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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

#161

Post by sgtnoodle »

systemvoltage wrote: post #115
shmatt wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 showin…

I saw it during an interview at Ft Lauderdale. I was interviewing for the optics metrology engineer position. It was as mind blowing as the op is stating. Absolutely stunning. This was 5 years ago. Signed a bunch of NDA papers so shouldn’t talk too much about it.

I tried one out maybe 3 years ago. It seemed clunky and awkward to me, and the projected scene glitched out a lot.

I tried my friend's oculus rift around the same time, and it felt immersive and fun.

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

#162

Post by notabanker »

LegitShady wrote: post #151
notabanker wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean Anduril? I have only a passing knowledge of Anduril, thanks for sharing your impression of them. But knowing his track record, I tend to believe Palmer Luckey has the ability to achieve daring innovations. That said, with quantum leap innovation, failure is the more likely outcome.

> I tend to believe Palmer Luckey has the ability to achieve daring innovations. If you're talking about oculus, they 'stole' a lot of their development from valve because there were valve employees who convinced whoever was decision making there to just give oculus tech without any license prior to the facebook acquisition, and then those employees got hired by oculus once they had facebook money. Oculus is the stor…

It's for insights like these that I come to HN. Thanks for disabusing me of the notion that Oculus was a classic garage to greatness story.

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

#163

Post by notabanker »

baybal2 wrote: post #62
notabanker wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean Anduril? I have only a passing knowledge of Anduril, thanks for sharing your impression of them. But knowing his track record, I tend to believe Palmer Luckey has the ability to achieve daring innovations. That said, with quantum leap innovation, failure is the more likely outcome.

> Ghost is practically invisible to the targets it observes, with a frontal cross-section smaller than some of the phones I have owned over the years. Stay tuned for true invisibility. I don't tend to believe people telling something like this being credible. Especially when they try to pass lobotomised Chinese RC toy heli for "an Apex of Aerospace Engineering," and carefully photoshops all its photos to disguise its…

Watched the video from start to finish. It's basically too good to be true -- modular, undetectable, lethal, rain proof, etc. Picturing the meeting room where the Anduril salesman plays the video to investors. A distortion vortex is in play due to the founder's previous success and no one in the audience dares object to the claims in the video. Bereft of challenge, the startup quadruples in valuation after the meeting.

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

#164

Post by LegitShady »

notabanker wrote: post #162
LegitShady wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I tend to believe Palmer Luckey has the ability to achieve daring innovations. If you're talking about oculus, they 'stole' a lot of their development from valve because there were valve employees who convinced whoever was decision making there to just give oculus tech without any license prior to the facebook acquisition, and then those employees got hired by oculus once they had facebook money. Oculus is the stor…

It's for insights like these that I come to HN. Thanks for disabusing me of the notion that Oculus was a classic garage to greatness story.

alan yates (posting as vk2zay on reddit) said the launch rift architecture was identical to the valve room headset architecture with its own tracking implementation and its own fresnel lens system.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4klu94/oculus_becomin...

>While that is generally true in this case every core feature of both the Rift and Vive HMDs are directly derived from Valve's research program. Oculus has their own CV-based tracking implementation and frensel lens design but the CV1 is otherwise a direct copy of the architecture of the 1080p Steam Sight prototype Valve lent Oculus when we installed a copy of the "Valve Room" at their headquarters. I would call Oculus the first SteamVR licensee, but history will likely record a somewhat different term for it...

---

Ben Krasnow (former valve employee who now has the youtube channel "Applied Science" https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience/ which you should check out if you haven't yet) posted here on hackernews back in 2017 during the oculus lawsuit.

> It fits a pattern. I was a hardware engineer at Valve during the early VR days, working mostly on Lighthouse and the internal dev headset. There were a few employees who insisted that the Valve VR group give away both hardware and software to Oculus with the hope that they would work together with Valve on VR. The tech was literally given away -- no contract, no license. After the facebook acquisition, these folks presumably received large financial incentives to join facebook, which they did. It was the most questionable thing I've seen in my whole career, and was partially caused by Valve's flat management structure and general lack of oversight. I left shortly after.

and then further down that thread

> Overall, I think Valve is a good place to work, and I learned a lot from all of the incredibly smart people there. The main reason that I left was the difficulty in merging hardware development with the company's exceptionally successful business model. The hardware team was pressured to give away lots of IP that could have been licensed, with the explanation that hardware is just so worthless anyway compared to online software sales, there was no other choice. It's possible that this was a good faith gamble, however it still doesn't preclude the use of business contracts that would have protected our investment. It also isn't so great for morale to hear everyday that your years of work are going to be given away to another company, and then watch that company get acquired for $2B. This is especially the case since many employees strongly voiced concerns about just such a scenario.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414190

Oculus was built on stolen tech taken by employees working at valve who convinced valve to give the tech away in the spirit of cooperation, and then jumped ship to facebook right away for the $$$.

