If only we could have that money for our Lynx[0] headset...
EG "This blog has been reporting why from a technical perspective on the massive problems with Magic Leap since November 2016. At that point, Magic Leap had “only” raised about $1.4B. They were able to raise another $1.2+ billion since this blog started reporting on their hype. Magic Leap’s total VC raise of over $2.6B dwarfs the measly $700m raised by the infamous Theranos."
https://kguttag.com/2020/05/03/magic-leap-starts-to-auger-in...
Magic Leap Settling Sex Discrimination Lawsuit with Former Employee (vrandfun.com):
https://www.vrandfun.com/magic-leap-settling-sex-discriminat...
HN discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14310144
More:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18209363
The whole point of the lawsuit was all about how Magic Leap's company culture and product plans and demos and self image all revolved around adolescent male egos and sexist fantasies, and excluded women.
Tannen Cambell, who filed the lawsuit, was actually hired for the express purpose of solving Magic Leap's recognized "pink/blue problem", but was rebuffed and ignored. They knew they had a problem, and even gave it a name, but they refused to solve it.
Read the lawsuit:
https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/02/14/magic-leap-sex-discriminat...
>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.”
Did all of that suddenly change after the lawsuit was settled?
Because if it did suddenly tangibly change, then that might be evidence that settling a sex discrimination lawsuit by changing their behavior was a positive signal.
But if they only forked over a big pile of hush money, signed non-disparagement agreements and gag orders, and went their separate ways, and Magic Leap didn't actually change their culture, then I don't think you could consider it positive sign or a constructive settlement for anyone other than the woman who was paid to keep her mouth shut.
Quotes from the lawsuit:
>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.
>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.
>"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.'"
>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.”
https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/30/7954611/magic-leap-augmen...
>Magic Leap's futuristic patent art was copied from other artists' designs
>When Google-backed augmented reality company Magic Leap quietly applied for a patent, it did so with dozens of pages of futuristic (and slightly creepy) scenarios: a social media charm bracelet, a gargoyle bursting out of a box in a store, gamified cucumber chopping...
>Wait a second. That last one sounds familiar. Maybe that's because it's a line drawing of a shot from "Sight," a Black Mirror-esque short film about an augmented, sinister future. As it turns out, Magic Leap's patent art isn't so much its vision of the future as one created by various students and designers. Former Verge-r and current Gizmodo writer Sean Hollister was tipped off to a set of side-by-side comparisons that leave no doubt we're looking at copies.
>If patents are about originality, does this mean Magic Leap is hurting its claims? Not really. A great deal of patent art just shows potential designs or uses for something, in order to make the actual, more abstract claims clearer. In this case, Magic Leap is patenting an optical system that has nothing to do with the interfaces displayed here. Even bringing a copyright claim would be hard and arguably pointless. "Images such as these are setting consumer expectations of VR and AR today," the company told Gizmodo. "We wanted to use the same images to demonstrate what our technology will enable."
>The designers themselves seem ambivalent of their images' rebirth as patent art. Magic Leap appears to have neither contacted them nor credited them, but at the same time, it's showing the world how this futuristic design fiction could work. It's one thing to have someone rip off your art. It's another to have them actually make it real — if Magic Leap can actually deliver on its ambitious promises.
https://gizmodo.com/magic-leap-ripped-off-those-awesome-ui-c...
>Magic Leap Ripped Off Those Awesome UI Concepts
>Magic Leap is secretly building a headset that could blend computer graphics with the real world. Recently, we lucked into a treasure trove of illustrations from Magic Leap about what that future might hold. There's just one problem: Magic Leap didn't actually create all those awesome UI concepts. It copied them.
>The images speak for themselves. On the left of each of these comparision shots, you'll see an illustration plucked directly from this Magic Leap patent application. On the right, you'll find a screengrab from an awesome UI concept invented by someone else.
