Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 449 posts

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

#391

Post by janekm »

istorical wrote: post #377
egd wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic problem is that without high fidelity & a wide FOV, there's nothing that sets MagicLeap apart from any of the other companies that have been able to create AR headsets for the last ~decade. AR right now is stuck because the display technologies aren't up to the task. The "Waveguide" approach has always fallen short - nobody's ever been able to make the viewing angle wide enough to be worthwhile, and the "pa…

One could argue that Google Glass could have worked if the battery life was better, universal google maps / navigation had been better developed and more omnipresent, and pricepoint had been way lower. Perhaps enough time has passed for those sorts of problems to be resolved and Apple will do something similar to Apple Watch but for Glasses.

I find that very unlikely. Pedestrian navigation isn't exactly a major use case for most people and is pretty well covered by phones and smartwatches already. Could have been useful for food delivery drivers (cyclists), but then we're right back into specialist markets.

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

#392

Post by ben_w »

istorical wrote: post #377
egd wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic problem is that without high fidelity & a wide FOV, there's nothing that sets MagicLeap apart from any of the other companies that have been able to create AR headsets for the last ~decade. AR right now is stuck because the display technologies aren't up to the task. The "Waveguide" approach has always fallen short - nobody's ever been able to make the viewing angle wide enough to be worthwhile, and the "pa…

One could argue that Google Glass could have worked if the battery life was better, universal google maps / navigation had been better developed and more omnipresent, and pricepoint had been way lower. Perhaps enough time has passed for those sorts of problems to be resolved and Apple will do something similar to Apple Watch but for Glasses.

From the criticisms I saw at the time, it also needed the absence of a camera, and the presence of a fashion expert in the hardware design team.

I don’t understand fashion at all, so I wouldn’t have predicted it in advance, but it was unfashionable.

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

#393

Post by wastedhours »

idavidrein wrote: post #387
TwoBit wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently the cameras are low fidelity, but perhaps that will improve enough in the future.

given the rate of improvement in camera tech, I'd say we are very far away from passthrough to be usable

> we are very far away

For different definitions of "very far away". We're only talking about 15 years since we started getting proper video recording in phones, and only about 4 since the big players started focusing on software enhancements.

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

#394

Post by wastedhours »

zaidf wrote: post #359
npunt wrote: post #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…

...because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts This is easy to assume but a far more common reason companies go broad is that it makes it much easier to sell big vision and big dreams. Most investors in magicleap probably wouldn’t have invested if the pitch was “right now we are focused 100% on a product that serves $INDUSTRY_X well before moving to $INDUSTRY_Y” In fact, many investors wouldn…

Completely agree - but for such a well funded company, surely they could have continued to try and sell unicorn tears on the front end, but spent some real time and effort to nail something on the backend.

This "pivot" seems like a play they should have been running in parallel regardless, considering they've had actual hardware on the go for a few years so far.

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

#395

Post by npunt »

abacadaba wrote: post #346
npunt wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question I'm asking is why they don't have a great product. Why is it bulky, weird looking, expensive, etc? Why does their marketing fail to explain the product's value? There are tons of ways to implement AR. They chose 'general AR', the kind of thing you see on Westworld or Black Mirror. That was a bad choice, because the tech isn't there and won't be for a long time, and it only follows that the implementation…

I've only used the quest for a short demo, but I have a hard time seeing what full AR gets you that a quest in camera augmented setup mode can't. What's the point of crappy half dim see-through display when you can just pipe the camera output to a normal VR screen?

Wearable anywhere. AR's unique value is not big bulky things you play with at home, they're to be a nearly invisible accessory you wear everywhere. You get a few grams to hang off people's faces in the form of glasses, not a half kilogram. Otherwise, you're right - VR meets the need well enough.

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

#396

Post by npunt »

zaidf wrote: post #359
npunt wrote: post #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…

...because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts This is easy to assume but a far more common reason companies go broad is that it makes it much easier to sell big vision and big dreams. Most investors in magicleap probably wouldn’t have invested if the pitch was “right now we are focused 100% on a product that serves $INDUSTRY_X well before moving to $INDUSTRY_Y” In fact, many investors wouldn…

Sure, selling a big vision is important to new startups. That's just one of many constraints and risks you have, but like all risks it can be navigated well or poorly. They could sell a big vision but also have a plan to increment there, but they didn't. I don't think that negates the fact that Magic Leap never presented what their groundbreaking idea was for why we needed AR.

If you're interested I do cover this among other things in the linked essay.

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

#397

Post by kangaroozach »

wpietri wrote: post #365
npunt wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question I'm asking is why they don't have a great product. Why is it bulky, weird looking, expensive, etc? Why does their marketing fail to explain the product's value? There are tons of ways to implement AR. They chose 'general AR', the kind of thing you see on Westworld or Black Mirror. That was a bad choice, because the tech isn't there and won't be for a long time, and it only follows that the implementation…

It was a bad choice if they wanted a successful consumer product. But I think the simplest explanation here is that the company's real product was fancy demos for investors. $2.6 billion in revenue! In operation since 2011! Thousands of jobs created! I'd call it great choice. They wouldn't have been able to make nearly as much money on a purposeful, targeted device, because nobody's put in that much money for a narro…

I’m printing and framing this. SPOT ON!

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

#398

Post by kats »

npunt wrote: post #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…

I think that Magic Leap went on for years with just promises and marketing, and they never produced a demo or product. I guess they actually did release hardware a while ago, I didn't know. But for a long time it was just news about "Magic leap promises X" or "Magic leap raises money". But they didn't release a demo or product.

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

#399

Post by p1necone »

didibus wrote: post #313
npunt wrote: post #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…

I agree with you, but I also want to say it's often more complicated then this. Like, the Apple Watch example seems easy, but what happened to FitBit? FitBit went all in on your idea. Picked a single use case with a market, delivered on it. Yet Apple swooped in, took the market from them. Why is that? This is an open question, I don't claim to have the answer. It just seems that in this case, Apple was promising, as…

> "What happened to FitBit?"

I was confused when reading this and googled market share - you're right, apparently Apple has a much larger chunk of that market than FitBit does. Either I live in an odd bubble, or the market is a lot different in New Zealand because I probably know 5 or so people with FitBits, and zero with Apple watches.

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

#400

Post by npunt »

jimmySixDOF wrote: post #350
npunt wrote: post #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…

I agree with you the problem was loss of focus related but not in the way you frame it. MLeap's original focus was to deliver a transformative visual experience through Dynamic Light Field Display. This worked , was presented to investors, and made smart people's jaws drop. It took a room of equipment to deliver, but they were funded at risk by smart people to develop this experience in a consumer format. Fast Forwar…

A "transformative visual experience" isn't a product, or a vision. It's a technology in search of a problem. They needed to demonstrate a clear use case, and determine if that was achievable with what they had. If it wasn't, they could always be an R&D lab instead. I don't know what you actually do with a $10k light field thing even if it is cool. If you want to make a category-defining product (which $2.6b in funding strongly suggests), you have to define the category, not just ship a thing.
Post reply on HN