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.
I mean, come on:
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!
I’m just confused how the press and investors were misled in such a miraculous way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'"
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.
As I understand it today, Neuralink already has a surgical robot that can thread electrodes in between individual neurons with minimal damage.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.