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

Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 183 posts

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#101

Post by ant6n »

x0x0 wrote: post #79
rsp1984 wrote: post #70

I've been working on AR and related technologies for almost the last decade and I've been part of the first handful of people working on Google Glass. Bottom line I've seen a lot of promising AR technologies come and go. My personal take on this is that they may indeed have some very good, if not revolutionary, display technology. However : The big, big obstacle to delivering credible AR is latency. Contrary to VR, t…

Since you're an expert: what about these videos is hard? The things that jumped out at me are: 1 - the robot moving behind the table leg (ie you have to do depth recognition of objects in the scene) 2 - the user's hand interacting with the artificial elements in the scene. Some code had to recognize a hand and figure out which element it was touching. What strikes you as the hard parts of those videos besides the rea…

The weapon is physically there tho

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#102

Post by Nagyman »

slavik81 wrote: post #73
tlrobinson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying cars don't exist. That's a technology problem, not a market problem.

There have been a number of flying cars over the years, such as the Model 59H AirGeep II. They're just expensive and impractical, so nobody ever builds more than a handful of them.

I never thought the "flying" part was the core technology... it seemed to be the invention some non-traditional, low-noise, propulsion & power source that could levitate heavy objects. I don't think we have that ... if we did, the expensive and practical part might be solved and we'd have them everywhere :)

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#103

Post by ant6n »

angersock wrote: post #25
untog wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you need to demonstrate any kind of working model in order to patent something? As far as I'm aware, you don't. I look at this as an aspirational patent - frankly, exactly the kind of thing you'd see from a company with so much money they can spend all day dreaming.

It's worse than that...these folks (or whoever inherits the patent) can now sue anybody that actually can get it working. This is a great example of patents being bullshit.

Or by the time this actually is possible, the patents will have expired.

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#104

Post by ericd »

x0x0 wrote: post #74
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #42

The money flowing into Augmented Reality in general isn't so much about 'augmented reality' as a thing today so much as it's a big audacious bet on it being the next wave of technology that replaces mobile phones.

That finally makes this make sense to me; a bet on the future of smartphone UI.

Yep, imagine a phone UI you don't have to hold in front of you as you walk across the street, and never have to pull out of your pocket.

Then imagine it putting annotations into the real world - review scores of wines floating next to the bottles as you browse the wine aisle, or yelp stars floating next to the restaurants, GPS arrows floating in space, etc. etc.

All assuming they solve the ridiculously hard power, miniaturization, object recognition, latency, etc problems. Even if you have to be tethered to a PC, though, it has a lot of potentially revolutionary uses.

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#106

Post by [deleted] »

hanniabu wrote: post #99
untog wrote: post #9

Augmented reality has been the sci-fi dream forever, but I'm really, really skeptical about its applications in real life. Not that they don't exist - the shoot-em-up game demoed in that video looks fantastic. The Gmail app looks horrendous. Worth billions? Depends on the implementation, and a demo video is very far from the real thing. I wouldn't be investing.

It would work great for commercial, medical, and military training purposes. You can use it to train personnel how to perform tasks that would generally be considered too dangerous, expensive, or risky to jump into first hand training. Doing so could also help lower insurance costs.

[deleted]

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#108

Post by sycren »

tlrobinson wrote: post #33
chao- wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the former omnipresence of flying cars in science fiction movies, I would say yes.

Flying cars don't exist. That's a technology problem, not a market problem.

I agree and interestingly I think the first technology problem that needed to be solved was not the flying element, but instead with autonomy self driving capabilities, which we will soon see within the next 3-5 years.

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#109

Post by zump »

josephpmay wrote: post #57
emcq wrote: post #27

It's easy to think of reasons why this isn't a sound investment. However, here are some thoughts why this may be sensible: * This is largely Google's investment to cover possible future success of Facebook's Occulus or Microsoft's Hololens. * They could have valuable non-tangible patents or employees. This is way past the "acquihire" funding levels, but perhaps the technology itself is valuable. Perhaps they get arou…

As I compete with Magic Leap, I'm probably in a pretty good position to answer this question. The main reason why ML is able to attract this level of investment is that their technology is literally decades ahead of what anybody else has. I haven't had the opportunity to try their headset out, but I know some people who have, and I haven't heard a single bad thing about it. The closest metaphor I can think of is seei…

Compete? Your website makes you out to be a high school student.

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#110

Post by kafkaesq »

Glaciers are melting; forests are burning; coral reefs are blanching; ocean levels are rising, water tables are dropping. The ecosystems that sustain our food supply chains are collapsing; those that aren't collapsing, are being poisoned; and the tiny niches relatively immune from these threats are being bought by hedge funds and private equity firms. Our education system is being gutted; so are our retirement plans. Our healthcare system seems to resiliently resist nearly all efforts at meaningful reform. Every movement we make, physical or virtual, is being relentlessly tracked, recorded, indexed and archived by an exponentially growing number of surveillance systems, private and governmental, for perpetuity.

And these guys are getting $1.4b so we can... shoot imaginary robots at the office?

Post reply on HN