I kind of assumed all along. I was crying vaporware the whole time though - I'm surprised they released something. The signs were there in the marketing - they never showed anything other than pretty cg mockups the entire time, the only videos they showed of functionality were clearly fabricated mockups - even < 1 year to release date. The closest they ever came to actually demoing the thing was showing some celebrity using it.
If they actually had anything nearly as impressive as they were claiming they wouldn't acted so obviously shady.
Despite this, I think they still deserve some credit for actually releasing something. I was on the Magic Leap hate train, but now that they actually released their gimpy headset I'm actually kinda rooting for them.
Not really- "releasing" implies a regular person could buy it... No human being outside of Theranos was ever allowed to be in the same room as an Edison machine.
Are you seeing a “silver lining” he missed? If not, don’t you think it’s possible that he’s been a long time critic because it was crap and exception from the get-go? If not, I think it’s worth remembering that this critic correctly predicted all of the major problems with the device months (and longer) before it was released. He called the “lightfield” and other marketing dishonesty out quite a long time ago, and seems to have been batting nearly .1000.
So... what do you see that he missed?
I understand that you’ve been very supportive of this for months, but unless you’re invested in or affiliated with Magic Leap it might be time to let it go in the face of the reality.
Yes, I've watched a few long form video reviews of the ML One, and I've generally been impressed with what I've seen in the videos. The reviewers have generally seemed impressed as well. They usually say it could use a bit of work before being unleashed to consumers, and that it's a long way from fulfilling all of AR's potential, but being that it's explictly a dev kit of a V1 of potentially a whole new industry, I think that's all acceptable.
This reviewer has clearly had an axe to grind with ML's claims for years, and this is a continuation of that.
EDIT: that doesn't seem like the same comment I replied to, did you significantly expand it?
I think you can quibble about the author's bias, but Magic Leap has so far failed to deliver on the promise that its early videos promised: the ability to seamlessly blend the real world with a computer-generated one.
Other systems in the same space (like Hololens, the Rift and the Vive) didn’t put such simulated imagery front-and-centre in their marketing materials.
They're not quite there yet on their miniaturized consumer hardware, but have you watched the longer form videos? What they've pulled off looks like a very strong start toward that.
The Rift and Vive are not in the same space as Hololens/ML at all, they shouldn't be lumped together.
Going back further, Microsoft has a history of this with things like Project Milo on the Kinect. These things really don't matter in the end though. Its the technology itself that matters, and how good or bad it is relative to the market.
The silver lining is that devs actually really like the device. Despite the hype/reality factor that tainted the initial reviews the consensus is that the device itself is actually quite good. If all you read are the negatives, especially hit pieces from Guttag then I could see why you have the point of view you do. In fact you'll be hard pressed to find any reviews outside of Guttag and Palmer Luckey who state the device is bad:
Well, of course it has to block most of the room lighting. They can't draw dark. The display has to be brighter than the ambient light. I'm surprised these things don't have an auto dimming shutter, like a welding mask, to adjust how much outside light gets through.
Well, there is this rear view mirror in cars which essentially draws dark by blocking out the area where the sun would reflect into your eye.
Expanding on that, maybe with some kind of holographic shenanigans, we can have something that not exactly draws dark, but occludes light very cleverly.
The update rate has to be very high and the alignment perfect or it will drive users nuts. Which means it will probably be done soon, although not in this round. Doing it with lightweight short path optics is also difficult. All this stuff with diffraction gratings and Fresnel lenses makes for a crappy image. That can sometimes be overcome; the Polaroid SX-70 camera had a very compressed optical system with Fresnel lenses without compromising image quality too much.[1]
The other option is simply to show the real world via a camera feeding into the system. That's been tried many times, and it works OK, although lag will make users faceplant or ill.
The problem is focal conjugates; you can't darken something close to the eye and have it look like a dark region at a distance without focus blurring ruining the effect.
>The fact that 85% of the normal room lighting is blocked by the lens means that wearing it would essentially be like wearing sunglasses.
