zlacker

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

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

>>defter+K
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.

>>donpdo+(OP)
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.

>>nabdab+Y5
That sounds like buying with extra steps. I agree its a flawed comparison but still interesting

>>nabdab+Y5
That’s not how funding works, but it is how profit works.

>>donpdo+(OP)
> 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.

>>JumpCr+Rs
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.

>>ianai+X1
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.

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

>>ianai+X1
https://www.tiltfive.com/

Edit: Adding a Tested review...

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

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

>>spectr+d81
You certainly can, but even Amazon had much higher revenue/funding ratio than Magic Leap.

>>comex+7A
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+ok1
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.

>>lonela+vl1
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...