>Remember Sight, the incredible student film where a man with bionic eyes plays Fruit Ninja with a real cucumber that becomes part of his meal? Same cucumber. Same everything:
>Or how about the Ringo Holographic Interface dreamt up by then-UI-design-student Ivan Tihienko in 2008?
>Here's a augmented reality concept from interaction designer Joesph Juhnke called "The Future of Firefighting":
>And below, one from designer Michaël Harboun and his team called The Aeon Project. "What if you could travel to exotic, far-away destinations while being stuck in traffic?"
>Lastly, two images from "Meditating Mediums - The Digital 3D," which was the graduating thesis for Greg Tran at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He now designs for Samsung.
>This might also look familiar: [...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY
In my mind, they're not as reputable after having given Rony Abovitz a platform to perform that "fudge". Just watch the video, if you can stomach it, all the way through. And read the comments, like this one:
>Nick Steele 2 years ago (edited)
>This is a joke. Take it for what it is. They didn't want to say anything so they basically said "are you ready? READY? ... fuck you".
>After a completely ridiculous intro which includes nano machines humping blood cells and two crack monkeys worshiping a massive block of "demented space fudge" which takes up 75% of the talk until 4:30, right after 30 seconds of literal silence, a spaceman says "greetings" and introduces today's "keyword" which is "fudge", then a guy plays terrible music out of tune and sings half-way into the mic. Then the lights suddenly go out and the crack moneys and space man simply walk away.
>Keep in mind the audience thinks they are about to hear a billionaire explain his new "world changing" virtual/augmented reality technology, then they get this shit.
>The best part is the audiences reaction at the end. :)
Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/dented-reality-magic...
>Magic Leap had high hopes for sales of its augmented reality headset. Instead, the richly valued startup has seen slow sales of the device, recent layoffs and executive turnover. In the coming years, competition in AR will likely intensify as bigger tech companies enter the market.
>[...] Magic Leap was founded in 2010 by Rony Abovitz, an eccentric, 47-year-old Florida native who once gave a TED talk in a spacesuit surrounded by people dancing to music in furry monster costumes. [...]
And if that's not enough proof that Magic Leap is a fraud, then watch their completely fake demo, that they originally did not truthfully bill as a "concept video" but instead they falsely and deceptively titled it "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap" and described it with the blatantly false claim that "This is a game we’re playing around the office right now". But since then, the title and description have been retroactively amended, AFTER they got busted.
Magic Leap | Original Concept Video (originally titled: "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap" and described: "This is a game we’re playing around the office right now"):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM
Magic Leap is actually way behind, like we always suspected it was:
https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/8/13894000/magic-leap-ar-mi...
Remember that amazing video of the whale leaping out the gym floor and splashing down? Yeah, it was BS. Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/09/magic_leap_neither_...
Magic Leap video may have involved more magic than tech:
https://www.slashgear.com/magic-leap-video-may-have-involved...
The reality of Magic Leap: fake demo videos and delayed technology:
http://www.techspot.com/news/67342-reality-magic-leap-fake-d...
Watch This New Virtual Reality Game Turn an Office Into a Robot-Infested Fight for Survival:
http://time.com/3752343/magic-leap-video/
That last Time article above was written BEFORE they got busted, and it cites a Magic Leap company spokesman (and I'm pretty sure it was a man) mendaciously lying to the rightfully skeptical (and eventually vindicated) Time reporter:
>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 that Magic Leap was playing (and still is) is called FRAUD.
Heres my video flying inside my house:
The jaw dropping aspects:
- it correctly knows when to mask for the column
- it does lighting effects from the planes headlights
- it does particle collisions with my furniture when it crashes
- it crashes by detecting i hit the wall
It really is amazing tech but it is very unpolished. But I am very hopeful they keep pushing and it gets cheaper and more people can experience it and develop for it.
This is like the amiga. We are at the infancy of AR.
1. Teranos
2. Magic Leap
3. Andelur Ghost
Only the last one still didn't get enough media attention. People who scored Andelur handshakes with the military & intelligence are the types who did it for Advanced Tactical Security & Communications Ltd ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 )
Andelur is basically trying to sell the governments around the world a Chinese toy copter for millions of dollars through incredible "Tech 2.0" type marketing fudging.
