251–260 of 449 posts
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> Reminds me a little of Theranos (although not as criminal). More like Dean Kamen's launch of "Ginger" in 2001.
The Segway actually launched and sold and delivered on its technical promises. The problem was that most people didn't want to spend $3000 on one.
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To be fair to the Segway, there's a remarkable number of self-balancing one wheel scooters on the street in SF these days (well, a few months ago). And I think you can trace all of those back to Segway. Sometimes v1 doesn't quite do it.
Is the number remarkable? I would be very surprised if those were more than 1% of traffic.
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Supposedly the magic leap demo was actually cool and used different technology than the eventually crappy hardware they ended up sort of shipping. I think they couldn’t get it to a place where it could be small enough to be useful? Hopefully when Apple ships AR hardware for real it’ll be what it should be. Magic leap will be kind of like General Magic or the creative nomad jukebox - right idea but too early with hard…
I think Apple are shipping their AR hardware, mostly anyway. The iPhone and iPad are it, modulo enhancements like LIDAR. I really don’t see Apple bringing out a headset. I’m not even sure it’s a technology problem. People just don’t want to walk around with cameras and LIDAR and goofy goggles on their faces, not at Apple scale anyway, possibly ever. It’s a fundamentally flawed concept. Specialist applications sure. M…
No idea when it will be a viable product in a nice enough hardware package, they're working on the ecosystem and platform in the mean time via iOS/iPadOS, but AR via those devices is a lot less compelling.
Doing this in a real way would be big if the hardware is possible, but it may be a ways out.
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I don't trust Evans at all, but I'm going to partially defend that here. There's a long history of technology being absolutely amazing the first time you use it and then not mattering at all. E.g., the Segway was going to revolutionize transport. The 3D space is particularly prone to this. I count at least 5 waves of 3D innovation going back to the Great Exhibition in 1851. 3D movies were going to revolutionize thing…
While I agree with your point, did anyone except the inventor and the marketing team think Segway was going to revolutionize anything? I seem to remember all the revolution talk coming from Segway people before they had even unveiled the thing. It was just a big hyped secret that would "revolutionize" the world. I remember being extremely underwhelmed when they unveiled it. It seemed like one of those things that had…
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WHy wouldn't they push the narative "Look at this - now we'll make it smaller" vs. "it's awesome - trust us and wait"? Even snake oil salesmen have a demo if they're good; these guys suck at being phonies.
They got to series E funding and raised over a billion dollars. If they were phonies, they were phenomenal ones.
I sort of always knew it was the job of VCs to hype up their portfolio, but i've never seen it as bare faced as when Benedict Evans was shilling Magic Leap saying things along the lines of "Magic Leap was the coolest thing I'd seen since the iPhone. It's now much cooler than that." and "I’ve had the Magic Leap demo. It was worth going to Florida for." Well that looks a bit silly now doesn't it.
I don't trust Evans at all, but I'm going to partially defend that here. There's a long history of technology being absolutely amazing the first time you use it and then not mattering at all. E.g., the Segway was going to revolutionize transport. The 3D space is particularly prone to this. I count at least 5 waves of 3D innovation going back to the Great Exhibition in 1851. 3D movies were going to revolutionize thing…
No one except their PR interns thought it was going to revolutionize anything.
This company could snub reality for a long time and I'm honestly surprised it lived for this long.
That said:
1. There absolutely exists a product and putting it on for the first time is a pretty exhilarating experience. Unfortunately Magic Leap failed to provide an convincing reason to put it on for the second and third time.
2. The company had very good talent. Unfortunately its management turned more awkward as you climbed the ranks - professional corporate survivors which needed to bridge reality between Rony's dreams for the next year and what's possible in the next 10 with their modest skillset.
It was a bit of Hunger Games up top.
3. AR hardware startups need money, and lots of it. I estimate Magic Leap had about 50% overhead, meaning that given better management and direction - and a bit of hindsight no doubt - it could have been done with $1bn. It's still $1bn.
4. Consumer AR will come in a minimalistic form, such as Intel's deceased Project Vaunt (ironically enough, many of its Swiss optics team were brought on to Magic Leap following its termination in Intel). Minimal, stylish, useful - not something to wow you once over but to provide day in, day out value. An Apple watch rather than an Oculus.
