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 processing, and compelling input methods.
The real question in AR is what use cases can you hit without great fidelity? What sort of value can you unlock with a low-res postage stamp overlay and slow processor instead of full FOV? That's where the go-to market effort needs to be placed.
A similar example of this overreach was in multifunction pen devices of the 90s (General Magic, Newton, EO Personal communicator). A great counter example is Apple Watch, which didn't chase the 'smartphone on your wrist' everything device, and instead picked a few key use cases, established a beachhead, and slowly added capabilities as the technology allowed.
When a category-defining product has yet to emerge on the market, there are going to be a lot of people making predictable mistakes like this - mistiming ideas, scoping the wrong set of features, getting too excited about the wrong technologies, not leveraging their assets.
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 "passthrough" approach isn't really viable for walking down the street.
This is why I'm skeptical about Apple's AR moves - unless they've either got a totally new display technology or they've managed to do something incredibly clever with the waveguide approach, I just don't see consumer goggles working.
The only people I've seen doing something unique in this space is Tilt Five: https://www.tiltfive.com/ - they've basically done what you're suggesting: constrain the use case until you can actually build something for it.
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.
I find that very unlikely. Pedestrian navigation isn't exactly a major use case for most people and is pretty well covered by phones and smartwatches already.
Could have been useful for food delivery drivers (cyclists), but then we're right back into specialist markets.
I disagree. You could make the same argument that texting and phone calls are handled by smartphones, so why need the apple watch? I personally hate looking down at my phone to navigate while walking around in an unfamiliar city.
If there was a big demand for pedestrian navigation (walking around an unfamiliar city is not a frequent activity for most people) we would already have better solutions, such as good voice navigation, which would arguably be better than can be done on the low-res Google glass display.
Receiving messages and notifications is a very frequent occurrence for most people these days. Personally I suspect I'd find the watch notification preferable to one that appears in my peripheral vision (disrupting attention) for that use case.
Good pedestrian navigation (which needs pedestrian road/pathway networks that haven't been built to the same extent as they have for roads, though in some countries like Japan they are much better) doesn't need constant interaction.
You'd just be wearing your regular headset and you'd occasionally hear "at the next intersection, take the traffic light on your left, cross the road and continue down xxx street"
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.
But that is precisely the point the parent is trying to make, no? The tech was in no way ready and able to do these things, so Google Glass had to appeal in a broader, non-focused way which is one of the issues that broke its neck.
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.
The question I'm asking is why they don't have a great product. Why is it bulky, weird looking, expensive, etc? Why does their marketing fail to explain the product's value?
There are tons of ways to implement AR. They chose 'general AR', the kind of thing you see on Westworld or Black Mirror. That was a bad choice, because the tech isn't there and won't be for a long time, and it only follows that the implementation was going to be bad.
As far as VR goes, it's further along. Quest is a quality stand-alone product, but VR is young and content is still lacking. Its also completely sold out, even before coronavirus. They aren't producing them in Sony/MS console numbers but its not a failure, just a stepping stone to success. Unlike the Rift or Vive, with cords hanging out of them and an appeal only to hardcore gamers, Quest is definitely on the path to mainstream, or mainstream-adjacent success.
It was a bad choice if they wanted a successful consumer product. But I think the simplest explanation here is that the company's real product was fancy demos for investors. $2.6 billion in revenue! In operation since 2011! Thousands of jobs created!
I'd call it great choice. They wouldn't have been able to make nearly as much money on a purposeful, targeted device, because nobody's put in that much money for a narrow market. Worse, it would have been much easier for investors to figure that the more modest product would fail. Much better to sell moonbeams, to sell the glorious possibility of AR just like they saw on Westworld and Black Mirror.
I mean sure, the wheels had to come off eventually. After a while, you run out of fools. But most startups fail eventually, and you have to admit that 9 years is a great run for something that never worked, and probably never could have worked.
While sounding slightly cynical, I have come to believe that your comment is a good description of the current state of "the latest buzzword" startups.
Wearable anywhere. AR's unique value is not big bulky things you play with at home, they're to be a nearly invisible accessory you wear everywhere. You get a few grams to hang off people's faces in the form of glasses, not a half kilogram. Otherwise, you're right - VR meets the need well enough.
Camera quality is the easy problem. The hard problems are getting camera latency down and dealing with depth of field and all the other things you lose when you replace the incoming light field with camera images.
I’m pretty impressed with the depth of field the Quest is able to develop in Passthrough+ mode just using the 4 wide field tracking cameras and a smartphone processor from 3 years ago. A residual, after-thought capability like that on a $400 device is pretty impressive, IMHO.
For different definitions of "very far away". We're only talking about 15 years since we started getting proper video recording in phones, and only about 4 since the big players started focusing on software enhancements.
that's a fair point, but vision is such a high-dimensional and dynamic input that my feeling is the last 20% of super-fast autofocus, auto color balancing, high dynamic range, removing motion-blur, etc. will be very difficult to improve upon. it seems that just increasing brightness/fov by making better waveguides or MEMS will be much easier. that being said, magic leap's lack of success doesn't bode well.
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.
VR headsets have been sold out for months, now. I got an Oculus Quest, but only got one because I refreshed the product page (on multiple vendors) constantly for days.
I think VR is starting the mainstream (at least for gaming), and Coronavirus is encouraging this (as it’s making virtually all gaming platforms a boost).
no, not really. You can't get over the motion sickness thing for many people. And VR games will always need to mitigate that, which means they are going to be limited in significant ways compared to normal games.
This is a misconception borne of ignorance of the current state of VR tech.
Your statement was true for early VR seated games that used smooth locomotion or flight-sim-like games.
Roomscale VR games don't have motion sickness because of different locomotion methods (teleport, for instance... or they take place entirely within the room volume you have available). In fact, less motion sickness than you'd experience with a large monitor and something like a dynamic flight-based combat game. Unlike a monitor, your in-game view motion is mapped perfectly to physical head motion.
I've tried out about a dozen games, and the only time I had motion sickness at all was when I changed locomotion method from teleport to smooth in Rec Room.
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.
- VR headsets generally are similar to focusing on something further away due to the setup of the lenses. It's not literally focusing on a screen 1cm from your face.
- One direction for current VR work is dynamic focus via lens arrays.
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 still top selling VR and while cable and setup wise it's arguably the worst it at least has quality content.
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.
> The Quest is underpowered to run any of the truly compelling VR experiences.
It is, but it compensates by offering good enough experience while being untethered, self-contained and quick to start up. It may not matter for teenagers with expensive gaming rigs, but it matters for working adults with families, who otherwise don't have time and space to justify a VR gaming PC build.
You can make the same arugment for gaming on smartphones, yet it's a huge and growing market. The truth is, most people don't care about the latest and best technology. They care about great games, and often times the best games don't need the cutting edge hardware (see Minecraft, Fornite).
Meanwhile, I've been playing the Echo VR alpha on my Quest (not Link) and it's fucking great.
It's also untethered, which is a far bigger deal than you think. I tried playing tethered and really didn't enjoy it that much, but wireless? That gets used multiple times a week.
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 opposed to FitBit, that it would bring much more use cases to the user, a smartwatch on your wrist really, that seems like it was the messaging at least.
Good counter-example. The reason is leverage. FitBit had nothing to leverage, whereas Watch had iPhone, Apple's manufacturing prowess, and Apple's entire market presence. There's a part of the essay that covers the leverage piece, but the quote that most applies (and may be most controversial here on HN) is:
> "a lack of leverage is one reason why category-defining products are rarely created by brand new startups."
