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My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

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Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#101

Post by leetrout »

Aunche wrote: post #84
leetrout wrote: post #36

If you have not experienced the magic leap videos do not do it justice. Heres my video flying inside my house: https://youtu.be/Grlk03MdScQ The jaw dropping aspects: - it correctly knows when to mask for the column - it does lighting effects from the planes headlights - it does particle collisions with my furniture when it crashes - it crashes by detecting i hit the wall It really is amazing tech but it is very unpol…

Is this much different from the Hololens?

The magic leap os is some funky linux / android thing so I think it loses out to Hololens right there.

The ML seems to scan rooms better and "lock" things in space better but the HL seemed to have a better resolution (_not_ field of view) when using "normal" apps.

They are both competing on field of view now with the next generation of devices but the ML beats the first gen HL hands down on the larger FOV.

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#103

Post by adrr »

breezeTrowel wrote: post #63
raesene9 wrote: post #21

I must admit I'd forgotten about Magic Leap, amazed to see they're still going and raising even more money. In my head, I always put them in a bucket with Theranos and uBeam, Startups who made product claims which experts in their fields said were not possible. I guess slick marketing wins over those doubts in some VC circles but you wonder if anyone at the early stage Magic Leap investors is getting asked tough ques…

> Startups who made product claims which experts in their fields said were not possible. Can you clarify what you mean by this? What aspect is considered impossible? Augmented Reality has been around for a while. There's the Microsoft HoloLens. Not to mention all the AR demos Apple does whenever they announce a new iPhone. Check out this page, for example: https://www.apple.com/augmented-reality/ especially the Snapc…

I wonder if Microsoft spent $2.5 billion to develop HoloLens.

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#104

Post by tootie »

idontwantthis wrote: post #41

Does anyone here work with super expensive "enterprise" VR/AR? My gut instinct is that they try to make something good, realize the tech to fulfill their dream is incredibly expensive, then pivot to "enterprise" to get more funding. Am I being cynical?

My last company tried really hard to pitch AR/VR projects. Using headsets, phones even the Bose sunglasses. It was a huge struggle to find anything compelling to do with AR even when it worked. We ended up selling a few nifty marketing experiences and artsy installations but they were like 30 second experiences and not useful for anything. The tech "works", it's just not very compelling.

Think about phone AR which works very smoothly and Apple/Google have been investing in hardware upgrades to enhance AR experiences yet it's been 5 years since Pokemon Go and no one has figured out another interesting thing to do with it.

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#105

Post by listless »

bathtub365 wrote: post #79
listless wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I read “pivot to enterprise” from a startup, I read “we’re out of ideas”. In my own personal experience, startups who pivot to the enterprise are dying stars and that statement is a hallmark.

It sounds more like a recognition that headset-based AR has no future as a consumer product with current form factors.

That’s a much better phrasing.

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#106

Post by ghaff »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #54
krageon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried the leap in practice and the experience was significantly above what I expected. The tracking worked most of the time (how???), with occasional wonkyness. The accuracy was very good (outside of the wonks). Where it is very limited is number of applications.

The problem, to me, looks like getting 90% of the way there is possible. However, getting from 90% to 99.9% (to get rid of that "wonkyness"), seems to be way way way harder. Magic Leap has made little to no progress in working out the kinks in their product despite raising literally billions of dollars.

The 90% statement is both true and is one of the things that really sucks people in. There are any number of technologies that kinda/sorta work as a PoC. There's a gaping chasm between that PoC and a viable working product but a lot of people look at the PoC and can imagine what the working product looks like--and think to themselves that it's only about some refinement.

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#107

Post by shmatt »

leetrout wrote: post #36

If you have not experienced the magic leap videos do not do it justice. Heres my video flying inside my house: https://youtu.be/Grlk03MdScQ The jaw dropping aspects: - it correctly knows when to mask for the column - it does lighting effects from the planes headlights - it does particle collisions with my furniture when it crashes - it crashes by detecting i hit the wall It really is amazing tech but it is very unpol…

I have to say, I've been reading these comments who love or hate ML, treating them as just another internet argument

As someone who was following the public hype but never actually saw what they released. This is absolutely completely terrible. The promises they made when they raised half a billion dollars 7 years ago as a stealth company backed by tech geniuses.

If this is what they have today, what were they showing investors 7 years ago? and why did investors think this is going to revolutionize the world?

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#108

Post by shmatt »

phonon wrote: post #85
dabeeeenster wrote: post #58

I never quite figured out these tweets: https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/656667346837200896?... I’ve had the Magic Leap demo. It was worth going to Florida for. https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/842399282485460992?... So, a while ago I said that seeing Magic Leap was the coolest thing I'd seen since the iPhone. It's now much cooler than that. Any suggestions?

The demo he refers to was not (and could never be) an actual commercial product. It was stationary and the optics were 100x what could fit on a mobile device. What they eventually shipped had very little to do with the tech used in the private demo. Turns out optical physics is not like software...

Which makes another tweet of his even weirder. Someone questioned the plausibility of making that demo mobile

>it’s perfectly clear. Just not public.

https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/656667935205797888

The only difference between 2015 ML and Theranos is that faking tech in healthcare is just a lot more illegal.

If they promised investors there was a definite plan the demo becomes a real product, and knew thats a lie, could they sue?

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#109

Post by taneq »

leetrout wrote: post #36

If you have not experienced the magic leap videos do not do it justice. Heres my video flying inside my house: https://youtu.be/Grlk03MdScQ The jaw dropping aspects: - it correctly knows when to mask for the column - it does lighting effects from the planes headlights - it does particle collisions with my furniture when it crashes - it crashes by detecting i hit the wall It really is amazing tech but it is very unpol…

TBH that's better than I expected. I'd call the column masking "barely adequate" rather than "correctly" but it's at least making an attempt to reconstruct the scene and do additive composition in realtime.

Wasn't the real breakthrough meant to be to do with variable focus lightfield voodoo meaning that the rendered components looked like they 'fitted in' with the scene and could occlude as well as be occluded, rather than being additive CGI floating in front of it?

Re: My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

#110

Post by eberkund »

nikanj wrote: post #30
raesene9 wrote: post #21

I must admit I'd forgotten about Magic Leap, amazed to see they're still going and raising even more money. In my head, I always put them in a bucket with Theranos and uBeam, Startups who made product claims which experts in their fields said were not possible. I guess slick marketing wins over those doubts in some VC circles but you wonder if anyone at the early stage Magic Leap investors is getting asked tough ques…

> I guess slick marketing wins over those doubts in some VC circles but you wonder if anyone at the early stage Magic Leap investors is getting asked tough questions about why they approved it, or if they've all just moved on to other roles. I would guess this depends on whether or not they managed to hoist the stock to someone else in subsequent rounds. Investing in a scam can still be a good deal, as long as you ge…

*as long as you _get out_ before the jig is up
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