Source - I was there for few years, running some parts of their engineering. I don't regret a second of it.
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What's really crazy about that video--while it's technically possible to make something mostly like that with current hardware[0]-- is that, if you have any experience with AR at all, you know that most of those UIs would be terrible to use. [0] The FOV is accurate, given we're looking through a narrow camera lens, but gives the wrong impression that it fills what the user could see because it fills the video frame.…
Yeah - even the fake demo use case isn't that compelling to me. This is the kind of thing that I think the real AR value will be from: https://twitter.com/st8rmi/status/1249950879807045633?s=21 Basically a meta-layer for the real world that you can interact with outside of a screen. This would let you do things like interact with a lightswitch from across the room by looking at it, get metadata about most object stat…
Imagine a physical checklist where areas get highlighted, arrows to direct you to the next step, and a little red icon that goes green when you're done.
I think this could shave real time (maybe a third?) off airframe downtime while keeping the very high accuracy requirement. That would save actual money.
I sort of always knew it was the job of VCs to hype up their portfolio, but i've never seen it as bare faced as when Benedict Evans was shilling Magic Leap saying things along the lines of "Magic Leap was the coolest thing I'd seen since the iPhone. It's now much cooler than that." and "I’ve had the Magic Leap demo. It was worth going to Florida for." Well that looks a bit silly now doesn't it.
I don't trust Evans at all, but I'm going to partially defend that here. There's a long history of technology being absolutely amazing the first time you use it and then not mattering at all. E.g., the Segway was going to revolutionize transport. The 3D space is particularly prone to this. I count at least 5 waves of 3D innovation going back to the Great Exhibition in 1851. 3D movies were going to revolutionize thing…
Most of these, certainly including Segway and Magic Leap, fall apart as soon as you ask ten random non-tech people if they'd actually buy one though.
I sort of always knew it was the job of VCs to hype up their portfolio, but i've never seen it as bare faced as when Benedict Evans was shilling Magic Leap saying things along the lines of "Magic Leap was the coolest thing I'd seen since the iPhone. It's now much cooler than that." and "I’ve had the Magic Leap demo. It was worth going to Florida for." Well that looks a bit silly now doesn't it.
Supposedly the magic leap demo was actually cool and used different technology than the eventually crappy hardware they ended up sort of shipping. I think they couldn’t get it to a place where it could be small enough to be useful? Hopefully when Apple ships AR hardware for real it’ll be what it should be. Magic leap will be kind of like General Magic or the creative nomad jukebox - right idea but too early with hard…
Imagine minecraft, but in real life. They had blocks you could put on walls, dinosaurs roaming around on the ground, knights fighting the dinosaurs, and all of it was controllable.
It was in a small-ish room, roughly ... 15x15 feet? a few meters by a few meters.
It had couches in the room, and pictures on the walls. It didn't look special. But in retrospect the room may have been part of the demo in some way.
(I went through their interview process, and one of the benefits was getting to see the ML in action. Supposedly they also had an "AI assistant" demo or something like that – Cortana? – but it wasn't available on that day.)
If I were an investor, I would probably invest based on the strength of that demo. It was enough to make you question the reason we're all staring at laptop screens. The device was comfortable, and I could imagine myself sitting at a desk typing into thin air (because goggles) rather than typing into a computer screen.
Of course, it looks like I would have lost my money if I were an investor. But how could we know it would play out this way? All they had to do was build a strong developer ecosystem. The lame demo-style apps we see are a direct result of inconvenient APIs and SDKs.
In fact, they were actively hostile to developers. I remember getting a C&D just for publishing their SDK's manual on a personal website. No idea how they even found the link.
The premise is real – in the same way the Vive was in many ways superior to Oculus, I think the next "Magic Leap" will be superior and more affordable than what we see here. If you are looking for an investment opportunity, the AR scene is still a strong bet over the next decade or so.
(If that seems unlikely, think about how many major advances worked out after seeming so unlikely: deep learning in AI; consumer-grade VR; voice controlled devices; the list goes on and on.)