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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

#411

Post by dwb »

sh87 wrote: post #320
Judgmentality wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pebble took on enormous debt expecting their market to just keep growing. They had a great product, but they thought they had the next iPhone. They bet big, and they went bankrupt (basically the acquisition cost was just to cover the cost of debt). https://qz.com/857412/pebble-went-from-kickstarter-to-being-...

If you bet big, you may lose and eat the dust. If you don't, and play cautiously, your competition will eat your market and starve you. You still eat the dust. I just don't get it.

It doesn't seem that complex to me – Apple has sacks of cash and is quite good at integration, especially given their existing reach. Taking on hugely powerful incumbents is almost guaranteed to fail. We only remember the handful who beat the odds. I mean to me this is a rubbish way to organise a society, but hugely powerful incumbents think it's fine, so that's what we have for now.

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

#412

Post by satvikpendem »

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.

Google Glass is still used for enterprise.

https://www.google.com/glass/start/

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

#413

Post by habosa »

Has any company ever raised more VC money and then produced so little? This has to be up there with Theranos, not sure if there are other contenders.

Magic Leap is one of those companies where it seems like everyone (in tech) was rooting against them. Too confident, too much money, too little to show. The only people I ever heard defending them were people who were financially invested in them or in AR as a whole.

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

#414

Post by criddell »

kmonsen wrote: post #324
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 they just never had a great product. Look at VR, even though the products are becoming really good, it is not hitting mainstream and this is even more niche. The startup cost is enormous, it is really hard to create good content and there is close to zero revenue since there are few users. And the users that does exist is the techie crowd that doesn't like to pay for anything.

> I think they just never had a great product.

What were they showing investors and writers under NDA that caused billions of dollars and thousands of words of praise to flow?

I wonder if the NDAs still in effect? I'd love for Kevin Kelly to talk more openly about what he saw and heard.

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

#415

Post by moron4hire »

samatman wrote: post #295
moron4hire wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This already exists

Cool! Is there anything I could read about that? I'm taking your word for it, I would just find that interesting. Or do you mean "this already exists but isn't in AR goggles"? Because I can see where my phrasing was unclear, I mean this mounted in an AR HUD.

https://upskill.io/resources/blog/aircraft-maintenance-breez...

https://defensesystems.com/articles/2018/06/21/af-augmented-...

https://atheerair.com/ar-mro/

I personally also worked on similar systems for industrial factory equipment repair.

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

#416

Post by Peaches4Rent »

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…

If you want to pick a usecase for any new idea the best usecase you can think of is pornography.

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

#417

Post by Robotbeat »

kmonsen wrote: post #324
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 they just never had a great product. Look at VR, even though the products are becoming really good, it is not hitting mainstream and this is even more niche. The startup cost is enormous, it is really hard to create good content and there is close to zero revenue since there are few users. And the users that does exist is the techie crowd that doesn't like to pay for anything.

VR headsets have been sold out for months, now. I got an Oculus Quest, but only got one because I refreshed the product page (on multiple vendors) constantly for days.

I think VR is starting the mainstream (at least for gaming), and Coronavirus is encouraging this (as it’s making virtually all gaming platforms a boost).

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

#418

Post by braythwayt »

macspoofing wrote: post #292
braythwayt wrote: post #165

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…

Except that Apple wouldn't have survived if their primary business was mobile devices ... VC cash or otherwise.

That is my exact point, perhaps we agree?

If Magic Leap had a cash cow business, they could be relentless about their vision (heh) for VR, whether it takes five years, ten, or even twenty(!) to realize.

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

#419

Post by Robotbeat »

tsbinz wrote: post #385
TwoBit wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Camera quality is the easy problem. The hard problems are getting camera latency down and dealing with depth of field and all the other things you lose when you replace the incoming light field with camera images.

I’m pretty impressed with the depth of field the Quest is able to develop in Passthrough+ mode just using the 4 wide field tracking cameras and a smartphone processor from 3 years ago. A residual, after-thought capability like that on a $400 device is pretty impressive, IMHO.

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

#420

Post by stripline »

janekm wrote: post #391
istorical wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree. You could make the same argument that texting and phone calls are handled by smartphones, so why need the apple watch? I personally hate looking down at my phone to navigate while walking around in an unfamiliar city.
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