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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

#431

Post by disqard »

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…

While sounding slightly cynical, I have come to believe that your comment is a good description of the current state of "the latest buzzword" startups.

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

#432

Post by pixelbash »

janekm wrote: post #425
stripline wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If there was a big demand for pedestrian navigation (walking around an unfamiliar city is not a frequent activity for most people) we would already have better solutions, such as good voice navigation, which would arguably be better than can be done on the low-res Google glass display. Receiving messages and notifications is a very frequent occurrence for most people these days. Personally I suspect I'd find the watc…

Personally I feel weird talking at my phone in a public place, but to each their own

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

#433

Post by disqard »

npunt wrote: post #402
sek wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely agree with the killer application part, even for business applications they still don't have any idea. On their website you have a video that displays several use cases that don't make sense if you really think about them. Just to dissect the first example where doctors look at a low resolution brain over a surgery table. I don't know why there is a woman without a device who thinks: "why are those three…

Yep, the videos are basically scifi shorts devoid of actual product thinking. It's like asking concept artists to draw a hospital of the future, knowing nothing about how hospitals operate. I saw this a lot in edtech, lots of wishful thinking put in products by people who didn't know how schools worked.

Regarding Ed Tech, for a merciless look at this recurring insanity, see Todd Oppenheimer's "The Flickering Mind", and in general, Kentaro Toyama's "Geek Heresy".

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

#434

Post by rosywoozlechan »

bredren wrote: post #429
rosywoozlechan wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Coronavirus becomes like the normal flu, where seasonal vaccines offer only partial coverage[2]--social distancing will become something people get very good at and want to maximize the bounds of experience in. There's no way that social distancing or shelter in place becomes a seasonal norm of any kind. Maybe some people will wear masks more often and we'll shake hands less. That's about it.

Would you please share what makes you confident to say this? The reason I ask is that the director of the CDC just said the fall will be worse than it is now. [1] What specific medical changes will occur such that this will be "fixed" by next season? [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/04/22/coro...

My point was that we're not going to be social distancing and sheltering in place year after year if the coronavirus becomes a normal seasonal thing like the flu. Maybe we'll do it in the fall, we will not be doing it every year after that. It's not going to happen.

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

#435

Post by esyir »

gfxgirl wrote: post #370
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oculus Quest and its 3 year old mobile chipset would like to disagree. People pay for a good experience.

The Quest is underpowered to run any of the truly compelling VR experiences. You can't play Half Life Alex on a Quest, nor No Man's Sky, Boneworks, SkyRim, Lone Echo, etc.... You basically get a 3 or 4 mobile class experiences and then you're done. Yes you can use the link, but then you need an NVidia 1650 RTX or better which means you're a high end gamer already and so were not this supposed "mass market" PSVR is st…

It's also untethered, which is a far bigger deal than you think. I tried playing tethered and really didn't enjoy it that much, but wireless? That gets used multiple times a week.

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

#436

Post by esyir »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #407
flukus wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think they just never had a great product Bingo. If the product works as advertised I could justify the cost just in replacing existing screens, I could have a dozen virtual terminals floating around, I could replace my large TV, etc. All with zero new content required. The problem is it doesn't seem to work as advertised.

I’ve not looked into this but is this bad for your eyes to be focusing so close for long periods?

A few things:

- VR headsets generally are similar to focusing on something further away due to the setup of the lenses. It's not literally focusing on a screen 1cm from your face.

- One direction for current VR work is dynamic focus via lens arrays.

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

#437

Post by esyir »

bredren wrote: post #298
jjeaff wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5-10 years? They are selling the standalone Oculus quest for $400 right now. At least, they would be if they could keep it in stock. Seems cheap enough for mainstream. Considering the game console price point.

I think it is a mix of things that make 5-10 years sound reasonable to me. Part of it is the equipment setup and hardware requirements make it almost a gaming hobbiest attraction still. (although I have not set up a quest or reviewed the recommend specs) The comparison consumer-ready technology would be an iPhone or a Nintendo Switch which are sort of out-of-the-box experiences mainstream consumers are quickly gettin…

There is no equipment setup or hardware requirements. The Quest is a VR console that works out of the box. Everything works on the headset itself, so there's no need to set up the IR beacons that the other headsets require.

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

#438

Post by idavidrein »

wastedhours wrote: post #393
idavidrein wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that's a fair point, but vision is such a high-dimensional and dynamic input that my feeling is the last 20% of super-fast autofocus, auto color balancing, high dynamic range, removing motion-blur, etc. will be very difficult to improve upon. it seems that just increasing brightness/fov by making better waveguides or MEMS will be much easier. that being said, magic leap's lack of success doesn't bode well.

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

#439

Post by janekm »

pixelbash wrote: post #432
janekm wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was a big demand for pedestrian navigation (walking around an unfamiliar city is not a frequent activity for most people) we would already have better solutions, such as good voice navigation, which would arguably be better than can be done on the low-res Google glass display. Receiving messages and notifications is a very frequent occurrence for most people these days. Personally I suspect I'd find the watc…

Personally I feel weird talking at my phone in a public place, but to each their own

Good pedestrian navigation (which needs pedestrian road/pathway networks that haven't been built to the same extent as they have for roads, though in some countries like Japan they are much better) doesn't need constant interaction. You'd just be wearing your regular headset and you'd occasionally hear "at the next intersection, take the traffic light on your left, cross the road and continue down xxx street"

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

#440

Post by disqard »

jkestner wrote: post #224
jjeaff wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Definitely not Jobs and Bezos. Jobs said what you say from a different angle—if this thing is revolutionary, why does it look so banal? Bezos pointed out the basic flaw that bedevils personal transportation to this day—will you be allowed to ride it? Guess that's what they mean by 'revolutionary'—you'd have to throw a bunch of established systems out the window to take over. https://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/steve-jobs-a…

That was a neat article. I had no idea those guys weighed in on the Segway (and gave it a hard pass).
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