It’s expensive, and it’s incredibly difficult to convey in video what it’s like to wear one.
If you get a chance to try one, I HIGHLY recommend it. It’s an incredible experience. Even just the demos.
Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
121–130 of 312 posts
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#122Magic 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’s not how funding works, but it is how profit works.
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#123Lol at "Dented Reality". I would prefer "Demented Reality" though.
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
A large point of video games is escape. AR takes that away. Plus, most people’s spaces aren’t set up for a game. For example, I couldn’t play Minecraft: Earth in my apartment since there isn’t a good flat space.
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely agree. The GM people were competent without being arrogant. They failed only because cellular data networks were not good enough at the time.
Bill Atkinson is the humblest, sweetest, most astronomically talented guy -- practically the opposite of Rony Abovitz! I think they're on very different drugs. The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson, as told to Leo Laporte. "In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, Cali…
Thanks for that. Bill's been a hero of mine since I did Mac development on a Lisa using photocopied binders of Inside Macintosh mailed to me by Guy Kawasaki. Those were the days.
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that it doesn't work, it's bad. You can make a bad product with a company with a "valuation" in the billions, we need to start to understand that. And there's good alternatives to the product that actually do work better at a similar price point. This is not a "product market fit" problem, this is bad tech being pushed down the pipes until it makes it out of a fucked up company.
In what way is it bad? From the various video reviews I’ve seen, it seems to work a lot better than the Hololens circa a couple years ago.
Other reviews in this post say that it’s not even as good as the original Hololens
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#127AR 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 lea…
I have a feeling this comment will be linked on HN eventually (in about a decade) the same way people link that one infamous comment about Dropbox being an unnecessary thing that no one needs or wants. Or the same way people in 2019 mock those from a couple of decades ago who were saying that internet was "just a fad" that will go away sooner rather than later.
AR has been around since 1990. VR decades before so times ticking on what a fad is and you have to make a case why this decade AR will start?
Plus I did premise it on full AI to understand the world to augment. Technically we already augment with the 100 year old phone allowing us to talk to someone far away anywhere-ish.
Your case why in a decade we want AR which is a overlayed response and a camera that can analyse the world using real technology. What will it do? Sci Fiction movies struggle to come up with more than ads or more intrusive notifications ;) Magic Leap made beautiful whales that looked pretty, cost a fortune to produce and would have worked equally well in a movie which is how everyone viewed it, in a 2D advertisement. There was no reason to AR it even if you could afford to do it in the wild.
Most museums, a place of high structure and high value struggle to even create simple voice overlays of art work.
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Magic Leap reminds me of Theranos. The companies with vaporware seem to have very similar playbooks that are pretty obvious with how in your face they are while never actually showing the product.
I have some VC friends tangentially related to the deal. Apparently the original demo was wild, like real magic bonkers. Everyone who tried became a believer. The projected light streams onto the user's eyes so instead of seeing an image overlayed in an intermediate layer as in most AR, the image was projected onto your retinas through this very advanced technology and optics. The issue is that the advanced technolog…
If I could get something like that as a desktop monitor replacement, I would be ecstatic. (Assuming appropriately high resolution and refresh rates - but if it's doing eye tracking that'd have to be the case)
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#129The 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…
VR looks shitty in video through the lenses too, but it's actually really cool. I wouldn't have been put off buying a Vive by lackluster video captures, because people were saying really good things about it (or, at least, a lot of the things I wanted to hear to convince me to be an early adopter).
I guess Magic Leap's problem is that their product is thoroughly meh. Nobody is raving about it (that I'm aware of), and nothing I've seen makes me feel like going out of my way to try one.
Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses
#130The Information has been unlocking the occasional article for HN users for a while now. I asked if they'd do that for this one and they agreed. Thanks! (The submitted URL was https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/06/report-magic-leaps-early-d... , which made sense while the original source was behind a hard paywall. Changed now.)
That's nice! I noticed a modal but I closed before reading it. I could parse (not in time to avoid closing) that it was welcoming HN users.
I am curious now what it was saying.
EDIT: Got it again, it says:
"Welcome Hacker News Readers
Before you quickly exit out of this popup, consider subscribing for $10/month for your first 3 months"
I was quicker than they expected lol