This idea of course is distressing to product creators. You can create great products (focused, well-executed, nails the need) that don't succeed. Business can be pretty unfair like that.
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.
Also curious is the case of Pebble. Great product, priced right, small set of customers who swore by it, did one thing really really well. Now its dead.
Pebble took on enormous debt expecting their market to just keep growing. They had a great product, but they thought they had the next iPhone. They bet big, and they went bankrupt (basically the acquisition cost was just to cover the cost of debt).
This is everywhere in life, luck is incredibly important. Everyone that is successful only see when they worked hard and were smart, not all the luck. Sure you need hard work and talent, but there are lies of people with that and no luck that fail or at least less successful.
It isn't just luck. It's knowing what markets to enter and what markets to avoid. Pebble entered a market adjacent to iPhone and where Apple was likely to move next. It wasn't Pebble's market to win, it was Apple's to lose.
It isn't just luck, far from it, but it is also luck. All the skill and determination in the world might not do you any good without some luck to come with it.
Of curse getting that skill and determination in the first place is largely luck based so there is that as well.
It was unlucky that the android watch, pebble and fitbits failed compared to apple? I don’t think so. Apple tied the whole experience together with their phone and airpods. Smart watches don’t live in a silo.
Google failed because they’re google; they don’t understand UX.
Apple didn't win because they "tied the whole experience together". Apple won because they're Apple, and an Apple watch is a status symbol. My middle schooler was adamant about upgrading his Android phone to an iPhone last year, because all the cool kids had iPhones.
You can only punch so far above your weight before reality comes crashing in. On the flip-side, if you are a huge company, this new market might not be worth the distraction (amongst your existing priorities). But if you are just the right size, with the correct competencies, gaining traction in the market will not only be attractive but will be something the company is actually capable of achieving. Of course companies grow and shrink in their capacity, so that is the luck of the timing.
It doesn't seem that complex to me – Apple has sacks of cash and is quite good at integration, especially given their existing reach. Taking on hugely powerful incumbents is almost guaranteed to fail. We only remember the handful who beat the odds. I mean to me this is a rubbish way to organise a society, but hugely powerful incumbents think it's fine, so that's what we have for now.
I was confused when reading this and googled market share - you're right, apparently Apple has a much larger chunk of that market than FitBit does. Either I live in an odd bubble, or the market is a lot different in New Zealand because I probably know 5 or so people with FitBits, and zero with Apple watches.
Fitbit should have iterated on their devices, making them more accurate while maintaining "host platform" neutrality. Instead, they thought they were in a position to compete against Apple and Samsung in "tiny wrist computers" and the rest of the story is history.
Fit it also had quality issues. My wife owned several and used all of them until they fell apart, which was always less than a year. They were garbage. Counterexample: I have g-shocks that have been abused for decades and are going strong.
...because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts
This is easy to assume but a far more common reason companies go broad is that it makes it much easier to sell big vision and big dreams.
Most investors in magicleap probably wouldn’t have invested if the pitch was “right now we are focused 100% on a product that serves $INDUSTRY_X well before moving to $INDUSTRY_Y”
In fact, many investors wouldn’t even have taken the pitch, let alone writing a check
Completely agree - but for such a well funded company, surely they could have continued to try and sell unicorn tears on the front end, but spent some real time and effort to nail something on the backend.
This "pivot" seems like a play they should have been running in parallel regardless, considering they've had actual hardware on the go for a few years so far.
Sure, selling a big vision is important to new startups. That's just one of many constraints and risks you have, but like all risks it can be navigated well or poorly. They could sell a big vision but also have a plan to increment there, but they didn't. I don't think that negates the fact that Magic Leap never presented what their groundbreaking idea was for why we needed AR.
If you're interested I do cover this among other things in the linked essay.
I agree with you the problem was loss of focus related but not in the way you frame it. MLeap's original focus was to deliver a transformative visual experience through Dynamic Light Field Display. This worked, was presented to investors, and made smart people's jaws drop. It took a room of equipment to deliver, but they were funded at risk by smart people to develop this experience in a consumer format.
Fast Forward so many years and what got delivered in ML1 ? A consumer format device not capable of delivering on that original vision experience.
Your comment suggests MLeap should have early on baked in expectations for a substandard visual experience in a first mass market consumer product. I disagree. Instead, they should have planned on miniaturization problems and baked in expectations for first delivery of a ground breaking visual experience product not available in a mass market consumer device footprint or price point.
MLeap's killer app should have been their visual experience. That was the day one focus and it got lost along the way, as you say 'pulled in a ton of different directions'.
I tell people I would have bought a $10,000 Motorcycle helmet with a backpack from MLeap if that was able to produce just a good part of original Dynamic Light Field AR experience. Is that a fast moving mass market consumer device ? No, but obviously the ML1 was not either.
I am reminded of Theranos and their maniacal insistence on using 'one drop of blood' and how it defined the format of every component, when it is possible they would have succeeded with just a little more flexibility on that design principle.
As with Theranos setting back the IoT medical space, I fear that the MLeap experience will set back spatial computing in the short to mid term, however I think both these fields are at very early stages of transforming our living environments over the long term.
A "transformative visual experience" isn't a product, or a vision. It's a technology in search of a problem. They needed to demonstrate a clear use case, and determine if that was achievable with what they had. If it wasn't, they could always be an R&D lab instead. I don't know what you actually do with a $10k light field thing even if it is cool. If you want to make a category-defining product (which $2.6b in funding strongly suggests), you have to define the category, not just ship a thing.
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 people looking over me here?". But I think the association is some kind of neurosurgery.
* Neurosurgeons know how a brain looks like inside, that's anatomy.
* If this depicts the CT or MRT of the woman, those are evaluated on high resolutions displays by radiologists.
* It's difficult to keep those devices sterile in a hospital environment.
Let's extend this into surgery. "Hey cool you can look inside the brain in real time". Why would a display not be enough in any other case?
* Doctors don't wear a heavy device with a limited field of view during a 5h surgery.
* There are devices with a high resolution display, that can show you in real time where you are inside the brain. I tried this device once with a melon, I could make the mental transition within a minute. Now imagine a neurosurgeon with all his skill.
* What if there is a problem with the image. Right now the doctor can look from the display inside the real brain and check if something is off. You can't take the unobstructed view from a doctor here.
The other two examples in the video are not much more convincing. The second one is solved by a warehouse navigation device. Maybe the last one, but a car showroom usually has a real car you can drive.... Even without it a VR Headset would solve the same issue. Why do they have to see their surroundings?
After so many years and that much money, that's the best they came up with?
I used the one from Microsoft in a museum, that could in theory be interesting. Make it more interactive. You had to stand at an exact position, it couldn't interact with its surroundings and my nose hurt because it was so heavy. I think the battery was empty after 15 minutes.
Just the complexity building a fully interactive museum, all the 3D artists and programmers that would take. What else you could improve with those resources to enhance the experience?
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.
Regarding Ed Tech, for a merciless look at this recurring insanity, see Todd Oppenheimer's "The Flickering Mind", and in general, Kentaro Toyama's "Geek Heresy".
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 that wowed the world with its capabilities, instead they increased the field of view, slightly and made the form-factor slightly better.
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.
I want augmented reality for communication and for board gaming please. Someone focus on having cool Augment Reality chat where I can walk with a friend or family member and see them right next to me.
I also would like to play board games with my friends who no longer live close. Also if I was playing a game and they could be virtually sitting next to me so that we could communicate better that would also be great.
I play board games using Tabletop Simulator on Steam with my buddies due to the pandemic, one of them uses an Oculus headset and he really likes it. We can't see each other's faces though.
