Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
As for that, the ecosystem is far too closed. ML and Microsoft seem to be approaching the technology Apple-style, with expensive hardware and by-the-numbers (if that) developer support, which would allow them to control the platform - and profits - once the we reach some sort of inflection point where either a unpredicted killer app emerges or the tech matures enough for the more obvious applications to be viable.
They're not going to get there, though; someone is going to (or perhaps already has) released a cheaper alternative with a low barrier-to-entry creation platform, and that will allow the number of people who have access to both a good-enough device and a good-enough skillset to reach a critical mass. They'll create for that device and platform and everyone else will be playing catch-up. It's the early PC and BASIC all over again.
Do you know what would be really interesting? If Sony's PS5 were to launch with an affordable VR headset and an updated version of Media Molecule's Dreams.