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Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

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Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#51
post #49

Lessons learned from Magic Leap: don’t sign a non-compete agreement with your employee; you have to pay and it’s legally not enforceable in California. Ask your employee to sign a board confidentiality agreement and sue him if he works for a competitor. Also, I wonder if people would think differently if this case is about a Facebook employee left to work on a social media App like google+.

Possibly, but copying a web app is substantially simpler than copying AR tech. Considering magic leap was stealth with hundreds of millions in R&D, I would put it in a different category than making a similar web app.

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#53
post #51
post #49

Lessons learned from Magic Leap: don’t sign a non-compete agreement with your employee; you have to pay and it’s legally not enforceable in California. Ask your employee to sign a board confidentiality agreement and sue him if he works for a competitor. Also, I wonder if people would think differently if this case is about a Facebook employee left to work on a social media App like google+.

Possibly, but copying a web app is substantially simpler than copying AR tech. Considering magic leap was stealth with hundreds of millions in R&D, I would put it in a different category than making a similar web app.

I’m pretty sure Facebook backend is a lot more sophisticated than Magic Leap. I’m using Facebook as an example so that our judgements won’t be biased by the current sino-US tech climate.

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#54
post #10

Magic Leap has raised $2.6 BILLION dollars in funding and have nothing to show for it. Somehow I don't think a random guy in China is what's holding them back.

As other commenter said, this is not really the point of this particular article.

But I totally agree. I recently had the opportunity to try to develop (with a team) something for the Magic Leap One over a period of about 3 months, and it was an awful experience, a complete and utter disappointment.

Here are just some of the issues we faced:

- terrible overheating: we offloaded most functionality (basically everything in our app but image tracking) to a remote server and both the headset and the lightpack would still overheat to the point of being very hot to the touch within 5-10 minutes

- image tracking in general pretty much doesn't work: the effective range is like 2 feet, and even then it's laggy and inaccurate. And forget about trying to use your own images.

- controller drift: the tracking for the controller literally just starts floating away. We had attached something to the controller and during demos people would say, "woah it's just floating away" and look up as the virtual controller slowly faded into the distance

- unexplainable throttling: once it starts overheating, things like image tracking just stop working, apps freeze or shut down, etc.

- dizziness: everyone who tried it started feeling eye strain within minutes of wearing it

- awful field of view: to put it simply, if you look at someone eye-to-eye, the field of view cannot even show things right above their head

- clunky design: the lightpack is heavy and constantly getting in the way, and the cables attaching it to the headset are very stiff

- Lumin OS: sucks

- controller trackpad: the least functional trackpad I've used in my life. The circular scrolling is incredibly hard to use; our team just dropped the entire scrolling feature for demos because not a single person we trialed with was able to get it to work. Theoretically, it's just a circular motion with your thumb to scroll. In practice, after 3 months of experience using the device I was still unable scroll consistently.

- dim screen: like wearing dark sunglasses

- heavy headset / awkward weight distribution: it feels uncomfortably heavy on your eyes & nose area

And there are many more issues that make it feel more like a prototype made by a couple people in a garage than the flagship consumer product of a company with $2.6b in funding. Really makes me think the whole thing was a big scam, like a slightly less completely-made-up version of Theranos.

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#56
post #12
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but crucially, does not allege that Chi exfiltrated any CI/trade secrets or infringed on any IP Their complaint alleges exactly that, repeatedly.

Nowhere in the complaint do they ever mention a single specific bit of technology, code, design or patent stolen by Chi Xu. Their entire argument is that he signed a confidentiality agreement when he started working there so should not be able to start a competing company. This is going to be next to impossible to enforce in California, let alone China.

How are they supposed to know the extent of what was stolen without seeing the source code from the offending product? The reality is that a relatively insignificant employee up and left and had a competing product out the door in a very short period of time. Everything points to him stealing as much IP as possible and throwing a competing product together. Seems to be enough probable cause to justify an investigation.

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#57
Magic Leap promised Fiber Scanning Displays ; They conned everyone into believing they had the tech to beam photons more real than reality's directly in your eyes. Now that they baited and switched, they should just STFU. Who cares if someone copied their disappointing actual stuff?

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#58
post #15

Hey, did Bloomberg ever retract its entirely unverified Chinese spy chip story? Just a reminder that they’ve blown all their credibility.

You may not be aware of the great talk titled "Modchips of the State" [1] (presented at 35C3 in Dec 2018). The speaker managed to reproduce the exact single-chip hardware implant attack suggested in the Oct 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek story [2] [3], which claimed Amazon and Apple found malicious hardware implants in Supermicro motherboards while conducting detailed inspections. While Bloomberg has never retracted the…

The fact Supermicro didn’t sue kind of says it all to me.

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#59

Chinese companies have a very long history of state-supported IP theft. When a Chinese product so obviously mimics an American product--especially when the chief engineer used to work for the American company--it's on the Chinese company to prove that no IP theft occurred. They've lost the benefit of the doubt.

Xenophobia and disdain for due process all wrapped in less than 100 words. Someone get this guy a medal for brevity.

There's been a clear pattern spanning over a decade, maybe more, of routine IP theft by Chinese companies. Calling out xenophobia, while ignore these facts, doesn't help anyone.

Lack of respect for IP is also very ingrained in Chinese culture. It's not a new revelation. Whenever the subject comes up with my relatives on the mainland, they reply with, "Is anyone surprised? Why risk wasting time and money, when someone else has already done it for you? Why pay more when you can get it for less?" When I bring up ethical concerns, I get patronizing comments like, "You just don't understand, you are too American now."

If there's any place in the world where actors are rational according to economic theory, it's mainland China.

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#60
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with pointing out a pattern

I like patterns too. For example have you ever noticed China artificially props up the US economy via bonds/debt/investment and in return has flagrantly been allowed to steal pretty much every byte of US IP, both from the private sector and defense with zero pushback from our "intelligence" community, legislature, and only a hand wavey stop it from the Obama admin? You still like patterns?

Owning 28% of a government's debt is "propping" up said economy?

Lmao this lad never passed Econ 101.

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