light which gives you no warning before it's all hitting the same spot on your retina and destroying it. The beam doesn't diffract of diffuse because it's all one wavelength and colliminated so it puts all that energy suddenly on one part of the eye.

But that property is also what makes the idea of using them for VR/AR amazing: because you could more or less directly target individual parts of the retina with no diffraction, then there's no eyestrain - everything can be made always in focus because the nature of the beam means it essentially bypasses your eye's lens. Your eyes relax because you think everything's in focus already.

>>tripzi+i21
I feel like you probably haven't tried VR? The thing about VR is put someone who doesn't understand video games or any of the metaphors people who grow up with them understand, and in something like the HTC Vive they'll still just "get it". People almost immediately start walking around and trying to touch things, pick things up etc.

The biggest problem with VR is headset bulk, and space. Lighter headsets will make a huge difference. Finding a way to give people more raw space to play in will make a huge difference.

>>greggm+iM
This reads like someone who has had VR for a limited time. Yes, it’s very impressive at first, and people write posts like these. After a few years, many realize that the resolution is low, the headsets are uncomfortable, and the experiences are limited. It still has a long way to go. I do agree that it can happen, but it needs to be much better, similar to the state of AR,

>>gbear6+am
So you cannot have companies like Amazon which had no profits for like a decade.

>>Wowfun+q81
Yup, I did! I can even see the utm_source and utm_medium query params in the URL that I guess is supposed to unlock the article. But this is what I see https://i.imgur.com/pN83qpg.png

>>spectr+1f1
You certainly can, but even Amazon had much higher revenue/funding ratio than Magic Leap.

>>DonHop+B91
I'm not sure how they are pretending? The AR bit seems to work pretty well to me.

>>XorNot+uc1
I did try VR a few times. And no I didn't like it. I had a lot of trouble with the controls, these wand things and the buttons on it. I'm also not comfortable with regular console controllers, so maybe that's it. But my main problem is that any time I tried it I got overstimulated super quickly and it just made me very annoyed and in a bad mood. It's healthier for me to avoid situations like that.

On the other hand, if the controls were actually like "reach out and touch the thing" (which they just aren't because you're holding things that only signify interaction), I might have felt better about it. Not sure, because so far all VR has made me feel completely helpless wrt the controls.

>>tmh79+Bf
I've had a similar demo a few years ago from some under-the-radar Israeli company, projecting image straight to the retina. It took only a single table, and they talked about how their tech was actually better than Magic Leap – but as most of Israeli high tech, they were looking to get silently acquired by some tech giant instead of developing a product themselves. Never heard of what happened to them later.

>>pas+k81
Actually, my understanding is that light field is actually the ONLY way you could have ar with opaque black. However, you'd need orders of magnitude better light field tech than what's available.

>>jandre+hg
If you or I could answer that, we could probably raise Magic Leap levels of money to develop it.

>>keenma+Kh
Education and games seem sensible and I already said there may be some commercial uses (although I can't imagine them ever being good enough to want to use for 8 hours a day). Nothing else you listed there offers enough of an improvement over current phone and watch based alternatives.

Outside of education, games, and commercial uses, I don't think they will be able to overcome the glasshole factor.

It's going to be a big market, but I don't think it will ever be as big as cell phones are today.

>>1MoreT+U4
One of the funniest eras of advertising was the ads for HD TV broadcast on 480p TV. They’d always include all these video clips & that always made me laugh :-)

>>LegitS+cs
Apples and oranges I think. Take video signal reproduction as an example. You can have the same signal routed to different display devices, and they image produced will look better/worse than the original. Compare it on a 1980s 3 lens RGB projection screen compared to a CRT compared to a modern OLED screen. Compare Google Cardboard VR headsets with a cheap plastic lens compared to the higher quality headsets.

>>mch82+An1
A pedantic side note: analog TV broadcasts in America were 480i, not even 480p.

>>wpietr+gQ
Cameron made a great 3D movie that spawned a generation of shitty counterfeit imitations. That article is about how Cameron feels 3D cinema was poisoned by a glut of cheap fake 3D, and he wants real 3D tech to develop so people stop faking it, and he wants a no glasses solution. Is he wrong?

People always had TV. Obviously home viewing is winning because it's getting better and it's much cheaper and more convenient.

>>comex+VG
Keep in mind that Pokemon Go (AR) has generated over $700M in revenue for iOS App Store & Google Play. [1] That’s 7x the $100M in revenue Facebook generated from the entire Oculus Store (VR). [2]

[1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/pokemon-go-statistics/, Pokémon Go Statistics

[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/oculus-eclipses-100-millio..., Oculus eclipses $100 million in VR content sales.

