Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Above all else, Apple doesn’t release products that are dorky. https://www.apple.com/nz/airpods/
Friendly reminder that AirPods alone are a bigger revenue line item than Netflix.
Yes, and they're dorky as all hell.
Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022
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Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022
#72Back in October, when Facebook made a lot of "metaverse" noise, I wrote a thread looking at the history of stereoscopic 3D from the 1850s to the present as a way of explaining why I think facehugger VR is going nowhere. Somebody turned up to complain that going back to the Civil War era wasn't sufficiently big picture for him: "You need a long view. All the serious players are still in the Mercury phase. The Gemini a…
Rony sez:
"You need a long view. All the serious players are still in the Mercury phase. The Gemini and Apollo phases of XR are coming this decade and into the 2030s. An $800b company will likely spend $100b+ getting there. You need a wide aperture to understand what is going on."
He should know, he went to Nova and he's been as deeply familiar financially in this exact effort as anyone for 10 years.
But from 1850 to 2020 that's 170 years so it looks like about the year 2190 would be the lower end of a not-big-enough-picture. That does make the offhand estimate of 2030 look a little optimistic. But optimism is the name of the game. You don't go into this if you thought it would take that much more than a lifetime. That's just the kind of thing you find out later. Sometimes later than others.
Looks like in "today's dollars" the Gemini program was over $10 Billion and Apollo over $200 Billion. Plus it took about a dozen years to spend it, seems like a long time to get to the moon but by comparison you could say sheesh NASA went through that money fast. And what do they have to show for it?
You do need a long view. Nothing happens overnight.
So I guess $100 Billion for the total AR dream would be a good deal since it would only get you halfway to the moon anyway. Wouldn't buy much else either, at today's prices.
>Why did he raise and burn $3.5 billion dollars if that's only 3.5% of the cost of "getting there"?
Do you really want my answer? Well if you did I could probably come up with something . . .
Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022
#73Optical AR is a dead end. Passthrough AR with VR goggles and 8K cameras on the outside will be the way that wins.
This seems like a tech-community-only opinion to me, the same thinking that is currently killing Magic Leap. If you want to build a mass-market AR headset, you should have one priority: make it look like glasses. People like eye contact. People don’t like looking like alien telemetry pods are eating their eyeballs. Once you have that, then you can worry about things like resolution, fov, and color reproduction. The o…
> If you want to build a mass-market AR headset, you should have one priority: make it look like glasses.
I so vehemently disagree with this because it's the same category of thinking that keeps XR in the dark ages.
The capital "P" Problem in XR is content. Behind every major innovation in content consumption technology has been content to consume. As of yet, there is no such content for XR, and the one thing Magic Leap did (and this was a few years back) was to invest in people to create content for their platform and dev tools to make it.
You can have the ugliest piece of garbage tech tethered to a desktop PC, and people will pay to use it if they get to experience some piece of content created by a team of artists that can't otherwise tell the stories or convey emotion as effectively in any other medium.
Throughout the history of consumer media you find that a successful medium is determined by what art is created upon it, not by its technical aptitude. There is always something better, but what makes it useful is what artists can do with the limitations of the medium today.
That's why we see this pivot to the nebulous "enterprise" (without real success). It's because they haven't found artists that can create real content yet, at least nothing people want to experience. The most successful so far was LBE (location based entertainment) which was seeing good growth pre-covid.
Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to me like a regular VR headset + dual cameras on the front might be able to get much better results than actual AR?
I think this is a "grass is greener" type argument. There are also massive problems with pass-through AR (VR with cameras).
I'm not entirely sure it is. Pass through has serious engineering hurdles to get over first with latency, power consumption, weight etc.
But the waveguide method has limitations rooted in physics and math that won't change until 30%+70% stops equalling 100%.
I know which one I'd put more Hope's in.
Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022
#75I treat any and all Magic Leap announcements with a pinch of salt these days. I'm old enough to remember their then stealth mode claims to have invented a device that would revolutionize society, put a stop to world hunger, prevent war, abolish capitalism, etc. etc.
Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same Abovitz that did this abomination of a TEDx talk ... https://youtu.be/w8J5BWL8oJY
What the fuck was that?
The kind of person who can raise $3.5 billion without a working prototype, let alone any products or revenue
This iteration of IT bubble is particularly into charismatic founders.
Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one wants to wear a headset if it makes them look stupid. If AR glasses are a dead end then mass adoption of AR outside of gaming/enterprise is likely DOA.
Bluetooth headphones were "stupid looking" and endlessly mocked. Now airpods are in vogue. Social perceptions easily change, especially when there are billions of dollars invested in making them change.
Do we forget that AirPods solved a real pain? No more tangled wires, and they were the first in-ears I actually found comfortable.
Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to me like a regular VR headset + dual cameras on the front might be able to get much better results than actual AR?
Even if it did, people won’t wear them in public. Google Glass looked half normal and people were still getting accosted in restaurants.
People are discussing whether AR device could be worn in public. But I’m wondering: should it? I mean, I’m the last guy to question novel technology. I was desperate to get the first smartphones. But why would you want an always-on screen in public?
Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if it did, people won’t wear them in public. Google Glass looked half normal and people were still getting accosted in restaurants.
Yes, but that problem was much more “Google” than “glass”.
I was working on enterprise Google Glass apps in 2014. The problem was lack of applications. You could do very few things with it beyond showing some text and pictures.
Re: Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one wants to wear a headset if it makes them look stupid. If AR glasses are a dead end then mass adoption of AR outside of gaming/enterprise is likely DOA.
Last time I went skiing I noticed ski goggles kind of look cool, and are the perfect form factor for pass through ar. I think that’ll be the form it finally takes when Apple makes it cool.
Show up to your next work meeting wearing ski goggles and report back to us.