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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

#41
I think all of these things are true:

AR is really hard and anything that does it at all is impressive and could, believably, be the precursor to a revolutionary product.

All current AR tech is more expensive than seems sustainable for a consumer product. It's also difficult to develop for and has few (if any) compelling experiences. These things are endemic to early stage products, but it is also possible that they will endure long enough to cripple AR as a product in the foreseeable future.

Everyone in the AR industry is guilty of overhype. Moreso than early tech start ups in general. That said, Magic Leap seems to have behaved significantly worse than its peers.

Part of the effect of the hype machine is that it's hard to get any depiction of what it looks like to look through the lenses of the products. This comes, as far as I can tell, from the likely true idea that the experiential qualities of AR cannot be captured through 2D video and such video would be somewhat deceptive. To me, it seems like the practice of releasing visualization videos is more deceptive but reasonable people can disagree.

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It feels to me like a lot of AR discussion comes down to people asserting that one of these genres of view is true in response to someone else expressing a different one of these views.

To me, it feels like it's hard to talk usefully about the current state of the industry. The promise is very cool, the products are early stage. So many factors legitimately excuse current failings. Do people feel like we the tech is public or mature enough that we can talk about the real limits or likely arc of the tech at all, or are we trapped between hype and development?

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

#42
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…

There was a twitter video that comically showed their marketing demo of the whale and then the real life example of the product (with related music).

It appears to have been scrubbed from the internet though because I was trying to find it a while back to show someone and I searched for a while, but couldn't find anything.

Magic Leap seems like a case study of how not to release a product, but maybe they were more focused on raising money?

Either work on your thing in public, shipping units (Oculus/FB) or work on it entirely in secret (Apple), but don't loudly and continuously talk vaguely about how amazing your thing is with no real public examples for years. This plus all the fake marketing video demos - if you're going to do this you better be as good as you're pretending to be.

Someone that good probably wouldn't need to show marketing videos, they'd just show the product itself.

I finally did get to play with one (friend who personally knows an investor had one) and it was pretty disappointing. AR seems likely to be the next computing platform, but the hardware is not ready yet.

Magic Leap reminds me a lot of the General Magic documentary - crazy hype, right general idea, but too early and bad product.

I'm not sure if they have the same talent General Magic had though.

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

#43
post #4

I didn’t even know they had gotten beyond vaporware! Why would someone spend $2,300 on this equipment other than as a developer kit? I assume there is virtually no compelling content or services available to make a consumer interested in shelling out that amount of money, or even 1/10th that amount of money.

The tech they were hyping (FSD) never materialized and is very much vaporware. Every one following got disappointed when they pivoted to hololens-like stuff...

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

#44

This is an early beta product for wealthy tech-savvy trend-following early-adopting VR-wanting consumers. That's a tiny market. Classic case of a company having no idea what they're selling and who they're selling it to but expecting billions just for existing.

Isn't it more a classic case of a company underestimating the challenges of bringing a prototype to market? Didn't magic leap's tech demo work on like a supercomputer strapped to the user's back?

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

#45
post #26
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can't imagine that the cost of production is more than $500... start selling them at that price point. You can't imagine that the cost of custom bleeding-edge hardware produced in four-digit-volume runs is more than $500?

In theory a lot of this funding should've been spent securing sales so they wouldn't be producing the items on a bespoke scale but instead would've been able to get the cost per unit down. I'm sort of amazed at the funding this has received when it seems to be performing like an underwhelming kickstarter.

Securing sales for an alpha prototype?

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

#46

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

Man, a Virtual Boy comparison is just the deftest diss one could possibly offer here.

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

#47
post #4

I didn’t even know they had gotten beyond vaporware! Why would someone spend $2,300 on this equipment other than as a developer kit? I assume there is virtually no compelling content or services available to make a consumer interested in shelling out that amount of money, or even 1/10th that amount of money.

It's still vaporware. I want whatever it is they were suggesting with the whale-in-a-gymnasium demo.

[deleted]

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

#48
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…

There was a twitter video that comically showed their marketing demo of the whale and then the real life example of the product (with related music). It appears to have been scrubbed from the internet though because I was trying to find it a while back to show someone and I searched for a while, but couldn't find anything. Magic Leap seems like a case study of how not to release a product, but maybe they were more fo…

I believe this is what you're referencing:

https://twitter.com/fernandojsg/status/1017411969169555457

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

#49

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 curio…

Exactly. We never got the Magic Leap. I remember reading that surgeons were already using the tech so it 100% existed and just needed to be productized. I figured google-ers had taken a close look and had a pretty good idea about how to productize it. Maybe it is worth a billion, I thought to myself. What we got was a Hololens clone. It should be called the Magic One because there's no technological Leap in it.

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

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That won't work here, nobody would buy software for this thing because it's really underwhelming.

Doesn't that depend on how big of a loss they are willing to take? Say they started selling to developers for $1000 with the promise that the price to consumers would be $99 six months from now. I think that would ignite a lot of development.
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