>>mch82+cr1
The difference is that PGo is an AR toy putting stickers on screen, not a 3D experience. And it's riding hard on Pokemon IP and Pokemon collector gimmick, not easy to replicate with other games in same or different genres. The failing AR projects are presenting it as a virtual reality experience, as general as everything we do on monitors first.

>>greggm+WM
Why girls?

>>andyba+Q31
> Your hands are in the same physical location as the object you're interacting with.

But, they literally aren't. The object is in virtual space, and your hands are interacting with two controllers (wands) that you cannot see and this interaction is then translated to control the virtual space.

I suppose, with practice they would become more of an extension of yourself? But that's not what I assume what was meant with "having to press the action button instead of just reaching out and touch the thing". Maybe the VR I tried just had really shitty controllers?

>>tomp+nh
Let’s be honest. Both are nothing more than niche.

>>Causal+EO
So many companies think they can pull a fast one and ignore/downplay mistakes with PR speak which is so stupid in 2019.

Information can’t be controlled, people aren’t stupid, and honesty goes a lot further to regain respect and patience... than some bullshit positive spin.

Sadly entrepreneurs and the business community cares more about pushing persuasion and clever tactics than merely being human and honest to your customers.

So agreed the iterative approach is excellent and dedication after getting panned in reviews is rare and should be encouraged... but their communication? Not so much.

>>lonela+8r1
I believe he is wrong. Sure, it's possible that Cameron is the only person who can make a good 3D movie. But the explanation that's more consistent with the history of 3D is that he was the person to get in early and ride the novelty wave. Once the novelty wore off, people stopped bothering.

It's true that home viewing is winning because it's more convenient. But my point is that it's obviously worse in terms of viewer experience and the technical qualities that VR proponents believe will finally lead to VR success.

>>andyba+T31
I have not tried the very latest generation, but I have tried previous generations. For me, it's really amazing/engaging/compelling for a while. And once the novelty wears off, it's not. I've also tried creating my own VR content and it's the same deal when I test it on people: really neat the first time, but interest quickly declines.

>>andyba+b31
Is there a gap there? I mean, sure, I see it conceptually, but I don't see a market gap.

Look at movies as an example. When sound came along, it basically destroyed the market for silent film. Same deal for color film. But 3D has come and gone at least twice, bumping along as a novelty in between.

I think it's going to be even more true of VR, in that doing good VR content is a) difficult, and b) a pretty different process than most non-VR content. One of the VR fans in this thread was bemoaning the lack of AAA VR content in particular. But nobody's going to be making that content unless the market is large enough to support it.

>>lookda+cR
Same. I tried it in 2016 during an interview and it was incredible... but I don’t have a use case for it and so can’t justify.

>>Andrex+Wq
Hololens lets you do that. You can put windows on any walls. It's... cool. But not useful. Real screens are just much better. Nobody is going to pay much money to do something with AR that isn't particularly useful, and is better with existing technology.

They might pay money to do something that they literally can't do using any other technology, i.e. AR games.

>>tomp+nh
No, VR lets you map a room so you can avoid walking into things. There are plenty of games that don't need a lot of space at all (the first Rift was a sit-down experience!)

>>fastba+o21
So there was an "original product" that was "not scaleable", "obscenely expensive" and "can't be sold as a consumer device", right?

If we distinguish the magic leap one as a different product, then from what I can see the original qualifies as vaporware.

>>capabl+ff1
You probably configured your browser to omit referrers. The Information looks at that to decide unlocking.

>>gumby+(OP)
Well, the crazy thing is, the underlying technology that ML was originally based on (i.e. U. Of Wahington's HIT lab VRD), is absolutely a leading approach in the path to AR. I personally think it's what will ultimately make AR the medium for applications people actually want (dare I say, need) to use every day. Ronny got that part right. Where he failed was in not investing that $2B+ fully into the glasses development and solving hard AR software problems like real time occlusion. Instead, this guy hired "story tellers" to design content for a technology that he didn't have yet.

For the second mistake, let me say only that people in AR marketing demos should not be smiling. If they are, you're introducing the wrong product.

The core idea was on the right track, but the conductor let the train derail very early on.

>>vkou+CX
Lets not forget Rubins own mini me Magic Leap by taking over control of CastAR https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/andy-rubin-backed-ar-hardw...

and burning it to the ground with brilliant 'lets drop $100K for cardboard box design' and buy a gaming studio management https://theamphour.com/394-jeri-ellsworth-and-the-demise-of-...

>>lonela+js1
Yeah, I'd say Pokémon Go only barely counts as AR, although it's improved since launch. Basically I agree with everything in [1].

But honestly, I wasn't even thinking about phone AR when I made my comment. Phone AR feels like almost a completely separate category from headset AR. On one hand, it doesn't face nearly as many technical barriers. No complicated optics leading to low resolution and low FOV. No problem drawing black. No need to convince people to buy an expensive bulky object and wear it on their face all the time. On the other hand... the use cases are obviously far less futuristic.

