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My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

magicleap.com

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

#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 questions about why they approved it, or if they've all just moved on to other roles.

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

#22

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.

No, that does not exist as of today.

If you can settle for VR, you might be happy with Immersed and Vive Focus 3.

There are no AR headsets today that would be remotely useful for day-to-day work, let alone with any kind of passable software support. Stuff from Varjo (like the XR-3) is getting there, but it's not there yet.

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

#24

Here we go again . . . But in all seriousness, even if they could ship something meaningful, one wonders if the brand is tarnished such that it makes sense to re-launch with fresh branding. “Magic Leap” does not conjure up positive images in my mind. Why swim against the current unnecessarily?

Or are you referring to the way Magic Leap picked up and ripped off so many other people's original designs and IP in their patent applications without giving the actual inventors credit, that tarnished Magic Leap's reputation?

https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/30/7954611/magic-leap-augmen...

>Magic Leap's futuristic patent art was copied from other artists' designs

>When Google-backed augmented reality company Magic Leap quietly applied for a patent, it did so with dozens of pages of futuristic (and slightly creepy) scenarios: a social media charm bracelet, a gargoyle bursting out of a box in a store, gamified cucumber chopping...

>Wait a second. That last one sounds familiar. Maybe that's because it's a line drawing of a shot from "Sight," a Black Mirror-esque short film about an augmented, sinister future. As it turns out, Magic Leap's patent art isn't so much its vision of the future as one created by various students and designers. Former Verge-r and current Gizmodo writer Sean Hollister was tipped off to a set of side-by-side comparisons that leave no doubt we're looking at copies.

>If patents are about originality, does this mean Magic Leap is hurting its claims? Not really. A great deal of patent art just shows potential designs or uses for something, in order to make the actual, more abstract claims clearer. In this case, Magic Leap is patenting an optical system that has nothing to do with the interfaces displayed here. Even bringing a copyright claim would be hard and arguably pointless. "Images such as these are setting consumer expectations of VR and AR today," the company told Gizmodo. "We wanted to use the same images to demonstrate what our technology will enable."

>The designers themselves seem ambivalent of their images' rebirth as patent art. Magic Leap appears to have neither contacted them nor credited them, but at the same time, it's showing the world how this futuristic design fiction could work. It's one thing to have someone rip off your art. It's another to have them actually make it real — if Magic Leap can actually deliver on its ambitious promises.

https://gizmodo.com/magic-leap-ripped-off-those-awesome-ui-c...

>Magic Leap Ripped Off Those Awesome UI Concepts

>Magic Leap is secretly building a headset that could blend computer graphics with the real world. Recently, we lucked into a treasure trove of illustrations from Magic Leap about what that future might hold. There's just one problem: Magic Leap didn't actually create all those awesome UI concepts. It copied them.

>The images speak for themselves. On the left of each of these comparision shots, you'll see an illustration plucked directly from this Magic Leap patent application. On the right, you'll find a screengrab from an awesome UI concept invented by someone else.

>Remember Sight, the incredible student film where a man with bionic eyes plays Fruit Ninja with a real cucumber that becomes part of his meal? Same cucumber. Same everything:

>Or how about the Ringo Holographic Interface dreamt up by then-UI-design-student Ivan Tihienko in 2008?

>Here's a augmented reality concept from interaction designer Joesph Juhnke called "The Future of Firefighting":

>And below, one from designer Michaël Harboun and his team called The Aeon Project. "What if you could travel to exotic, far-away destinations while being stuck in traffic?"

>Lastly, two images from "Meditating Mediums - The Digital 3D," which was the graduating thesis for Greg Tran at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He now designs for Samsung.

>This might also look familiar: [...]

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

#25

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 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.

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

#26

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?

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

#27

I can't believe VCs put another 500M$ in this (even at the same last valuation). If only we could have that money for our Lynx[0] headset... [0] https://lynx-r.com

You can't believe it, because you think there's a rational process involved in investment decisions. After watching how things go for some time, I came to believe that who you are and what connections you have is far more important.

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

#29

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.

https://varjo.com/products/xr-3/ is probably as close as you'll get today. However it costs around $6k and is still far from perfect.

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

#30

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 get out before the jig is up

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