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Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

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Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#401

Post by FrojoS »

npunt wrote: post #261

Magic Leap made one of the classic mistakes that other before-their-time products make: they tried to create a general purpose product because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts. When you're building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on fidelity , embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful…

> they tried to create a general purpose product because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts.

Couldn't you have said the same of the Apple II or IBM PC?

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#402

Post by npunt »

sek wrote: post #386
npunt wrote: post #261

Magic Leap made one of the classic mistakes that other before-their-time products make: they tried to create a general purpose product because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts. When you're building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on fidelity , embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful…

I absolutely agree with the killer application part, even for business applications they still don't have any idea. On their website you have a video that displays several use cases that don't make sense if you really think about them. Just to dissect the first example where doctors look at a low resolution brain over a surgery table. I don't know why there is a woman without a device who thinks: "why are those three…

Yep, the videos are basically scifi shorts devoid of actual product thinking. It's like asking concept artists to draw a hospital of the future, knowing nothing about how hospitals operate. I saw this a lot in edtech, lots of wishful thinking put in products by people who didn't know how schools worked.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#403

Post by npunt »

gtm1260 wrote: post #338
npunt wrote: post #261

Magic Leap made one of the classic mistakes that other before-their-time products make: they tried to create a general purpose product because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts. When you're building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on fidelity , embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful…

I think the biggest mistake that Magic Leap made is that they compromised on their hardware. Like you said, they tried to go general purpose which means low "enough" cost for devs to pick one up and build an app, for enthusiasts to try em out etc. But the thing is, they didn't have best in class hardware. I've tried one and its marginally better than a hololens 2. They could have gone all out with a vision prototype…

Even if they did make the world's greatest AR hardware of 2020, they wouldn't have a great product because they wouldn't have clear use cases to sell it, and it would be too hobbled by resource constraints of the available tech - much like pen computers of the 90s.

If it were the scifi-like AR glasses of the future, perhaps that would sell itself due to all the dreamed up ideas in movies and tv, but that's pretty far afield of what's possible today.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#404

Post by npunt »

Crespyl wrote: post #317
didibus wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but I also want to say it's often more complicated then this. Like, the Apple Watch example seems easy, but what happened to FitBit? FitBit went all in on your idea. Picked a single use case with a market, delivered on it. Yet Apple swooped in, took the market from them. Why is that? This is an open question, I don't claim to have the answer. It just seems that in this case, Apple was promising, as…

I'm probably oversimplifying, but there is some truth to the notion of Apple being as much a fashion company as they are a tech company, and smart-watches fit perfectly into that niche of fashion-tech. FitBit was a good product, but Apple had more experience and resources available when they decided to enter the space. Even so, I have no doubt there were other factors at play as well.

Yeah definitely! Fashion is itself a framing mechanism and a way to convey meaning, and part of any good product launch is having people understand your product the way you want it to be understood.

If one of the properties you want your product to have is being fashionable and communicate something about you, you have to both invest effort in making a product that reflects that need (through the design decisions of form & function), and gets people to understanding it through that lens (framing it through product marketing). It's a push and pull to create something fashion-forward, the product adapts to the market's needs, and the market shifts what's fashionable to include the product.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#405

Post by simonkafan »

npunt wrote: post #261

Magic Leap made one of the classic mistakes that other before-their-time products make: they tried to create a general purpose product because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts. When you're building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on fidelity , embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful…

To underline this statement, take a look at this "Spotify for AR" concept: https://mixed.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/spotify_magic_le...

Did someone at Magic Leap seriously think, people will buy an expensive AR device and wear it just to see virtual album covers placed on their table?

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#406

Post by whywhywhywhy »

gfxgirl wrote: post #370
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oculus Quest and its 3 year old mobile chipset would like to disagree. People pay for a good experience.

The Quest is underpowered to run any of the truly compelling VR experiences. You can't play Half Life Alex on a Quest, nor No Man's Sky, Boneworks, SkyRim, Lone Echo, etc.... You basically get a 3 or 4 mobile class experiences and then you're done. Yes you can use the link, but then you need an NVidia 1650 RTX or better which means you're a high end gamer already and so were not this supposed "mass market" PSVR is st…

We just gonna ignore it runs Beatsaber and VRChat two arguably much more important and popular VR apps than that janky Skyrim port.