I think that Magic Leap went on for years with just promises and marketing, and they never produced a demo or product. I guess they actually did release hardware a while ago, I didn't know. But for a long time it was just news about "Magic leap promises X" or "Magic leap raises money". But they didn't release a demo or product.
Last month I read an interesting use-case of AR which helped in setting up air handling systems for newly setup hospitals in China Wuhan by a German technician using AR technology of an Indian start-up here https://www.business-standard.com/article/technology/here-s-...
So yes, I do agree that such specific purpose apps definitely validates and advances a new technology like AR.
Was the Magic Leap naming intentional? I had always thought that that name carried the message in the clearest possible way. Were people not aware of that???
Not having a specific well-defined use case... Under no circumstances would I call that a “product”. I would call it “really cool tech” at best, but I can’t fathom how a “multi-billion company” can’t figure that out. Yes, this gives me obvious schadenfreude...
I don't know if the Apple Watch is a great example of product strategy, specifically, driving success. Pebble and other companies established those use cases first, but failed to get traction.
Those were years after PCs had made a foothold in (well-off) US households because they allowed you to do digital word-processing and spreadsheets at home.
tl;dr, avatar based communication will require basic voice/body language, mixed media, globally addressable spaces on the web. no fancy scripting, crypto, etc etc.
A little perpendicular to the subject, but this kind of thing always brings my mind back to iPhone. Apple had AT LEAST four kicks at the can with mobile devices.
They had the "Knowledge Navigator" vaporware in 1987, twenty years before iPhone.
They started working on realizing the KN concept in 1987, and shipped Newton in 1993, fourteen years before iPhone. Alas, the state of tech was not up to their ambition.
Then they shipped iPhone in 2007. The greatest hit in product history.
What made it possible to have so many kicks at the can was, of course, having a successful(ish) business selling Macs.
With VC funding, you strip all the legacy/cash cow business out of the equation. In exchange, you get tremendous financial leverage for founders, but you also have a very limited window in which to ship a hit.
Newton existed well before Ive joined Apple. Larry Tesler (who just passed away) was the driving force behind it. Jony Ive was brought in later to help design the smaller form factor.
Strange statement to make about the iPad regardless. The iPad is an incredible success; the only way it doesn't seem like one is in comparison to the iPhone.
Easily one of the most successful consumer products in history. Nearly half a billion iPads have been sold since 2010, with around $300 billion in sales in those ten years.
In electronics & tech, the good scale comparisons are few, things like the iPhone, Mac, Windows, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox.
To put that $300b into better context, that's equivalent to the total sales of Windows throughout its entire 30 year history up to about 2014. The iPad will probably end up being the second best selling consumer technology product of all-time behind the iPhone. It has already well passed the iPod in units and dollar sales.
For me what makes the iPad such a hit is that it can’t be copied apparently. There are phones that are in some ways more successful than iPhone but for tablets there is more or less just the iPad.
That's because for some reason nobody is putting a nice screen on their tablets! Even Samsung tablets, who sells high-end tablets and I think makes their own screens, look worse when placed next to an iPad. The iPad is the only device that truly makes me think "wow" when I look at the screen.
I had (I think 2 different) windows phones-- something like the XV6600 [0] that actually ran some flavor of Windows Mobile OS.
I liked it. It was the first phone I had that could actually browse real websites. Badly, but it worked.
Apple succeeded not because they had features never before seen (though the capacitive touch screen was critical) but a far superior UI. The windows phone worked, but it was a pain to use.
I still fondly remember some Nokia exec's rebuttal of capacitive-sensing touchscreen technology in favor of resistive, which allows pressure sensing [1] but not multitouch. It was exemplary of Nokia being out-of-touch (heh).
If you go back and see the original launch of the ROKR, though, you can see Steve Jobs barely masking his disgust at what Motorola was able to come up with. IIRC the iPhone was well underway from a product dev perspective when the ROKR shipped, and he knew it was going to kill anything the phone makers could envision.
I had a ROKR. I also had several windows mobile phones. I'd find it hard to believe that Jobs thought the ROKR was what he had to compete with; from a usability perspective, the iPhone didn't come close to windows mobile; it lacked even basic MMS functionality for quite a while.
There were shortcomings, but being able to browse the web and view full sites allowed you to do things with the iPhone in 2007 that were extremely useful. There was no other product like it in terms of usefulness for travel, shopping and general productivity.
Oh Gawd, I remember that. I believe that Apple never had any intention of making that successful, and were planning on backstabbing Motorola no matter how the Rokr turned out.
"Planning"? Apple released the iPod Nano the same day the Rockr was announced. Mid-level candy bar phone with not much capacity to store said "tunes", or a cute little music player with 2-4 times what the Rockr would hold? The Rockr seemed to me to be one of those products that was only released because of inertia. Or released because Apple blind-sided Motorola with that announcement and, "well, the ad spend is already spent, so..."
I always saw it testing a business relationship with the cellular industry rather than any serious effort. The iPhone wasn't successful in a vacuum; Apple Stores, relationship to a carrier, deployment of iTunes all contributed to getting traction. I'm sure Rokr had more influence than Knowledge navigator did.
If Magic Leap had a cash cow business, they could be relentless about their vision (heh) for VR, whether it takes five years, ten, or even twenty(!) to realize.
There were 100s of PDAs before iPhone. Palm Pilot, Sony Clie, Dell Axim, Compaq iPaq. Yes, it all finally came together with iPhone but you can clearly see the progression if you back and look at those devices.
Nintendo is a well-established company with a solid platform for its Switch that sells millions of units. They've been doing this for a little while longer tbf.
I get the sense that "shifting focus" means that Magic Leap were so focused on the hardware that they didn't really think concretely about bringing a viable platform to market, or something like that. I just don't understand how a company raises that kind of money and gets totally exposed during a financial crisis like this. Did they really raise that much money without a concrete go-to-market strategy?
But nothing about the crisis changes fundamentals negatively for at-home entertainment. Covid-19 is a convenient excuse here.
> Did they really raise that much money without a concrete go-to-market strategy?
I'm sure they had a nominal strategy. But if you take the anthropologist-from-Mars perspective on Magic Leap, it looks like their real business was selling feelings of excitement to investors.
This is a common phenomenon with build-it-and-they-will-come businesses. If you want to crate a good business, you need contact with reality early and often. You need to test your hypotheses on actual customers, because that's how you really learn to maximize delivered value.
If you want gobs of investor money, on the other hand, it's often better to have no proof at all. With $0 in revenue, investors just have to imagine the billions that await. But once you have $1 in revenue, suddenly projections get anchored to real data. Rather than reveling in dreams of what people might do with, say, Segway or Google Glass, people insist on looking at the dreary reality.
Living off the money of "believer" investors seems to be a tried and true tech business strategy. Why sell hard tech to lots of customers when you can sell dreams to a handful of rich investors? One can argue that Silicon Valley is simply an enormous apparatus for transferring wealth from investors to landlords by way of tech employees.
Nintendo's never competed with other gaming platforms on a technology basis, and they've shown novel experiences can be adapted from less edge bleeding technology. Thread from earlier this month:
It's an easy scapegoat. OneWeb blamed it for going bankrupt even though everyone knew they were in a precarious financial situation 6 months before covid-19 even existed.
That suggests there is demand for what they have to sell. Surely if they stood to profit, they would build it. They still have the Magic Leap listed for sale on their website. The real issue is likely consumers don't demand their product
The Nintendo Switch - which Nintendo has already shipped millions of units of, giving them a ready market for any software they release, even if they never ship another Switch.