I won't give them a cent.

Every time people post things to do with John Carmack all I can think about is that he was doing the same thing from his former employer to oculus as well. No matter what he did back in the day to make video game engines amazing, his involvement in oculus is a stain on his reputation. Even if you thought he was innocent in a vacuum, along with the rest of the shenanigans with oculus I don't think it was so innocent. He took the source code he wrote, sent it to himself, then he was involved in the "clean room" reimplementation? I don't believe it no matter what the courts ruled could be proven.

They are literally a company founded on "semi legal" theft, fraud, betrayal, etc.

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

#165

Post by knownjorbist »

baybal2 wrote: post #95
knownjorbist wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you care to reply to the people who attest that the magic leap is actually underwhelming given the current state of AR?

I will. I work in an engineering company which shipped a number of AR glasses projects (for clients I can't name,) and I can say that whomever did engineering for Magic Leap had no idea whatsoever about basics of optics, and such. And their overall engineering level is totally amateurish — you cannot have such shoddy job being done for money, let alone such amount of money, but they have everything to tick the checkb…

If you had to distill this down in layperson's terms- AR glasses are impossible without being essentially sunglasses? Or some sort of other tradeoff?

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

#166

Post by tsimionescu »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #153
snek_case wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I'm kind of left feeling like I'd rather fly the plane in a better looking simulated environment, with a first-person perspective. It's more flexible and fun than being tied to flying it in the environment around you. I still haven't seen a compelling use case for AR.

You can't envision a use case for A.R.??? Took me less than 5 minutes to think of the following: 1. Educational aspects such as being able to copy choreography by watching a virtual expert do it and still be able to see your own body mimicking the actions which she would not be able to do in VR (this could include juggling patterns, martial arts, any kind of complex motion) 2. Overlaying any number of AR layers on to…

These are all nifty niche cases, not compelling use cases for an expensive piece of hardware which everyone would own.

Use case 1 seems to be a minor improvement over a video call on a decent monitor today, and this is assuming that the AR and other tech would advance hugely from where it is today, to actually be able to do realtime filming and rendering with high precision, perhaps even in 3D to get some real advantage.

Use case 2 seems more realistic, but will be limited by eye tracking precision, component idenficiaction precision, and occlusion issues. Input will also be an issue (choosing which tooltips to see).

Use case 3 seems worse than building things in VR, other than some fancy art installations. Why would I want a virtual object that I can't view from my own home? Also, interaction would be fantastically limited, making the whole thing disappointing.

Use case 4 suffers even worse from interaction issues, and it also seems like a downgrade from current technology, which allows me to play in huge virtual environments without even getting off my chair.

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

#167

Post by baybal2 »

knownjorbist wrote: post #165
baybal2 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will. I work in an engineering company which shipped a number of AR glasses projects (for clients I can't name,) and I can say that whomever did engineering for Magic Leap had no idea whatsoever about basics of optics, and such. And their overall engineering level is totally amateurish — you cannot have such shoddy job being done for money, let alone such amount of money, but they have everything to tick the checkb…

If you had to distill this down in layperson's terms- AR glasses are impossible without being essentially sunglasses? Or some sort of other tradeoff?

The first point. This is the case for holographic waveguides, which currently seem to be the industry-wide obsession.

Many other optical schemes don't share this weakness.

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

#168

Post by DonHopkins »

dntrkv wrote: post #125
shmatt wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 showin…

Just reserve judgement until you experience it yourself. You can't reproduce the experience on a 2D screen. That's the whole point.

That didn't stop them from making fraudulent concept video demos that they falsely claimed to be actual existing games that they were already playing around the office, and that they promised much much more than they could actually deliver.

So if you can't reproduce the experience on a 2D screen, then fake it and lie, you're saying? That IS the whole point.

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

#169

Post by supermatt »

dexterdog wrote: post #26
supermatt wrote: post #17

Are the any AR headsets that will give me a good multi-monitor setup where I can still see everything going on around me? Id happily pay $1500 for something like that.

Why would you want the segregation of multiple monitors with a headset?

floating app windows would be better, but thats going to be a lot more complicated than virtual desktops. I just want a multi monitor setup without the monitors.

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

#170

Post by leetrout »

defen wrote: post #137
systemvoltage wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw it during an interview at Ft Lauderdale. I was interviewing for the optics metrology engineer position. It was as mind blowing as the op is stating. Absolutely stunning. This was 5 years ago. Signed a bunch of NDA papers so shouldn’t talk too much about it.

Have you considered that the demo may have been faked (for example maybe they preprogrammed it with room geometry that was acquired some other way)?

It had been proposed that this may be one way some of this tech gets adopted- purpose built and maintained rooms just for AR / VR / XR.

Its not a baf ifea if you have the right tradeoffs. The tech to make that worth it is going to be at least a decade away IMO.

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