As part of a costume I bought some $4 sunglasses at the thrift store and wore them in a dimly-lit bar the other night. Ended up bumping into people because I couldn't see.
To be honest it doesn't look that much worse than the Hololens and the Hololens was perfectly fine. Not perfect, sure, but technology has limitations. People still buy LCDs even though they reflect ambient light, don't work outdoors, etc. I don't see what the point is of complaining about having to look through a diffraction grating if we have no other way of doing it.
No, hololens just isn't good enough. Won't see market traction, because it's too unrealistic, the immersion factor too low.
There's a minimum bar of realism we need to hit to have reasonable AR and VR. The original Vive hit that bar for VR, but nothing has hit that bar yet for AR.
The worst part is that Hololens is now almost 3 years old and is going to ship a new model next year (rumored)...so Magic Leap is also so so so far behind. Microsoft is smartly pushing Hololens for industrial uses, where Magic Leap plans on military contracts? There is about a 0% chance the military will be using AR in any official capacity in the field for a while.
This kind of reminds me of Leap Motion, which is a very cool tech, but I could never find any practical use for it....at least Leap Motions are cheap.
"The original HoloLens has been out for a long time now, so a new (hopefully cheaper) version is overdue, but it now looks like we won’t see it before 2020."
Is there a chance of proper text rendering with this technology, usable browser windows and such?
I think overcoming the laptop screen and enabling "portable workstations" (portable like a laptop, not phone) could replace laptops and improve desktop -> laptop workflows.
This is very impressive that someone would take the time to experiment an document so thoroughly this product. I am thankful because I find this very interesting and I always thought of Magic Leap as vaporware.
The last time I compared Magic Leap to Theranos I was downvoted to -4 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16713546). It's interesting to see people's reasoning back then vs the product now, 6 months later.
You deserved to be downvoted for that because (a) it's a baseless accusation and (b) it was intellectually lazy.
Theranos committed crimes and their fraudulent behaviour directly impacted on people's lives. There is no evidence Magic Leap has done either and there is nothing illegal or immoral about pivoting on your product.
I got downvotes,which is fair because my comment was stupid because I didn't read the comments I was replying to carefully enough. I missed the "delete" deadline so sorry about the baseless noise.
Of course delivering shitty results isn't pivoting.
Of topic: who cares if you get upvotes or downvotes? Do people actually care what others think of their comments? Please, state the unpopular opinion however brashly you choose.
I see karma as a bank for paying for incredibly trashy comments: for every upvote I vow to write at least one thoughtless hot take and defend it to the death
There's a huge difference between a highly funded startup that is trying to build something completely revolutionary and hasn't quite gotten there yet, and a company actively and knowingly engaging in fraud in the medical space.
Seems like you're moving the goalposts though: the original question was whether Magic Leap is "unethical," not how much damage they could do by being unethical. Releasing much-hyped, highly-produced, and very compelling marketing content while knowing your company can't possibly deliver on it certainly meets my bar for unethical.
It's certainly not as bad as Theranos, sure - but bilking consumers (or investors) can still be unethical too. If your bar for a company acting unethical requires literally killing people, you'll be overlooking a lot of bad behavior...
I’d agree otherwise, but the article mentions that Magic Leap is bidding for a $500M military contract.
Putting these toy lenses on soldiers can get people killed — both the fighters themselves as well as civilians are at risk from these digital goggles that block 86% of incoming light unless the AR graphics can do something really, really useful in the battlefield.
I doubt it's for the battlefield. More likely for planning, where you'd have a briefing with several people around a tabletop projection of the ground scene and AR tanks and characters moving around.
I don't think Theranos is a good comparison... but I don't think it's fair to characterise AR as a toy either, some people probbaly said the same about early incarnations of the technology that drove high resolution colour displays, lots of technology looks like shiny toys to begin with, but that's only because you cannot forsee it's applicaiton... AR is definately general enough to have very useful applications.