My point is that the Magic Leap CEO made it seem like there is a lack of consumer demand for gaming / entertainment products, due to a lack of job / financial prospects during Covid-19.
While there is absolutely a consumer market for gaming and entertainment, Magic Leap has nothing to offer in that space. The apps store they offer is very limited and it's mostly tours of locations, or design tools for making stuff that works with the spacial dimensions.
They do not have any real games to play that the public at large would find fun for more than an hour or so. Their apps are like PoCs for what you can do with Magic Leap. If FF7R was on Magic Leap, I bet they'd be selling a lot more units and it'd be a great time for them.
Instead, you're better off getting the Oculus or Valves VR where you have tons of actual games to play and support for streaming apps.
There is no way for Magic Leap to capitalize on the consumer purchasing right now, because they don't have a catalog that supports the hardware to any meaningful degree. And they can't suddenly churn those things out in the space of a month since we've been hit with quarantine.
I've heard that VCs are doubling down on their portfolios and avoiding new company investing. Maybe Magic Leap was just not looking all that great to its VCs and they'd rather focus their resources on companies that are more likely to come out of this pandemic as big winners.
Karl Guttag has blogged about them for years, debunking their technology. Hi blog is a good read for all things in the AR/VR space https://www.kguttag.com/
Their tech is actually pretty decent. It's as good as anything else on the market. Their biggest mistake has been setting sky high expectations and just not coming close. If you got a cold demo of Magic Leap you'd probably be blown away. If you watch their simulated demo from however many years ago, then try on the headset you'll be sorely disappointed.
I've owned and extensively tested nearly every AR device that's been on the market in the last 10 years. I can conclusively say: the Magic Leap is garbage for anything more than short-term entertainment. Between the extremely dim visuals, the horrible rainbow effects on every bit of text you display, and the awful resolution, it's not just bad for anything other than games; it's nigh unusable.
If I could go back and stop myself from spending the money on an ML1, I absolutely, without question would do so.
So question : if MLeap had delivered on the whole light field display concept close enough to the original prototype; but the hmd was a motorcycle helmet, then how would you feal about it?
I would have absolutely loved it! I'm not opposed to something that looks silly or cumbersome, as long as it delivers on the functionality and is comfortable to wear.
I've played with the ML and HoloLens and they are comparable. As someone who was raised on 8-bit games, it's mind-blowing. But really none of them are sharp enough to make you suspend disbelief that you're seeing something that isn't there. And I haven't seen any remotely compelling use case that would make them worth spending even $500 on. VR is much further ahead. Not quite mainstream, but it's got a real consumer niche and some really fun games and commercial uses.
I think the Oculus Quest is mainstream. It's relatively cheap. Easy to use. Completely standalone. And most importantly it has at least one game that it's actually worth buying it for (Beatsabre). Nothing on the Hololens made me think "yeah I want to do that again".
The Hololens is still the best I've tested, but admittedly haven't tested the Hololens 2 yet. None are reasonable consumer devices, though; between the terrible FOV and the lack of useful software, none justify their price tags yet.
I'm having trouble thinking of times when I felt more demoralized as a developer than when the sales team has made promises that simply defied the laws of information theory, and then wondered why we couldn't just work harder to fix the problem.
I mean, technically, capital I Innovation often comes in finding a way to do something without violating the laws of physics, but that's how company origin stories are written. You don't schedule that on the project roadmap "And then a miracle occurs" style.
During a particularly memorable instance of this situation, I recall reading a story by someone suggesting that you can close this feedback loop with peer reviews across functional units. Marketing reviewed product management, product management reviewed development, development reviewed QA, and QA reviewed...
And this is the kicker: QA reviewed marketing. So if marketing sold something that was undefinable and thus untestable, they got an earful from QA. No bonus for you.
I fantasized about that over countless cups of coffee with coworkers for the next year or two.
> I'm having trouble thinking of times when I felt more demoralized as a developer than when the sales team has made promises that simply defied the laws of information theory, and then wondered why we couldn't just work harder to fix the problem.
Years ago, when "Web 2.0" was only just taking off as a buzz word ('07-'08?), Marketing came to my team to demand we make sure our shared web hosting platform be "Web 3.0", so that we were ahead of the curve. That was a super fun conversation, in a "hitting your head against a brick wall" way. You'd think that people in marketing would understand the concept of a buzz word.
I know that feeling, but at the same time, if Marketing makes the sales, and the customers are happy, the plan is working. And I have definitely seen cases where constraints bred creativity, and the ridiculous promises of marketing actually did force the devs to be more creative and sometimes spark some miracle, aka, some really creative and innovative approach to the problem. It also often falls flat, but that's the gamble I guess.
That is management's job, not Marketing. For one, there is no trust relationship that can support that sort of act, but what's the point of project management if the marketing people get to decide the roadmap not only by themselves but individually?
Theranos was already the Theranos of tech. Magic Leap is just an overhyped product that promised more than it could deliver, not an outright fraud that jeopardised the health of its users.
Or if by tech you mean "purely software (preferably Internet-based) company", Magic Leap does not fit into that category any more than Theranos does, both being primarily hardware companies.
I caught up recently with the friends of mine who had spent the most money on that game (at least a couple hundred.) The system requirements have grown past what any of their hardware is capable of.
They're exploring a sale valued at $10B, but it's doubtful who would have the appetite to buy it at this valuation. Google declined a follow on round recently, Apple has been developing their own tech for years, and Facebook has quietly stepped away from AR/VR.
Magic Leap is reminiscent of another company with "Magic" in its name: General Magic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic). They both made a product that evangelize the form factor in the public's (or some subset of it) eye, but alas is way ahead of its time in terms of tech, and content.
It's easy to hate on Magic Leap and its self aggrandizing marketing. Although I personally never bought into the hype of Magic Leap in particular, they did inspire a whole generation of developers in a way that hasn't been done since the release of the original iPhone.
Not sure why you are claiming that Facebook has stepped away from AR/VR. I know that Facebook is still hiring quite heavily in the Seattle area for AR/VR HW roles.
Ya, I don’t think Facebook is stepping away from VR at all, or even AR for that matter. Quest has been a huge hit during quarantine, too bad they’ve been hard to get ahold of.
Yes, a quick survey of posts in /r/virtualreality revealed this thread [1] asking about a "missing" media blitz on the Quest.
The reaction was that the demand for the device so outpaces supply Facebook shouldn't advertise it.
But the OP points out something I hadn't though of, which is that VR represents a potential opportunity in the times of social distancing.
If Coronavirus becomes like the normal flu, where seasonal vaccines offer only partial coverage[2]--social distancing will become something people get very good at and want to maximize the bounds of experience in.
Thus, if anything Facebook would want to increase its investment and accelerate roadmaps for the technology.
I think it is a mix of things that make 5-10 years sound reasonable to me. Part of it is the equipment setup and hardware requirements make it almost a gaming hobbiest attraction still. (although I have not set up a quest or reviewed the recommend specs)
The comparison consumer-ready technology would be an iPhone or a Nintendo Switch which are sort of out-of-the-box experiences mainstream consumers are quickly getting used to.
The Oculus Quest is an out-of-the-box experience. Oculus is aiming for mainsteam market with this. Maybe you're confusing the Quest (standalone) with the Rift S (wired).
As soon as you unbox the Quest you're ready for the onboarding process (which is quite enjoyable btw). No PC or additional hardware required.
There is no equipment setup or hardware requirements. The Quest is a VR console that works out of the box. Everything works on the headset itself, so there's no need to set up the IR beacons that the other headsets require.