PCVR is an evolutionary dead end, few adults want giant PC towers in their homes anymore. Even when I demoed PCVR with amazing experiences like Lone Echo people lost interest when I told them no, it wont run on your macbook, you need a tower PC.

Yet I demoed them Beatsaber on the quest and a guy ordered one within a minute of taking the headset off, he demoed it at a family BBQ and two of his relatives bought it after.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#407

Post by quickthrower2 »

flukus wrote: post #353
kmonsen wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they just never had a great product. Look at VR, even though the products are becoming really good, it is not hitting mainstream and this is even more niche. The startup cost is enormous, it is really hard to create good content and there is close to zero revenue since there are few users. And the users that does exist is the techie crowd that doesn't like to pay for anything.

> I think they just never had a great product Bingo. If the product works as advertised I could justify the cost just in replacing existing screens, I could have a dozen virtual terminals floating around, I could replace my large TV, etc. All with zero new content required. The problem is it doesn't seem to work as advertised.

I’ve not looked into this but is this bad for your eyes to be focusing so close for long periods?

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#408

Post by benedictevans »

adam_fallon_ wrote: post #75

I sort of always knew it was the job of VCs to hype up their portfolio, but i've never seen it as bare faced as when Benedict Evans was shilling Magic Leap saying things along the lines of "Magic Leap was the coolest thing I'd seen since the iPhone. It's now much cooler than that." and "I’ve had the Magic Leap demo. It was worth going to Florida for." Well that looks a bit silly now doesn't it.

Sometimes frontier technology doesn't turn out as planned. Welcome to the tech industry - you will encounter more of this as your career continues ;)

So:

Magic Leap built a technology demonstrator, on a rig that was bolted to a table (as everyone has said). That demo was great. It was also, yes, bolted to a table. They have not turned that into a shipping mass-market consumer product.

Somehow, a bunch of people on the internets decided that because they, personally, hadn't seen the demo, anyone who had must be lying (or on acid?). This was, well, 'a bit silly', for lots of reasons, and it also missed the real challenges. The question was never 'does the tech demo exist?' Rather: Can they turn the optics on the table into something you can wear (that also has even better optics, with acceptable FOV, occlusion etc)? Can they go from a display technology to an actual platform?

Presume for the sake of argument that they solved all the optics etc questions - then they would be in the position of a company that had invented multitouch. That doesn't give you an iPhone. You still have to make an actual smartphone, work out the software and the UI, build an ecosystem, create an app store, get to scaled mass production, and that's really expensive. Or, someone had to - you could licence it out in some way (which is what Qualcomm did with CDMA - Qualcomm doesn't make phones or build cellular networks)

So: imagine back in 2006, you'd seen Jeff Han's multitouch demo. It was three feet across, came in several packing cases, and it was very very cool. But it wasn't an iPhone.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#409

Post by xorcist »

istorical wrote: post #377
egd wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic problem is that without high fidelity & a wide FOV, there's nothing that sets MagicLeap apart from any of the other companies that have been able to create AR headsets for the last ~decade. AR right now is stuck because the display technologies aren't up to the task. The "Waveguide" approach has always fallen short - nobody's ever been able to make the viewing angle wide enough to be worthwhile, and the "pa…

One could argue that Google Glass could have worked if the battery life was better, universal google maps / navigation had been better developed and more omnipresent, and pricepoint had been way lower. Perhaps enough time has passed for those sorts of problems to be resolved and Apple will do something similar to Apple Watch but for Glasses.

That illustrates the parent poster's point pretty well. If you set out to build a killer heads-up display for navigation, it wouldn't look like Glass did. Better to focus on the "killer app" to establish the beachhead. Generality will follow.

Re: Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

#410

Post by _-___________-_ »

chaostheory wrote: post #347
kmonsen wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they just never had a great product. Look at VR, even though the products are becoming really good, it is not hitting mainstream and this is even more niche. The startup cost is enormous, it is really hard to create good content and there is close to zero revenue since there are few users. And the users that does exist is the techie crowd that doesn't like to pay for anything.

VR is becoming mainstream with Covid19 lockdowns. Oculus Quest keeps going out of stock and there's a long waiting list for Valve's Index.

I doubt that indicates that it's becoming mainstream so much as that they had trouble scaling production up quickly enough for all the techies that all decided at once to play with VR once they were stuck inside.
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