Still, there's significant promise. I'm looking forward to the first phone AR experience to solidly implement a shared virtual environment, where users can place 3D objects anywhere in the real world and have them appear at the same location for all other users. I think phone hardware isn't quite good enough yet to make this work well, but it can already approximate it (see Minecraft Earth), and the barriers aren't nearly as fundamental.

[1] https://arinsider.co/2019/04/10/the-age-old-question-is-poke...

>>teknot+D51
> integrated cloud scale systems

a computer?

>>wpietr+uD1
> I have not tried the very latest generation, but I have tried previous generations.

Just to clarify - you mean VR with 6DOF tracking of head and controllers? Vive, Rift, Quest, Windows MR etc.

Or something else? For me this is the minimum bar to being "truly interesting VR". Everything before that was just a novelty in my view.

>>tripzi+Es1
When you're in VR the space that matters to you is mostly the virtual space. If you move a controler and some representation of that controller matches it's position exactly then you feel that is where your hand is. The fact that your hands are invisible is quickly forgotten. (Fake avatar hands can often actually reduce immersion - uncanny valley time...)

It's similar to tool use. Tools become an extension of your body and you tend to perceive them as such. Musicians, sportsmen etc are familiar with this feeling.

>>wpietr+tE1
I think there is a market gap. Even without AAA games, even without a mass-market presence, VR is a genuinely new medium and there will always be enough people fascinated by it to for content to keep producing.

Even if it's arty or niche content (which is fine by me) VR fills a unique role and people will want to keep experimenting with it.

Between education, arts, B2B, training etc the gaming side of VR could disappear entirely and there would still be enough usage to maintain an ecosystem. It doesn't take a huge company to design and make the hardware.

Maybe VR going underground for another decade wouldn't be such a bad thing. The tech industry might be slightly less unicorn-obsessed next time round.

>>andyba+eI2
Could you tell me how you came to the conclusion that it doesn't take major resources to design and make the hardware? Magic Leap took $2 billion. Occulus, $3 billion.

I do agree that there's enough revenue in novelty that content can keep happening. 3D books are still coming out this year, more than 150 years after the initial wave of hype: https://www.amazon.com/Queen-3-D-Bohemian-Rhapsody-2019/dp/1...

But I don't think there's enough evidence to demonstrate that any of those VR uses you suggest will be sustainable businesses after this wave of hype fails. Sure, people will tinker, and I think that's great.

But the most I expect to be happening 10 years from now in VR hardware is the Cardboard-style "let's put a phone on your face" thing. With perhaps a side of "VR as amusement park ride", like today: https://www.msichicago.org/explore/whats-here/tours-and-expe...

And if that's all you're expecting, that's fine by me. My issue with VR is the enormous wave of hype around it.

>>DonHop+591
Fair point. I regret the error, and appreciate the correction.

>>andyba+GH2
That's great, and I'll certainly try them when I get the chance. But please understand that every time there's a new generation of hardware somebody tells me that this time is different for 3D. And have done since the 1990s.

And I'll note that I've believed that myself as long as my use of the platform is modest enough that it stays novel. So what I'm really looking for here is what I look for when evaluating most new products: proof of sustained use by a broad audience.

My personal experience with a new product doesn't tell me a lot. There are things I personally love that never take off, and there are things I don't like that end up being wildly popular. The evidence that will tell me VR has actually arrived is when it's good enough that people stop using their TVs or their Switches or their gaming PC. Or, heck, use it 20+ hours a week at the office, letting their laptops gather dust. And not just the ~3% of the people who are technophiles, the people who absolutely loved their Google Glass. But at a minimum, people in the ~15% group of early adopters, with usage starting to leak into the early mainstream group.

>>wpietr+H43
> But please understand that every time there's a new generation of hardware somebody tells me that this time is different for 3D.

VR != 3D. 3D is only a small part of what makes VR compelling.

And it's hard for me to pass judgement on what other people have told you. I only know that 6DOF for me was the game changer. And I've been around the block a few times myself.

I'm still curious about what VR you have tried. I'd like to know what your benchmark is.

>>wpietr+L33
> Could you tell me how you came to the conclusion that it doesn't take major resources to design and make the hardware?

God knows how ML spent $2 billion. Where did you get the figures on Oculus? Is that their spend or how much Facebook spent on them?

My source is the fact that multiple relatively small companies have brought VR headsets to market and that there are viable open hardware projects to do the same.

> My issue with VR is the enormous wave of hype around it.

Then we agree. My fear is the hype and the associated snipe will kill a fascinating new medium before it's had a chance to mature.