> If Coronavirus becomes like the normal flu, where seasonal vaccines offer only partial coverage[2]--social distancing will become something people get very good at and want to maximize the bounds of experience in.
There's no way that social distancing or shelter in place becomes a seasonal norm of any kind. Maybe some people will wear masks more often and we'll shake hands less. That's about it.
Would you please share what makes you confident to say this? The reason I ask is that the director of the CDC just said the fall will be worse than it is now. [1]
What specific medical changes will occur such that this will be "fixed" by next season?
My point was that we're not going to be social distancing and sheltering in place year after year if the coronavirus becomes a normal seasonal thing like the flu. Maybe we'll do it in the fall, we will not be doing it every year after that. It's not going to happen.
Not sure if Facebook is stepping away from AR/VR. Oculus/ Facebook reality labs is still hiring plenty of folks in the optics/ photonics world.. even making announcements over the last week on open positions.
This is an uninformed opinion yeah. Facebook is recruiting HEAVILY and appears to have the published state-of-the-art research in the field. They also recently acquired a hot startup in the field, Scape based in London, and kickstarted Facebook Reality Labs in London which is hiring. They are also hiring in Seattle.
If someone wants to look how Microsoft is also doing from a engineering PoV, watch this cool video from Marc Pollefys from ETH Zurich/Microsoft. It was made for a technical-minded scene and shows the behind-the-scene, some potential issues (privacy) and where it is going next https://vimeo.com/380218937
Facebook is one of the most active players in the space, Oculus Quest is the best selling VR hardware outside of PSVR and continues to sell out regularly. Facebook is also working on new VR applications and new VR hardware. Not sure where you got the impression that they've quietly stepped away when they are actively working on new products... Maybe the marketing feels reduced?
> inspire a whole generation of developers in a way that hasn't been done since the release of the original iPhone.
I don't really think this is true. Most of what I've heard about magic leap from developers has been skepticism, while the hype seems to have been from VCs and journalists.
Any particular examples of the enthusiasm you've seen?
Will be surprised to see someone would even buy them with 1B...They are basically worthless at this moment.
And what good has this inspiration brings to the economy then? It is funny to even call it an inspiration since for a very long period of time it is just rendered CG for marketing.
> They're exploring a sale valued at $10B, but it's doubtful who would have the appetite to buy it at this valuation.
One of the sentences in the article that leapt out at me from the article was
"Magic Leap is one of the most well-capitalized consumer hardware startups ever, having raised more than $2.6 billion from investors":
* "most well-capitalized" sounds very awkward.
* How much they raised is hardly indicative of how well-capitalized they are at the moment (in the sense of runway), without knowing how much of it they spent already.
* The article makes it sound like huge investments are all upside. But they carry a significant downside as well, because all those investors wanting to see a return will significantly increase the price tag if the company wants to sell itself.
Neither “most well-capitalized” nor “best-capitalized” sounds particularly awkward to me. I’d probably use them interchangeably. (American English native speaker)
I feel like Google needs it most. They killed Daydream and don't have an alternative and Apple is moving towards a wearable AR device.
Edit: I'm ready for Apple to pull a rabbit out of a hat again in a year with an AR wearable- I think the iPhone SE was strategic because AR glasses and an expensive phone and a watch is a tough sell. Cheap but powerful phone in pocket and a wearable makes more sense to me.
Oculus was sold for $2B in 2014. Adjusting for S&P, I think it would have been sold for $4B today. MagicLeap has much more difficult and stronger tech so $10B seems reasonable. On back of the napkin, I would estimate ~500 people working for 4-5 years to build something like MagicLeap. So if a company wants to do this, they should be prepared to foot the bill of approximately $1B and wait for that many years.
The problem, however,is this. AR tech is simply not there yet. Glasses are becoming smaller but resolution sucks and we don't know if headaches will ever go away for more than an hour usage. I would estimate another 10 years of intense development before they are ready to compete with 6X cheaper 4K monitors in rendering quality. It's a long game and doesn't work without determined leader like Zuck willing to drain billions on it.
It’s absolutely crazy to say ML has better tech. They have more experimental technology that proves to be nothing more than a cheap gimmick, based on descriptions of everyone who managed to test it for an extensive period of time.
Rony Abovitz is closer to Adam Neumann than Steve Jobs.
They did? I'm not a developer myself so I may have missed out on this, but I never sensed any enthusiasm about the platform. ARKit certainly brought a few people into that world, but I've never felt that Magic Leap inspired anything but skepticism practically since launch.
If you look at any of Mark Zuckerberg's statements, it's clear he still believes in pushing more and more funding to AR/VR, not sure where you're getting your info.
> Although I personally never bought into the hype of Magic Leap in particular, they did inspire a whole generation of developers in a way that hasn't been done since the release of the original iPhone
What on Earth is this claim? What XR developer was inspired by Magic Leap in any way other than the encouragement to bilk VCs out of their money?
Not only is AR/VR not going away, but this time period is likely to be looked back at as a turning point for the technology where it began to slowly leave the "toy" stage out of necessity. Magic Leap spent too much money on tech and a market that weren't ready.
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."
Supposedly the magic leap demo was actually cool and used different technology than the eventually crappy hardware they ended up sort of shipping.
I think they couldn’t get it to a place where it could be small enough to be useful?
Hopefully when Apple ships AR hardware for real it’ll be what it should be. Magic leap will be kind of like General Magic or the creative nomad jukebox - right idea but too early with hardware and not a great product.
Their constant advertising with no details for years really bothered me though so I probably have an unfairly negative perception of them.
Either build what you’re doing in public like Facebook/Oculus or do it in secret like Apple, but don’t loudly advertise in public when you don’t have anything to show for it.
###
(I played with the magic leap hardware that shipped for an hour or so and found it disappointing, a lot less interesting than when I had played with VR hardware for the first time. I think AR as the next computing platform has huge potential, but the hardware isn’t there yet and it needs a strong platform/ecosystem behind it. I think Apple has been preparing this for years.)
I saw the magic leap demo in person at their Florida office. It was quite something.
Imagine minecraft, but in real life. They had blocks you could put on walls, dinosaurs roaming around on the ground, knights fighting the dinosaurs, and all of it was controllable.
It was in a small-ish room, roughly ... 15x15 feet? a few meters by a few meters.
It had couches in the room, and pictures on the walls. It didn't look special. But in retrospect the room may have been part of the demo in some way.
(I went through their interview process, and one of the benefits was getting to see the ML in action. Supposedly they also had an "AI assistant" demo or something like that – Cortana? – but it wasn't available on that day.)
If I were an investor, I would probably invest based on the strength of that demo. It was enough to make you question the reason we're all staring at laptop screens. The device was comfortable, and I could imagine myself sitting at a desk typing into thin air (because goggles) rather than typing into a computer screen.
Of course, it looks like I would have lost my money if I were an investor. But how could we know it would play out this way? All they had to do was build a strong developer ecosystem. The lame demo-style apps we see are a direct result of inconvenient APIs and SDKs.
In fact, they were actively hostile to developers. I remember getting a C&D just for publishing their SDK's manual on a personal website. No idea how they even found the link.
The premise is real – in the same way the Vive was in many ways superior to Oculus, I think the next "Magic Leap" will be superior and more affordable than what we see here. If you are looking for an investment opportunity, the AR scene is still a strong bet over the next decade or so.
(If that seems unlikely, think about how many major advances worked out after seeming so unlikely: deep learning in AI; consumer-grade VR; voice controlled devices; the list goes on and on.)
>But how could we know it would play out this way?
For anybody who hadn't seen the demo, the company always looked like typical SV smoke selling pitch. "This is the best thing ever", "It will change the world", "We have great stuff but we can't show them in public because reasons".