One thing these fellows can do for sure is a Hollywood grade CG. I was with a company on a competing bid for border patrol drone.
Even I, somebody with quite good experience with CG, was initially fooled by their videos. Indeed, they intentionally were trying to numb your guard by showing it flying in the rain, and being sprayed by water. https://youtu.be/5xDEroiMQWk?t=100
It took me a few minutes to figure out that the rain, and water spay in their videos were also impressively disguised computer graphics.
I just posted citations and quotes about just the most obvious three ways Magic Leap tarnished their own reputation from the start:
1) the sex discrimination lawsuit and nepotistic sexist bro culture,
2) blatantly ripping off other people's ideas without credit in the patent applications,
3) the ridiculous TEDX talk and fraudulent claims on the fake video "demos".
But that's just the tip of the iceberg, not even touching on the flaws and shortcomings and fraudulent claims about the hardware and software itself. Magic Leap's terrible reputation has been well covered in many tech and mainstream publications, and is known quite widely both inside and outside of HN.
Here's a starting point if you really don't already know about Magic Leap's well established terrible reputation:
Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses:
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/dented-reality-magic...
>Magic Leap had high hopes for sales of its augmented reality headset. Instead, the richly valued startup has seen slow sales of the device, recent layoffs and executive turnover. In the coming years, competition in AR will likely intensify as bigger tech companies enter the market.
HN discussion of that article:
https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/656667346837200896?...
I’ve had the Magic Leap demo. It was worth going to Florida for.
https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/842399282485460992?...
So, a while ago I said that seeing Magic Leap was the coolest thing I'd seen since the iPhone.
It's now much cooler than that.
Any suggestions?
I don't tend to believe people telling something like this being credible.
Especially when they try to pass lobotomised Chinese RC toy heli for "an Apex of Aerospace Engineering," and carefully photoshops all its photos to disguise its Made in China ancestry https://ibb.co/8DT5JMc
And now these guys seem to be heading towards starting an IPO.
Can you clarify what you mean by this? What aspect is considered impossible? Augmented Reality has been around for a while. There's the Microsoft HoloLens. Not to mention all the AR demos Apple does whenever they announce a new iPhone.
Check out this page, for example:
https://www.apple.com/augmented-reality/
especially the Snapchat one. You have rendered images being obscured by physical objects directly "in front" of them.
If anything, Magic Leap seems a bit ordinary with only its size being the standout feature. But, even there, it looks like they're already beat by Snapchat's Specatcles (see: https://www.spectacles.com/ )
So I fail to see how Magic Leap's product claims are in any way similar to Theranos or uBeam. If anything, their claims are not that impressive given the competition.
I was thinking of the early demonstrations they had, where the lighting and occlusion just didn't seem plausible (e.g. the infamous whale demo https://youtu.be/LM0T6hLH15k?t=30). These early demos were called out by skeptics as being not plausible (https://www.theregister.com/2016/12/09/magic_leap_neither_ma... or https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-reality-behind-m...)
Is AR possible, sure, but it has restrictions and when Magic Leap's product hit the market those restrictions were obvious.
the hype was around their fiber scanning display patents, they were showing investors a totally new technology that projects images into your eyeballs. There are numerous articles describing the patented pie-in-the-sky vs the state-of-the-art, just one example here: [0]
> They don’t even have an decent brightness control of the pixels and didn’t even attempt to show color reproduction (requiring extremely precise laser control). Yes the images are old, but there are a series of extremely hard problems outlined above that are likely not solvable which is likely why we have not seen any better pictures of an FSD from ANYONE (ML or others) in the last 7 years.
Magic Leap was unable to improve and miniaturize this technology - its a dead end - so they ended up using the same tech as everyone else
[0] https://kguttag.com/2016/11/28/magic-leap-no-fiber-scan-disp...
