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Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

techcrunch.com

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Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#71

Post by jbhatab »

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…

What do you mean by revolutionizing computing? I assume you mean the way we interact with computers, not something like computer processing speed.

I definitely agree that AR has huge potential in changing how we interact with the world. Although I'm much more interested in technology that leverages things like projects to augment my reality without having to wear a headset. Very related things though.

How do you feel about headset vs no headset AR?

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#72

Post by x0x0 »

sigmar wrote: post #34
mosquito242 wrote: post #5

I don't know where I stand on this. To be raising such ridiculous amounts, they must have some incredible technology to demo. If they're anything close to what the second demo video shows, then they're basically building Tony Stark's home computer interface in Iron Man.

>To be raising such ridiculous amounts, they must have some incredible technology to demo. I used to think along this line too. But examples like Theranos make me more skeptical

Theranos has raised a little less than $90m according to crunchbase. These folks have already raised $592m.

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#73

Post by slavik81 »

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.

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.

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#74

Post by x0x0 »

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.

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#75

Post by tristanj »

karcass wrote: post #7

I didn't see in the article -- what was the post-money val?

Post-money valuation of $3.7 billion. It's from the forbes article, not sure why TC didn't include it.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2015/12/09/secretiv...

Another source shows they were seeking to raise $1b at around a $4.5 billion valuation. This one is dated two months ago though. http://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/blog/morning-edition...

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#76

Post by SandB0x »

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…

In what specific ways is their technology better, from what you've heard? Hololens supposedly has a narrov FOV and you need a relatively dark room due to the additive display. Have they really solved these problems?

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#77

Post by ksenzee »

S4M wrote: post #66
ksenzee wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this makes me a pedant, but it bothers me to see big O notation used as a shortcut for "within an order of magnitude." It would probably be fine if everyone on HN had taken an algorithms class and knew the formal definition. In reality, a lot of people here are still learning what that capital O thing means, and if they see it used as "within an order of magnitude" we're doing them a disservice. (As someone w…

Also nitpicking, but in the mathematical sense, 1000B/year or 1k/year are also O(1B)/year.

Yes, which is precisely why it bothers me. All I see in my head is a flat line on a graph.

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#78

Post by colinshark »

I can't get past the fact that the software, in order to interact with the 3D world, will be expensive and cumbersome to make. Also, people (your income) born before AR tech generally don't want hardware on their face.

This, and Hololens, and similar, will fail for a while, and I'm thinking it will be decades. I'm placing my bet now.

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#79

Post by x0x0 »

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 real-time requirement?

Re: Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C

#80

Post by paulftw »

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…

> Perhaps they get around that valuation with 100M/year in patent licensing.

Patents expire after 25 years, so at 100M p.a. deal for investors is spend 1B to get $2.5B back, two decades later. I'm not sure that even beats fixed interest. Even with continuation it's still around 10% return.

As others have pointed out O(1B) is same as O(1).

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