The whole "demo in a closed, secret room and then you can't tell anybody about it" reminds me too much of the carnival fair fortuneteller experience. You get shoved in a mystery room, get shown a bunch of smoke and mirrors, and then you're out before you can't think too much about what happened.
Not everyone. The potential is absolutely there, and even the devices that are available today would be groundbreaking, if only someone could figure out something to do with them.
As for that, the ecosystem is far too closed. ML and Microsoft seem to be approaching the technology Apple-style, with expensive hardware and by-the-numbers (if that) developer support, which would allow them to control the platform - and profits - once the we reach some sort of inflection point where either a unpredicted killer app emerges or the tech matures enough for the more obvious applications to be viable.
They're not going to get there, though; someone is going to (or perhaps already has) released a cheaper alternative with a low barrier-to-entry creation platform, and that will allow the number of people who have access to both a good-enough device and a good-enough skillset to reach a critical mass. They'll create for that device and platform and everyone else will be playing catch-up. It's the early PC and BASIC all over again.
Do you know what would be really interesting? If Sony's PS5 were to launch with an affordable VR headset and an updated version of Media Molecule's Dreams.
I think the thing you missed from the 'all they had to do' list, was make a product that a large audience could afford.
I think Zuckerberg said at the last FB conference their aim with the Quest was to get 10,000,000 sold because that's the tipping point to a self sustaining app ecosystem.
Software is worth making, so hardware is worth buying, so software is worth making... etc
They had zero chance of achieving this at their price point.
It's not just software though, the viewing hardware they eventually shipped is extremely similar to the hololens, but 2 years later and with a slightly larger viewport. And worse hand tracking, from my experience. Cheaper though.
What you and other early-people seem to describe appears to be something else entirely, in which case yea - original plan fell through completely and they pivoted to their current thing. But was it actually different?
Holy crap, the memories. I had the creative nomad jukebox and for years convinced myself if fit in the pockets of my jeans...it did...but it didn't. The folly of youth!?
Actually, back in those days I was wearing Jnco jeans and you could fit a laptop in the pockets if you wanted to. I made a throwaway username for this comment because I don’t want people to know I wore Jnco jeans.
I got to demo their consumer product and it really is pretty cool. Perfect? Far from it. But it's good enough that you put it on and say "wow" for the next 15 minutes.
In the demo I saw, you get immersed into a coral reef and walk around. It's very cool, but I'm not gonna buy a unit just for that. So you need lots of content before it makes sense to buy one of these things, and then you have a chicken and egg problem. Who is going to spend massive amounts of money to create content when there isn't already a big audience for it?
I'm not the person you're asking, but imagine looking through dark sunglasses through a little window at a faded image sitting on the table in front of you.
For me the illusion of it sitting on the table didn't even feel like it was really on the table because of how dark the glasses were and how faded the image was.
VR was like being in a different place with a real sense of perspective and your hands in VR felt like a part of you. Sure it was low resolution, moving was strange, and the sides were letter boxed a bit but it was an impressive thing.
I think Apple are shipping their AR hardware, mostly anyway. The iPhone and iPad are it, modulo enhancements like LIDAR. I really don’t see Apple bringing out a headset. I’m not even sure it’s a technology problem. People just don’t want to walk around with cameras and LIDAR and goofy goggles on their faces, not at Apple scale anyway, possibly ever. It’s a fundamentally flawed concept. Specialist applications sure. Mainstream, one in every home? I don’t see it.
No idea when it will be a viable product in a nice enough hardware package, they're working on the ecosystem and platform in the mean time via iOS/iPadOS, but AR via those devices is a lot less compelling.
Doing this in a real way would be big if the hardware is possible, but it may be a ways out.
Interesting link, thanks. It looks like all their acquisitions and hires, at least the ones linked there, are on the capture, interface and authoring tools side. The only actual mention of a headset were of glasses with a camera, presumably for environment scanning, but using a phone as the display. I really could be wrong, but every time I start writing something where I hedge my bets it just doesn’t feel right. My gut persistently says no, VR/AR headsets are niche tech.
The link up thread shows patents going back 10 years on headset ideas but still no product, they could work on it another 10 years and it still go nowhere. They look at all sorts of things and patented all sorts of crazy ideas for much longer that but also went absolutely nowhere.
The only real indication is Akonia, that is interesting, but they have 200 patents on display technology. Any of that stuff could be useful in other applications. So I’ll stick to my guns.
I'm not talking about their fake demo ads they put everywhere, I think they actually had an impressive in person demo using some different technology they couldn't miniaturize.
They had a few-hundred-pound cart-bound prototype called The Beast that was supposedly mind blowing to use, and that's what convinced a lot of engineers to drop everything and move to Florida to work on it. I agree pushing that technical narrative would have sounded much better.
I'm not a marketing person, but constantly alluding to something amazing without revealing details is a hack that stirs up a lot of curiosity and people discussing what it could be.
If you reveal the thing then that dies down (or worse knowledgeable people know that what you're dong isn't possible), but if you keep it secret while giving content-free little hints about it you can keep it going longer (and maybe raise more money by letting people in on the secret?).
I have a strong dislike for this kind of thing, but that doesn't mean it's not effective.
As funny as this sounds I must agree. If they had something cool & innovative they could have shown the world and been upfront about the challenges to make it smaller. That could in turn bring new talent to help them. Instead we now see a drowning company.
What's really crazy about that video--while it's technically possible to make something mostly like that with current hardware[0]-- is that, if you have any experience with AR at all, you know that most of those UIs would be terrible to use.
[0] The FOV is accurate, given we're looking through a narrow camera lens, but gives the wrong impression that it fills what the user could see because it fills the video frame. The graphics wouldn't be "solid", they'd be transparent, but a pre-setup room can definitely do occlusion effects with foreground furniture. The physical gun controllers could be done, though nobody would fork out the money for it. And all the hand gestures and UI pinning stuff could be done, though the software support on Magic Leap does not help you in the least.
Basically a meta-layer for the real world that you can interact with outside of a screen. This would let you do things like interact with a lightswitch from across the room by looking at it, get metadata about most object states by looking at it, anchor big displays to white walls, etc.
I think there's huge potential for this kind of interface, but I suspect the hardware isn't possible yet.
The hardware can do this, it's just that you can't get any funding for anything interesting. You're basically stuck with hobby apps and marketing demos developed via consultoware. The hobbiests can't afford the tech or the lack of reach and the consultoware shops have exactly zero imagination (I know, I worked at one).
I personally define VR vs AR as "who provides the context in which we are working? The app (VR), or the user (AR)". A lot of extant "AR" apps don't do anything particularly interesting with your surrounding environment.
If your AR app needs me to clear out a space in my livingroom to give you room to drop some 3D models that maybe bounce off my walls, you've not actually made an AR app, you've just made a crappy VR app instead. Facebook could release an update to the Quest any day now that auto-scans your room to set the boundary and then you'd have exactly the same experience in an occluded headset, but with twice the FOV and better input.
This is the thing that gets me. There are plenty of people who would be willing to design around existing constraints, just because they think the tech is cool and they want to see what they can do with it.
But the cost of entry is mid-4-figures, between the hardware itself and the required development equipment. It's obvious that the people making the hardware and platform aren't a wide-enough cross-section of the public to create what business interests or consumers don't know that they want yet. They're shooting themselves in the foot, trying to maintain control over the platform.
My guess at the killer app for AR is airplane maintenance.
Imagine a physical checklist where areas get highlighted, arrows to direct you to the next step, and a little red icon that goes green when you're done.