>it’s perfectly clear. Just not public.
https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/656667935205797888
The only difference between 2015 ML and Theranos is that faking tech in healthcare is just a lot more illegal.
If they promised investors there was a definite plan the demo becomes a real product, and knew thats a lie, could they sue?
That's a nightmare. See "Hyperreality"[1], if you haven't. That may be the future of AR. Especially if Facebook is involved.
The background is dark, the occlusions are bad, the hardware is large, and the FOV is poor.
Magic Leap really burned a lot of good will imo by sucking up enormous amounts of AR funding having 'demo' marketing that was at best intentionally misleading if not just fraudulent.
I'm still bullish on AR being the next platform when the hardware is ready, but I'd bet on Apple or Oculus pulling that off, I wouldn't go near anything from Magic Leap.
This about sums it up: https://twitter.com/fernandojsg/status/1017411969169555457
It's a little reminiscent of General Magic - something like the AR they want is likely to exist in the future, but I'd surprised if it's from them.
Can you imagine Steve Jobs shipping something at the quality level of that video?
A friend of mine who was approaching AR from a more theoretical point rather than a product point shared some of the physics of how many nits of brightness the display needs to produce to occlude the actual background and it is a lot. ML worked around some of that problem by shading the background think sunglasses with a 50% light reduction, which helps but then you're trying to match shading. Basically it is a really hard problem and had they not been so "out there" in their original claims I really don't think they would be so challenged in their marketing now.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4klu94/oculus_becomin...
>While that is generally true in this case every core feature of both the Rift and Vive HMDs are directly derived from Valve's research program. Oculus has their own CV-based tracking implementation and frensel lens design but the CV1 is otherwise a direct copy of the architecture of the 1080p Steam Sight prototype Valve lent Oculus when we installed a copy of the "Valve Room" at their headquarters. I would call Oculus the first SteamVR licensee, but history will likely record a somewhat different term for it...
---
Ben Krasnow (former valve employee who now has the youtube channel "Applied Science" https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience/ which you should check out if you haven't yet) posted here on hackernews back in 2017 during the oculus lawsuit.
> It fits a pattern. I was a hardware engineer at Valve during the early VR days, working mostly on Lighthouse and the internal dev headset. There were a few employees who insisted that the Valve VR group give away both hardware and software to Oculus with the hope that they would work together with Valve on VR. The tech was literally given away -- no contract, no license. After the facebook acquisition, these folks presumably received large financial incentives to join facebook, which they did. It was the most questionable thing I've seen in my whole career, and was partially caused by Valve's flat management structure and general lack of oversight. I left shortly after.
and then further down that thread
> Overall, I think Valve is a good place to work, and I learned a lot from all of the incredibly smart people there. The main reason that I left was the difficulty in merging hardware development with the company's exceptionally successful business model. The hardware team was pressured to give away lots of IP that could have been licensed, with the explanation that hardware is just so worthless anyway compared to online software sales, there was no other choice. It's possible that this was a good faith gamble, however it still doesn't preclude the use of business contracts that would have protected our investment. It also isn't so great for morale to hear everyday that your years of work are going to be given away to another company, and then watch that company get acquired for $2B. This is especially the case since many employees strongly voiced concerns about just such a scenario.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414190
Oculus was built on stolen tech taken by employees working at valve who convinced valve to give the tech away in the spirit of cooperation, and then jumped ship to facebook right away for the $$$.
I won't give them a cent.
Every time people post things to do with John Carmack all I can think about is that he was doing the same thing from his former employer to oculus as well. No matter what he did back in the day to make video game engines amazing, his involvement in oculus is a stain on his reputation. Even if you thought he was innocent in a vacuum, along with the rest of the shenanigans with oculus I don't think it was so innocent. He took the source code he wrote, sent it to himself, then he was involved in the "clean room" reimplementation? I don't believe it no matter what the courts ruled could be proven.
They are literally a company founded on "semi legal" theft, fraud, betrayal, etc.