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Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

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Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#32
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that $2300 is a steep price for an experiment but I'm not sure you would want to base your price on the cost of production - why is that any better than any other arbitrary price?

Why not follow the model used by consoles and cell phones? Sell the hardware at a loss and take a 30% cut of software sales.

This would be really sensible especially giving the funding they've been floated - that said maybe their debtors are coming home to roost and they've been given pressure to avoid setting any more money on fire.

Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#33
post #24

How are we even surprised. They are the Theranos of AR. They pushed the 'fake it until you make it' mantra a bit far, and now reality is biting hard. Hopefully they will still trigger a revolution of some sort... but this was predictable.

This is way overblown. They have at least a Hololens equivalent, and if you value occlusion, they're ahead. And that's without Microsoft's reach. Equating them to vaporware isn't fair at all.

Have you used one?

Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#34
post #23

Let this be a lesson: Working prototypes trump all theory. I heard all silicon valley gurus stating they were "bearish on VR, bullish on "AR". This proliferated as a mantra throughout the industry. I thought they were wrong then, and believed the opposite - because I had a working VR headset that was awesome, but had only heard somewhat meh things about existing AR prototypes. Until great AR hardware comes out, I'm s…

The units i've used have worked reasonably well. but nobody is paying $2300 for them.

Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#35
post #12

The thing that got me about the Magic Leap is I couldn't find a reliable video of what it looked like through the lenses. Everything was clearly a CGI overlay or recreation. Reviewers claimed they were prohibited from showing video through the lenses.[0] I can understand not wanting their product misrepresented, but all the secrecy and censorship about it makes me believe it is bad, and I'm not going to spend money o…

Overlayed content is sharp enough, not great. Ghostly opacity. Biggest blocker by far is field of view vertically. Images outside the "screen" get badly cropped and look very unnatural.

Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#36
post #23

Let this be a lesson: Working prototypes trump all theory. I heard all silicon valley gurus stating they were "bearish on VR, bullish on "AR". This proliferated as a mantra throughout the industry. I thought they were wrong then, and believed the opposite - because I had a working VR headset that was awesome, but had only heard somewhat meh things about existing AR prototypes. Until great AR hardware comes out, I'm s…

It depends on your definitions. You don't need a headset for pretty interesting AR. If I could just point a phone at things and get genuinely useful information as an overlay, I'd consider that a pretty decent AR application. Sure, the same thing in a pair of stylish glasses might be even better but it's not strictly necessary.

Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#37
post #24

How are we even surprised. They are the Theranos of AR. They pushed the 'fake it until you make it' mantra a bit far, and now reality is biting hard. Hopefully they will still trigger a revolution of some sort... but this was predictable.

This is way overblown. They have at least a Hololens equivalent, and if you value occlusion, they're ahead. And that's without Microsoft's reach. Equating them to vaporware isn't fair at all.

Also, from the reviews that I have read their software seems to be pretty good, at least when it comes to spatial awareness and surface detection.

Most reviews are positive but main problem seems to be the price and the fact that the overall end-to-end experience still feels pretty rough.

Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#38
The very big disappointment comes from that they promised (kind of) that they would get Fiber Scanning Displays working. What I gather is they had a sort of, more or less working, giant machinery prototype (The Beast) that was very impressive for the few who got to try it. But they never actually managed to make the tech viable in a headset form factor. Also unclear if they had more than one color... Still very curious about what they managed to accomplish on that front but I now doubt we will ever know.

Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#39
Magic Leap One has been for sale for 6 months. At $2.6B in total funding, thats $433,333 per unit for 6,000 units. The sticker price is $2300 per unit.

By comparison the Nintendo VirtualBoy was for sale for one year at $180(in 1995/$300 in 2018) and sold 770,000 units[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Boy

Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#40
post #12

The thing that got me about the Magic Leap is I couldn't find a reliable video of what it looked like through the lenses. Everything was clearly a CGI overlay or recreation. Reviewers claimed they were prohibited from showing video through the lenses.[0] I can understand not wanting their product misrepresented, but all the secrecy and censorship about it makes me believe it is bad, and I'm not going to spend money o…

The problem is that a video through the lenses isn't going to tell you anything about the experience of actually wearing one of these things.

Neither is an artist's conception.

I think that this is inevitably going to be a serious problem for selling a product like this to a generation that still remembers Virtual Boy.

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