I think this could shave real time (maybe a third?) off airframe downtime while keeping the very high accuracy requirement. That would save actual money.
That was the concept video which was different from the demo, but you are correct and they did a horrible job conveying that that was a concept and not the actual product.
Did they? They raised a billions of dollars to try to basically try to drag reality to this demo. It feels like a bigger version of a regular venture story.
"Gimme a ton of money to run this experiment. If I'm right you'll be rich"
That's not even a demo of the actual physical product though, that was just a video that was posted online that purported to show what the experience would look like (but actually was not). It's not like you would've seen that had you actually been looking through the glasses.
> than when I had played with VR hardware for the first time
AR is 1-2 orders of magnitude more demanding than VR, so if we get to acceptable screen-door-effect-less VR on 30TFlops hardware, we might need like 1 Petaflop for the same with AR. That won't fit into a pocket anytime soon, but we can build such experiences on beefy demo rigs.
I don't trust Evans at all, but I'm going to partially defend that here. There's a long history of technology being absolutely amazing the first time you use it and then not mattering at all. E.g., the Segway was going to revolutionize transport.
The 3D space is particularly prone to this. I count at least 5 waves of 3D innovation going back to the Great Exhibition in 1851. 3D movies were going to revolutionize things twice, in the 1950s and a decade ago. Over and over, this stuff is absolutely amazing for a hot minute and then nobody cares.
Of course, Evans is sold as a brilliant pundit and now VC genius, so if anybody should understand that novelty doesn't equal a business model, it's him. But as you suggest, Upton Sinclair's quote applies here: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."
To be fair to the Segway, there's a remarkable number of self-balancing one wheel scooters on the street in SF these days (well, a few months ago). And I think you can trace all of those back to Segway. Sometimes v1 doesn't quite do it.
They're toys that a lot of people use as their primary methods of transport, along with other micro mobility solutions like electric scooters amd good old fashioned bikes. In a way, the future took the path of least resistance and redesigned micromobility around cities instead. And we might still end up redesigning cities around some of those options
The segways itself doesnt make much sense to me though. I dont remember too much about the hype when it was released, but like, I'm still unclear about what it was supposed to be able to do that an electrified scooter or bike couldn't.
I'm still unclear about what it was supposed to be able to do that an electrified scooter or bike couldn't.
When the Segway was released? It could do this one cool trick: actually exist. Electric bikes and scooters (at least at any sort of scale) were at least ten years off.
There were other factors. Ungodly expensive for what it was, and poor enough range that I questioned whether it could get the six-ish miles from the house to Microsoft's main campus with that WA-520 hill to contend with. Now my Boosted Rev scooter can almost do the 7.5 mile round trip to work, with that same WA-520 hill, and for 1/3rd the price the original Segway was going for.
EDIT: oh, wait a minute, the max speed on the original Segway was like 20kph/12mph, right? Yeah, the Rev would easily make the 15 mile round trip if I were riding it that slowly.
> I'm still unclear about what it was supposed to be able to do that an electrified scooter or bike couldn't.
Segways have much better low-speed handling characteristics than bicycles, which makes them safer to intermix with pedestrians: Travelling at a slow amble speed in a crowded environment is extremely difficult on a bicycle, but no big deal for a Segway (or similar)
The primary fault that causes bikes to mix poorly with pedestrians occurs between the handlebars and the helmet. Bikes are, in fact, super easy to operate in close proximity to and at the same speed as people who are on foot. The trick is to not have it between your legs.
I know the market is small but the Segway was a fantastic upgrade for some people with limited mobility. A classmate of mine in college (2007 or so) who has cerebral palsy got one and it totally changed her ability to get between classes. More maneuverable than a wheelchair, faster than walking with crutches.
I finally got to try one around 2002, and I have to say it completely changed my opinion. The price didn't matter, the wacky overhyped introduction didn't matter, self-balancing was such a revolutionary technology that I immediately saw where it was going.
Your comment raised the hair on back. I was a naive student in those days. Kamen's build up to the announcement and some of the posts of people who had tried "it" - they broke my heart and took away some of my innocence. You reminded me of all the hype pre-announcement. I couldn't sleep because of it.
I still respect Kamen but take every pre-announcement I hear with a strong degree of skepticism.
Perhaps they're big in SF, but they exist basically nowhere else in numbers that matter in any way (aside from those super weird Segway tours in like D.C.). Sometimes the tech itself just isn't that good, and sometimes it's a bad idea.
Unlike Magic Leap, wasn’t Segway the first personal transporter with self balancing technology? Ie. Setting a new bar. Hence others followed from that new standard.
I’m not aware of Magic Leap setting any new bars.
While I agree with your point, did anyone except the inventor and the marketing team think Segway was going to revolutionize anything? I seem to remember all the revolution talk coming from Segway people before they had even unveiled the thing. It was just a big hyped secret that would "revolutionize" the world.
I remember being extremely underwhelmed when they unveiled it. It seemed like one of those things that had never been invented before, because why would you invent that.
Definitely not Jobs and Bezos. Jobs said what you say from a different angle—if this thing is revolutionary, why does it look so banal? Bezos pointed out the basic flaw that bedevils personal transportation to this day—will you be allowed to ride it? Guess that's what they mean by 'revolutionary'—you'd have to throw a bunch of established systems out the window to take over.
Many people did think it was revolutionary. "Venture capitalist John Doerr predicted it would reach $1 billion in sales faster than any company in history, and that it could be bigger than the Internet." https://www.wired.com/2015/01/well-didnt-work-segway-technol...
And it wasn't totally insane, for the same basic reasons people think scooters, etc, could revolutionize cities.
People who think scooters are going to revolutionize cities are equally insane. Reason being, scooters are ubiquitously available at a reasonable price point and have been for a long time.
The fact that you can rent one by the minute is going to make marginal differences to most people. If people wanted to use electric scooters to get around the city, everyone would own one already.
Yes, and there are also plenty of solid niche applications of 3d displays. The point is that both the Segway and the MagicLeap were pitched as being the next mobile phone or automobile (something everyone has at all times).
Of course personal electric vehicles seem to be having a renaissance at the moment (scooters) but the buzz:use ratio of modern scooters is much-much lower than the original segway era from 20 years back.
As far as I've seen, Magic Leap doesn't even have a niche. I can think of plausible niches for some hypothetical future AR tech, but none for what Magic Leap has managed to create.
Oh, sure! But those who didn't live through the hype may not know that it was expected to revolutionize transportation. "Venture capitalist John Doerr predicted it would reach $1 billion in sales faster than any company in history, and that it could be bigger than the Internet." [1]
Presaged in the sense that there was also a lot of VC-driven hype that didn't work out, sure. I'll admit there's a slightly higher chance that scooter rental still might turn into a real business. But it's definitely not a given.
Anyone that follows him closely on Twitter Should know this. He's the type of person that just throws predictions everywhere so he can say "I told you so", but never owns up the ones that don't crystallize.
It seems a bit like the home console version of the Neo Geo to me. Once upon a time, I'd gladly shove large numbers of quarters into Neo Geo arcade cabinets. But when they stuck the hardware into a consumer model, with its huge price tag, my thought was, "If a rich friend bought one, I would enjoy playing with it at their house."
I suspect that the big difference here is, this being 1990, SNK didn't have nearly as much access to investment money from rich people who don't understand the what entertainment budgets look like for the other 99.99% of people. So it was never hyped as anything but a luxury product.
