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Magic Leap One

magicleap.com

551–560 of 653 posts

Re: Magic Leap One

#551

The naysayers here are funny. There's a fundamental basis for the technology thats rooted in physics and a mathematical model describing how to attain perfect bragg compliance in lightfield displays that has been well documented. But I didn't come here to argue about whether such a thing could exist in the world or not. Let's turn instead to more practical matters. The reason they needed a lot of money is because no…

I'm pretty sure the main objection isn't how much money they took, it's that they've shown very little evidence of actually being able to back up their claims. How much money they were able to raise just makes it look more egregious.

sure, but they don't need to show you any evidence. Only investors. In fact it's a competitive advantage to keep such evidence behind an NDA for as long as possible when you're creating fundamentally new tech?

Re: Magic Leap One

#552
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two reasons why the field is focused on gaming and not productivity: fidelity and familiarity. It's hard to build high-enough fidelity into the hardware at a reasonable price point. And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested. In gaming, on…

>And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested. I'll admit that I might not be the "average person" that this is target, but I completely disagree. I've often said that developers should have powerful machines and tools, pretty much regardless of price.…

This, exactly, you described it better than I could.

Re: Magic Leap One

#553
post #517

The naysayers here are funny. There's a fundamental basis for the technology thats rooted in physics and a mathematical model describing how to attain perfect bragg compliance in lightfield displays that has been well documented. But I didn't come here to argue about whether such a thing could exist in the world or not. Let's turn instead to more practical matters. The reason they needed a lot of money is because no…

>However, generally people who have billions to invest on high risk super high tech ideas aren't as stupid as people here would have you believe. Counterpoint: Theranos. Never assume investors are smarter than us mere mortals.

A counterpoint where willful negligence and manipulation of investors exists is not a good counterpoint to an example of bold investments in technology.

If anything use "Segway", with Steve Jobs et al hyping them up before it bombed...

Negligence like that is far far rarer than the technology not being feasible, at least in terms of startups failing.

Re: Magic Leap One

#554

The first headset to give me virtual monitors that I can use day-to-day in lieu of my physical monitors will have my money in a heartbeat. I'd love to be able to carry a headset to/from work and have essentially the same multi-display experience at home/coffee shop/work/etc. I don't care if it's VR/AR.

This comes up a lot in VR/AR discussions, but IMO it's the least likely application in the near to medium term. There's just not enough pixels in the headset to accurately simulate multiple high-resolution monitors. For instance, the Hololens is rumored to have 1280x720 resolution per-eye - so a screen that consumes the entire visual field is only 720p, and "simulated displays" that were farther away would be worse.

Could it do a single monitor at a decent resolution? That would be handy enough for me when I'm standing on the train and can't open a laptop, or just to avoid carrying a laptop around everywhere. If I could open a decently sized terminal at any time I'd be happy.

Re: Magic Leap One

#555
post #315
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two reasons why the field is focused on gaming and not productivity: fidelity and familiarity. It's hard to build high-enough fidelity into the hardware at a reasonable price point. And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested. In gaming, on…

> It's hard to build high-enough fidelity into the hardware at a reasonable price point. And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested. I doubt that. If you make a VR/AR/?R version of a Bloomberg terminal or Factset then finance firms will literally rol…

Excel have been dethroned in every bank by bespoke software, unless you are talking about a tiny scale.

Re: Magic Leap One

#556

I don't understand why this entire field seems so focused on gaming, and not productivity. The single most interesting thing to me was the "displays on demand". There are two things that would absolutely revolutionize how I work that I would pay big money for: 1) Any sort of glasses that would allow me to view virtual displays in high definition. I don't care if I have to turn my head to see more than one display, I…

> I don't understand why this entire field seems so focused on gaming Because gamers are a community well know to spend several hundreds of dollars easily for any kind of upgrade to their existing hardware. At least the core PC gamers, and that's quite a large segment nowadays.

I think is because of the culture of the company itself, it’s all about creating worlds and leaping towards the next big contract with the user. Those things won’t happen for an Excel user that just want Excel in 3D. Haptic feedback, virtual characters etc. are more gamer friendly

Re: Magic Leap One

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the main objection isn't how much money they took, it's that they've shown very little evidence of actually being able to back up their claims. How much money they were able to raise just makes it look more egregious.

Again, this is your own bias rooted in the fact that most SV/tech people in bay area think you have to launch a product as soon as possible and that's the only way tech has ever been developed. It's not the only way, and the agile model that works well for web stuff and consumer/B2B applications often isn't suitable for other kinds of technology development, where there is a custom hardware component. If you want to…

I've noticed that the agile model doesn't work well for a lot of technologies too. Things that have been well studied (for example, creating a webapp with X frontend and Y backend, or creating a graphics engine with DirectX) have known costs and estimates. There are answers you can look up on StackOverflow. Not all realms of technology have such luxury.

Is there an alternative to agile that's available out there?

Re: Magic Leap One

#558
post #367
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard to build high-enough fidelity into the hardware at a reasonable price point. And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested. I doubt that. If you make a VR/AR/?R version of a Bloomberg terminal or Factset then finance firms will literally rol…

I've never worked at a financial firm but I have a hard time imagining the uptight social culture of finance being one that embraces employees being spotted wearing goofy headsets and waving their hands around. The boost in productivity from any such app would seemingly be negligible, especially when you consider that the popularity of the Bloomberg terminal lies in its chat function: https://www.ft.com/content/5d6c2…

> uptight social culture of finance

Ha! You don't know traders...

Re: Magic Leap One

#559

The first headset to give me virtual monitors that I can use day-to-day in lieu of my physical monitors will have my money in a heartbeat. I'd love to be able to carry a headset to/from work and have essentially the same multi-display experience at home/coffee shop/work/etc. I don't care if it's VR/AR.

This comes up a lot in VR/AR discussions, but IMO it's the least likely application in the near to medium term. There's just not enough pixels in the headset to accurately simulate multiple high-resolution monitors. For instance, the Hololens is rumored to have 1280x720 resolution per-eye - so a screen that consumes the entire visual field is only 720p, and "simulated displays" that were farther away would be worse.

Google is working on a headset with 10x the number of pixels of today's: https://www.roadtovr.com/google-developing-vr-display-10x-pi...

Re: Magic Leap One

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you didn't follow it at all. Magic leap showed the demo to a lot of people and the Rolling Stones journalist extensively tested it. How can you suggest that it is just a plastic mockup? As for the content there are hundreds of people working on it both in house and in selected partners like Weta.

I explained further here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15971433 It would be trivial to fake the demo. You can buy the parts to stream HD video wirelessly for a few hundred bucks. If they're using a small server farm to render the output, isn't that cheating? If they can show it to a journalist in a lab, why not make a marketing demo in a park? Like I said, I'll believe it when I see it.

Except it has to do a bunch of other things to do what they described convincingly.
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