In my head, I always put them in a bucket with Theranos and uBeam, Startups who made product claims which experts in their fields said were not possible.
I guess slick marketing wins over those doubts in some VC circles but you wonder if anyone at the early stage Magic Leap investors is getting asked tough questions about why they approved it, or if they've all just moved on to other roles.
I would guess this depends on whether or not they managed to hoist the stock to someone else in subsequent rounds. Investing in a scam can still be a good deal, as long as you get out before the jig is up
That said, I am waiting for v2 from these guys and/or anyone else.
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 have only a passing knowledge of Anduril, thanks for sharing your impression of them. But knowing his track record, I tend to believe Palmer Luckey has the ability to achieve daring innovations. That said, with quantum leap innovation, failure is the more likely outcome.
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.
Your comment would work just as well and could be just as informative without the personal attack
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...
And their overall engineering level is totally amateurish — you cannot have such shoddy job being done for money, let alone such amount of money, but they have everything to tick the checkbox in the buzzword department: waveguides, holographics, structural colour, photonic chips...
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One main point:
Holographic waveguides, and such are a dead end development with a substandard image quality which you cannot do anything about, as well as its inefficiency (these waveguides waste 70-90%+ of light.)
You can make them more opaque to preserve more light, but then you get VR sunglasses, instead of what the promise is.
The fundamental problem is that the amount of image light transferred is inversely proportional to the amount of light obscured. — they are extremely inefficient, and there is physically no way around this.
For this reason this solution really had to be sent to the wastebin on day one, and not be presented as the next best thing after sliced bread. This is obvious to anybody knowing optics on above a high school level, and it's inconceivable how anybody paying real engineers can opt for this solution.
Neither of this is required for a slick demo in well lit room and perhaps on better HW.
What was it that experts said wasn't possible about Magic Leap? My understanding was that their product was a more advanced version of the tech in Microsoft's HaloLens and the primary challenges for both were bringing down the cost, expanding the FOV and DOF, and finding realistic use cases.
Microsoft went the enterprise route, like Google did with Lens, while Magic Leap tried to release something that felt boutique.
It's basically the only alternative for an investor who wants to get into AR, other than buying MSFT of AAPL stocks. That's why, despite shipping a V1 almost as good as the HoloLens V1 they are getting funded again.
Problem is, by the time Magic Leap gets it's V2 out there's a good chance we'll be seeing HoloLens V3 in the field.
If you're talking about oculus, they 'stole' a lot of their development from valve because there were valve employees who convinced whoever was decision making there to just give oculus tech without any license prior to the facebook acquisition, and then those employees got hired by oculus once they had facebook money.
Oculus is the story of one of the biggest tech scams in VR and the scam was on valve by employees who took advantage of and betrayed valve.
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.
Many other optical schemes don't share this weakness.
I have a copy of The history of the future and was planning to read it. If all it's going to be is PR for Luckey, I will donate it to a used books shop.
Would you have an opinion on VR being the next computing platform? Despite the troubled past, do you suppose Oculus Quest 2 could become THE standard?
>Would you have an opinion on VR being the next computing platform?
Not any time soon, but maybe once the display technology improves. I like VR and don't get VR sickness, but when I take off the headset after a long session I can tell I haven't been focusing my eyes on distant things for a long time and the whole world feels a little unreal. I think the more time you spend in VR the more likely you are to cause short sightedness, but I don't have any scientific evidence of that so its just my opinion.
>Despite the troubled past, do you suppose Oculus Quest 2 could become THE standard?
I have many friends who own the Q2. It's an affordable device with a lot of good ideas. But sadly I think oculus was run by toxic people and being acquired by facebook can't have improved it. Them requiring a facebook login and their privacy policy preclude me from participating.
It's a neat device but I wouldn't call it the standard. The index is the gold standard. The quest 2 is the subway or taco bell restaurant of VR headsets - ubiquitous, affordable, but not better than the competition although the competition costs more.
We'll what happens in the future but I'm not betting on VR/AR computing being common anytime soon. If it is I hope facebook isn't the primary supplier because oculus and facebook are both unethical companies I dont' want to deal with.
But what do I know? I'm just a guy who loved the idea of it and paid attention during the development of the recent VR revival. I think the biggest barrier is resolution, and then graphics silicon need to run it at good framerates.