>>lonela+ys1
Have you seen dance roulette? This was made almost 10 years ago: http://youtu.be/aEolW1x9O3k

>>tripzi+Es1
I think a similar thing happens with all tools. The same happens with game controllers, mice, keyboards, etc. While you're getting to know them, they're weird and unfamiliar. And then once you're really used to them, they vanish. When I'm typing a comment, I'm not thinking about fingers or QWERTY. I'm immersed in what I'm doing.

Which is certainly an argument that people get used to VR controllers. But I think it's also an argument against VR being particularly special in terms of immersion.

>>wpietr+bn3
> But I think it's also an argument against VR being particularly special in terms of immersion.

Or rather, it's an argument against 6DOF controllers being central to VR immersion. I think they make a difference albeit a small one.

Actual physical hand tracking is wonderfully immersive but hits other snags. No haptic feedback and tracking limitations. For some scenarious however it's a step forward.

(You need to design interactions around the controller limitations. Current VR experiences are too enamoured of the novelty and give the user too much freedom. Immersion comes from carefully stage managing the experience to avoid those things that sign-post the artificiality)

>>vander+X31
No, no. I mean who should you hold accountable. I'd rather hold Sony's marketing, than a bunch of developers who finally got their shot.

Like it's understandable to me that a small software team would sell their big shot as something huge. It's the job of a publisher like Sony to keep consumers' expectations in check.

Hold the right people accountable lest it will also keep happening.

>>Dylan1+6w
In this sense, was Duke Nukem Forever still vapourware in the sense that it didn’t end up being whatever the original game would’ve been?

>>tim333+Ag1
Everybody I know who plays Pokémon Go turns off the AR features, because they don’t care about them. They would rather use their smartphone normally than pointlessly aiming the camera at the sidewalk.

>>SkyMar+kd
> They need to start advertising like Occulus is doing, buying up literally all the ad slots on Youtube.

Not everyone has the money of Facebook behind them. ;)

>>wpietr+Nu
A lot of people complain about it but I like the 3D effect on the (new) Nintendo 3DS a lot, even after using it for quite a while.

>>lonela+ys1
I wasn't trying to single out girls, only that it's an observed pattern that young girls (teens) talk to their friends constantly. It used to be with a phone, now it's probably via multiple ways. AFAIK the same pattern does not exist with young men to the same level. I have no idea why. I only know that it's an observed pattern than fits enough that it's a stereotype.

It's old but it was one of the first hits

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2010/04/20/chapter-two-...

How teens communicate might have changed but I'm guessing the relative amounts show girls still use it more.

I firmly believe that at some point those same people will embrace full eye AR (not phone AR) as a preferred or common way to communicate over all current methods. Further, I believe that once it's possible for them to do it easily without cumbersome equipment that AR will become mainstream.

It's clearly years out but the fact that I can carry a tiny and relatively light computer on my wrist with display (a smart watch) suggests it might not be that far off to have stylish glasses with similar tech at a price people will pay for once the applications make it clear they want it.

If you asked in 2007 how many non-techies wanted a PDA the answer would likely have been close to 0. Now the answer is close to 100% of them carrying one at all times. I think AR will be no different. What has to happen is they need to go from the bulky Apple Newton level tech of today to something light and useful.

>>andyba+sa3
Zuckerberg was the one who said $3 billion. Which doesn't count ongoing development expense for the last 3 years, but from news reports it looks to be in the billions. And apparently they're spending circa another $1 billion on VR acquisitions this year: https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/12/07/facebook-is-on-a-b...

I do believe that it doesn't cost that much to bring something VR-ish to market, as long as they're trying to replicate older hardware with commodity gear. But if they want to push the state of the art forward, I'm not shocked at all by those numbers. Apple's spending something like $15 billion a year on R&D, and billions more on acquisitions. Maybe that's unnecessary for VR, but certainly a lot of VR advocates still believe that true success requires further technical innovation.

>>daeken+8J
Imo you are in for a treat, because FOV and comfort are the two biggest improvement areas with HL2, along with redesigned software/UX. Still no “killer app” third party software yet, or much third party software at all, but your biggest comfort and FOV complaints are all addressed extremely well.

As it goes with those kinds of things, you should definitely try the device out before making a conclusion, but given what you said earlier, I feel like you will like it.

>>aspace+yr3
I do agree that it would be unfair to only hold the small indy company accountable - but both they and Sony deserve criticism in their own way

>>NotSam+MV
It was TWiT. No idea what episode. I believe it was Calacanis that was the investor that said that though.

>>Zannet+FF3
The AR is not very good for actual gameplay but was kind of fun, partly for sending pictures in the early days.

>>seanmc+eJ
Facebook wants to be a family friendly brand.

>>andyba+fa3
Well here's your chance to help me get up to date. Why system and titles should I try next? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21767363