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Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

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Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#261
Magic Leap made one of the classic mistakes that other before-their-time products make: they tried to create a general purpose product because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts.

When you're building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on fidelity, embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful processing, and compelling input methods.

The real question in AR is what use cases can you hit without great fidelity? What sort of value can you unlock with a low-res postage stamp overlay and slow processor instead of full FOV? That's where the go-to market effort needs to be placed.

A similar example of this overreach was in multifunction pen devices of the 90s (General Magic, Newton, EO Personal communicator). A great counter example is Apple Watch, which didn't chase the 'smartphone on your wrist' everything device, and instead picked a few key use cases, established a beachhead, and slowly added capabilities as the technology allowed.

When a category-defining product has yet to emerge on the market, there are going to be a lot of people making predictable mistakes like this - mistiming ideas, scoping the wrong set of features, getting too excited about the wrong technologies, not leveraging their assets.

If you're a product person interested in understanding more about these factors, I wrote an essay on the subject recently: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#262

A little perpendicular to the subject, but this kind of thing always brings my mind back to iPhone. Apple had AT LEAST four kicks at the can with mobile devices. They had the "Knowledge Navigator" vaporware in 1987, twenty years before iPhone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_navigator They started working on realizing the KN concept in 1987, and shipped Newton in 1993, fourteen years before iPhone. Alas, the…

Yeah, I've heard a few people (more common around the debut) say "the iPad is Jony Ive's Apple Newton"

I always reply "As it happens, the Apple Newton was Jony Ive's Apple Newton..."

It was his first product for Apple, the Bondi Blue iMac was just his first successful product.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#263
Two bad signs:

1. They were founded by a well-connected VC-type, in a hyped new industry. These companies always raise a lot of money (because of the connections and the hype) but rarely (never?) work out well. (See also 21.co for “blockchain”.)

2. A few years ago they contracted with my friend’s company to make some swag, it was a chromed 3D paperweight of their logo guy. I saw a prototype of it, and it was really nice and pretty cool. Then I heard magic leap had rejected it because they didn’t like some way the chrome plating came together at the point it was dipped or something? It was insane to me, that thing was pretty cool and totally professional, and I knew if that was emblematic of how they did business they were screwed..

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 saw the magic leap demo in person at their Florida office. It was quite something. 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 sp…

It's not just software though, the viewing hardware they eventually shipped is extremely similar to the hololens, but 2 years later and with a slightly larger viewport. And worse hand tracking, from my experience. Cheaper though.

What you and other early-people seem to describe appears to be something else entirely, in which case yea - original plan fell through completely and they pivoted to their current thing. But was it actually different?

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple had AT LEAST four kicks at the can with mobile devices. Another interesting Apple mobile device "kick": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Rokr

If you go back and see the original launch of the ROKR, though, you can see Steve Jobs barely masking his disgust at what Motorola was able to come up with. IIRC the iPhone was well underway from a product dev perspective when the ROKR shipped, and he knew it was going to kill anything the phone makers could envision.

I had a ROKR. I also had several windows mobile phones. I'd find it hard to believe that Jobs thought the ROKR was what he had to compete with; from a usability perspective, the iPhone didn't come close to windows mobile; it lacked even basic MMS functionality for quite a while.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a bit like the home console version of the Neo Geo to me. Once upon a time, I'd gladly shove large numbers of quarters into Neo Geo arcade cabinets. But when they stuck the hardware into a consumer model, with its huge price tag, my thought was, "If a rich friend bought one, I would enjoy playing with it at their house." I suspect that the big difference here is, this being 1990, SNK didn't have nearly as mu…

I had that rich friend with the Neo Geo. Yeah, I wonder if Magic Leap had started small and luxury, installing that Beast contraption with the undiluted experience to rich people, it could've grown more like Tesla. Of course, the Roadster ran on all the same roads, while whole new experiences have to be created for AR, but make a few great ones and it'll be like having a bowling lane in your house—you don't play with…

[deleted]

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 saw the magic leap demo in person at their Florida office. It was quite something. 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 sp…

>But how could we know it would play out this way?

For anybody who hadn't seen the demo, the company always looked like typical SV smoke selling pitch. "This is the best thing ever", "It will change the world", "We have great stuff but we can't show them in public because reasons".

The whole "demo in a closed, secret room and then you can't tell anybody about it" reminds me too much of the carnival fair fortuneteller experience. You get shoved in a mystery room, get shown a bunch of smoke and mirrors, and then you're out before you can't think too much about what happened.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#268
post #200
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's as good as anything else on the market. I've owned and extensively tested nearly every AR device that's been on the market in the last 10 years. I can conclusively say: the Magic Leap is garbage for anything more than short-term entertainment. Between the extremely dim visuals, the horrible rainbow effects on every bit of text you display, and the awful resolution, it's not just bad for anything other than gam…

I've played with the ML and HoloLens and they are comparable. As someone who was raised on 8-bit games, it's mind-blowing. But really none of them are sharp enough to make you suspend disbelief that you're seeing something that isn't there. And I haven't seen any remotely compelling use case that would make them worth spending even $500 on. VR is much further ahead. Not quite mainstream, but it's got a real consumer…

I think the Oculus Quest is mainstream. It's relatively cheap. Easy to use. Completely standalone. And most importantly it has at least one game that it's actually worth buying it for (Beatsabre). Nothing on the Hololens made me think "yeah I want to do that again".

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 saw the magic leap demo in person at their Florida office. It was quite something. 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 sp…

I think the thing you missed from the 'all they had to do' list, was make a product that a large audience could afford.

I think Zuckerberg said at the last FB conference their aim with the Quest was to get 10,000,000 sold because that's the tipping point to a self sustaining app ecosystem.

Software is worth making, so hardware is worth buying, so software is worth making... etc

They had zero chance of achieving this at their price point.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#270
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> creative nomad jukebox Holy crap, the memories. I had the creative nomad jukebox and for years convinced myself if fit in the pockets of my jeans...it did...but it didn't. The folly of youth!?

I had one of these too. It was so _nearly_ good. So so close. That tiny track pad was just too sensitive, or was in insensitive, or both?
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