Am I going to drop $2300 sight unseen? No. I’d be willing to go to a Microsoft store or Apple store to try one out. The technology might be great, but they need to work on their marketing.
Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
101–110 of 312 posts
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#102Let 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…
I've tried Hololens and it is honestly pretty amazing. The field of view really sucks but I'm sure they'll improve that, and it doesn't actually matter quite so much for AR. But it is still a less compelling proposition than VR. The main market is games where seeing the real world is kind of pointless. Good VR is much more immersive, and being taken to another world is much cooler than seeing some floating planets or…
Isn’t it the exact opposite? Only with AR can you turn everyday spaces, like a home or an office, into games... with VR you’d be bumping into walls and tripping over things
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#103Let 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…
I've tried Hololens and it is honestly pretty amazing. The field of view really sucks but I'm sure they'll improve that, and it doesn't actually matter quite so much for AR. But it is still a less compelling proposition than VR. The main market is games where seeing the real world is kind of pointless. Good VR is much more immersive, and being taken to another world is much cooler than seeing some floating planets or…
I think good AR is most important if it can be sufficiently miniaturized. I can totally see myself wearing AR glasses if they don’t look like I’m wearing Godzilla on my head.
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#104Magic Leap is proof that first mover advantage is fictional (or at least it's not an iron law that guarantees success). They spent large sums of money to put out the least half-baked AR product on the market. They would be in better shape now if they hadn't grown so fast. That being said, AR truly is the future. In a few years there will be multiple digital universes overlaid onto our world. Magic Leap should be comm…
> In a few years there will be multiple digital universes overlaid onto our world. I think applications like HUD displays on car windshields is an obvious place where it will be big for regular consumers. There are a bunch of interesting applications for commercial use too. Other than that, I have a hard time seeing much interest in regular people until they can eliminate the need for glasses or goggles.
There are many applications that, together, may make it worthwhile to wear AR glasses:
- Laptop monitor replacement or augmentation
- Indoor and outdoor navigation
- Identifying an available self-driving cab and dropping a waypoint for it to navigate to
- Immediate POV recording + sharing of ephemeral events (many people will like this, even if the HN crowd won't)
- Shared viewing of footage, large 3D graphics, or news items with your friends no matter where you are
- "Digitalized" brick and mortar fashion stores where you can easily identify clothes that fit you or that are in your price point. An enhanced view would show additional information, such as online reviews of each item.
- All the filtering features of the digital world can be brought into real life, including filtering out of advertisements
- Games games games. It sounds comical to say, but Pokemon will become real. People will run around with poke balls that release increasingly intelligent digital creatures. In Harry Potter AR, people will be able to cast digital spells by waving their wand in a certain way and saying the right thing. WOW or Runescape players could dawn their achievement capes irl
- Aesthetic landscape transformation. I imagine there will be a "default view," "modified view," and "off view" of the world. If you go to Times Square and enable the default view, you would be immersed in a digital world curated by the brands that advertise there. If you use a modified view, you can see whatever you want, whether that's anarchist graffiti or cyberpunk renderings. In the off view, all advertisements and all screens would be rendered invisible
- Usable IKEA instructions
- Non-boring meetings at work with interactive holographic renderings of enterprise projects
- Remote guidance and instruction (enabling emergency plant maintenance by people who have no clue how to repair a broken pipe)
- Digitally enhanced classrooms. Imagine a physics lab with a 3D rocket or roller coaster sim overlaid with force diagrams.
- Multilingual digital tour guide bots that can explain every nook and cranny of a city for free
- Guided construction of elaborate, ML-generated Lego structures
That's just the beginning. There are probably use cases we couldn't even imagine yet, kind of like how some technologies that are out today seemed like science fiction 10 years ago.
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet everyone was so optimistic and believed the hype. And it happens again and again! Whenever some early stage company/product gets some traction on HN that looks like hype-ware, the default reaction always seems to be excitement and optimism, rather than doubt and skepticism. Nobody's learned from Theranos. It's like we all adhere to that X-files poster "I WANT TO BELIEVE" over and over.
I don’t think this was ever the case for Magic Leap. All threads were always full of ‘I think this is waaaay too much funding for something we haven’t even seem yet’. I’m just confused how the press and investors were misled in such a miraculous way.
The most convincing "argument" for them was "well, they fooled Google into giving them a half a billion dollars, so they must have something there."
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#106This 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?
Yes, but I argue that's the same thing. The end user defines the product. They could've developed and sold the original technology is a different way (stationary entertainment, movies, etc) and be far more successful.
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#107AR fundamentally can't work.
To work, it has to understand the world around us. It needs to be full AI.
There's also no reason why we would want it. Nothing. As we develop ways to augment our world a simple phone can deliver the info.
VR has a use case for entertainment. It has no business or education case.
Work is done by reducing dimensions and abstracting things not adding dimensions and unabstraction.
But at least entertainment will propel the VR industry forward so we can see if anything else pops out.
Magic Leap faked all use cases from day one. It was obvious on multiple levels it was vaporware
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#108Magic 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
That’s not how funding works. If you believe the product is worth exactly what you pay that’s not funding, that’s buying. Funding is the belief that at some point the ownership will be worth the wait given the investment.
That sounds like buying with extra steps. I agree its a flawed comparison but still interesting
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#109Let 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.
Agreed. I think that Google/Apple have the right idea here. I am especially fond of Google's applications of AR in maps and translations as those use cases are both common and useful.
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yet everyone was so optimistic and believed the hype. And it happens again and again! Whenever some early stage company/product gets some traction on HN that looks like hype-ware, the default reaction always seems to be excitement and optimism, rather than doubt and skepticism. Nobody's learned from Theranos. It's like we all adhere to that X-files poster "I WANT TO BELIEVE" over and over.
Definitely not. HN is more pessimistic than any other forum I'm on besides Slashdot (the famous iPod burn, of course).
Are you forgetting Dropbox / "that's just rsync" and various other skeptics? No one likes anything here that seems flashy. And that's a good thing.