Yeah, I wonder if Magic Leap had started small and luxury, installing that Beast contraption with the undiluted experience to rich people, it could've grown more like Tesla. Of course, the Roadster ran on all the same roads, while whole new experiences have to be created for AR, but make a few great ones and it'll be like having a bowling lane in your house—you don't play with it except to show off to visitors. (Oh, League Bowling was the one game I remember playing on my friend's Neo Geo. He wasn't bowling-lane rich.)
Or Magic Leap could've licensed some Virtual Boy games.
Have you seen pictures of The Beast? The ergonomics and range of motion you get are about the same as what you have when using a phoropter. IIRC, it even has some of the same "positioning your head in the right place" hardware as is used by some piece of optometrist's equipment or other.
I tried out a HoloLens at a rich friend's house and had a similar experience, despite it also having a small FOV. It blew my mind and instantly registered as a really big deal. But as another commenter here pointed out, the hardware isn't there yet, and when it arrives it will require a vibrant software ecosystem. The difference is that Microsoft seems to understand that.
Counterpoint: I thought it was really, really cool when I tried it for a couple hours. I have no affiliation with Magic Leap. The Magic Leap unit I tried was a friend's (so it wasn't as though Magic Leap sent me a free unit to try out and therefore could have biased me).
I tried it a couple years ago at PAX Unplugged, and that was exactly my reaction. I felt like I was putting a lot of attention into shifting around my direction to frame the AR, and searching for content, because I was looking through a pipe.
They don't use gyroscopes so I'm not sure I'd say they superseded segweys technologically.
I also would hesitate to say they solve a common problem because the current market glut seems to be trailing a recent hype bubble of electric scooter startups.
Humans already have two "gyroscopes" in our ears, which for most people work well. It's really no surprise that bicycles are more popular than segways.
Have you actually played any VR games? It's not perfect yet but it's good enough. They're quite fun. They're still niche because they require hardware and space.
Many people, like you, don't get it until they try it.
Maybe. VR is more chicken-egg, like the Windows phone with apps. The more people with VR headsets, the more VR games get developed, but more people won't get VR headsets until there are more games developed.
Just to check things out, I rented a Quest over the winter holidays. There was very little content that was a) VR-specific, and b) so much better on VR that it was worth the hassle. After we sent it back, the kids never even mentioned it again; they're happy with their Switches and the PS4.
Game designer Jesse Schell said "If Oculus Quest can’t succeed we should just hang it up" [1] and I think he's right. The obvious technical problems have been fixed. It's technically very impressive, and it has a strong novelty rush at first. But if the current market isn't enough to drive the creation of must-have games, I expect it's a descending spiral from here.
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.
It's not silly to try some promising technology that ultimately doesn't work out for business. It's easy to be nasty in hindsight, from the comfort of your home, isn't it? Not so easy to try making it work in the first place.
What a vacuous comment. Granted in the early days you could give the benefit of the doubt that sure Magic Leap are trying to build some revolutionary AR - you could construe my comment as ill-natured.
But go to Magic Leaps website now. Look at the promotional video that is being shown there. Now go and look at actual footage of the Magic Leap unit in action.
The company are being entirely misrepresentative of what their product actually is. They are using that amazing video footage to sell a product TODAY that is nothing close to the quality shown there. Look at what the unit is capable of and compare it to that.
Now sure, you can be given creative freedom to express the ideas of things that the Magic Leap lets you do. But then you remember the Whale video. They've been misrepresenting their product and trying to sell it using that misrepresentation for years at this point.
When TechCrunch first released video of the little floating robot game I remember people being astounded at how asinine it was. This is what VCs have been raving about and pouring money into?
So what are they trying to make work? Their promotional videos, ability to dupe VCs and probably their rock solid sales team - how long can should you give that benefit of the doubt for? They are 9 years old at this point!
1. They were founded by a well-connected VC-type, in a hyped new industry. These companies always raise a lot of money (because of the connections and the hype) but rarely (never?) work out well. (See also 21.co for “blockchain”.)
2. A few years ago they contracted with my friend’s company to make some swag, it was a chromed 3D paperweight of their logo guy. I saw a prototype of it, and it was really nice and pretty cool. Then I heard magic leap had rejected it because they didn’t like some way the chrome plating came together at the point it was dipped or something? It was insane to me, that thing was pretty cool and totally professional, and I knew if that was emblematic of how they did business they were screwed..
Does this officially place the Magic Leap's consumer device on the list of the biggest vaporware products in the history of the tech industry?
I don't know whether there was some tech hurdle they could never get over or if they were just straight up selling a fantasy from the beginning, but this result has seemed to be the likely destination for years.
I think it's less of a tale of "vaporware" (I mean, Magic Leap has something that actually exists, even if it's not successful) than yet another cautionary tale of startups taking WAAAYYY more money than they need.
There was simply no reason for them to need this much cash before they proved market fit. I mean, has there ever been a successful company that gorged on funding before they needed it that eventually became successful? So many of the Vision Fund companies are in the same boat here.
If Magic Leap couldn't find at least good market fit with a couple hundred million, I don't see how they were going to get there with a couple billion.
Do you remember the whale demo[1]? This isn't close to anything they released and I don't see how that is the result of taking too much money or not being able to find a market fit. This product simply didn't exist.
The issue is the problems they were trying to solve required boiling the ocean. They did manage to boil a good bit of it, but didn’t see it thru all the way — their tech was very expensive and not that good in the end.
Or: It doesn't matter how many billions you spend on a problem if the core technology isn't there. Scientific discovery advances based on curiosity and open experimentation. That even includes when we "know" how to do the things but its not miniaturized enough yet. Imagine being a company tasked with inventing the walkman 10 or 15 years before it was possible. You'd end up with some crazy designs.
This is exactly right. They have some impressive technology and if they had found some non-consumer niche applications they could have had a decent business while continuing to develop the display technology to something suitable for consumers, which is probably 10 years away.
They were killed by too much ambition and too much money about 10 years too early.
Magic Leap was founded in 2010, it was a different market for capital back then. The market is the market, you can't fight it or it wipes you out, plus you don't ever have complete information until 5-10 years later.
They weren't selling a fantasy, they were selling real tech. Their block has been "consumerizing" it.
My understanding (from sources who have experienced the demo) is that their first demo was BONKERS. They projected light right onto the users eyes, so instead of having a AR heads up display, you had a light beam projecting images into your eye so they could add elements into your field of vision and make it look like they were naturally there. The issue is that they couldn't get that demo into any sort of a state where it could be commercialized. The rig was the size of a large room, the person hooked in was basically required to be stable for the duration of the experience. The eye-tracking for projecting was difficult and worked alright but not 100%. The funding they received was based on the demo of tech. After they realized they wouldn't be able to commercialize it, they transitioned to a more classic AR setup. The magic leap tech will work, but it will be 10-20 years until we are able to use it.
> they couldn't get that demo into any sort of a state where it could be commercialized
Dear Lord! I would hope that they couldn't get that out. Putting lasers directly into your eye sounds like a perfect recipe for large scale disaster. I don't care how many people say it's safe or how many papers there are out there on it, all it takes is a few microseconds of error just once in your whole life and it's boom lights out forever.
My take always was that their long-term vision remains very hard to implement in practice, particularly in a consumer-friendly form factor. They should've kept working on it in a R&D capacity in the background, and pushed a more limited AR (or even VR..) product to build a brand, ecosystem and start generating some revenue. And, of course, figure out what the hell their product-market fit was going to be! The quarantine era, in theory, could be a golden age for AR/VR products that deliver a compelling experience.
Which is also to say, the charismatic/ crazy founder with a reality distortion field is great and all, and can move mountains and often succeed - but sometimes reality hits with a thud. To some extent, their challenge was one grounded in physical limitations of our technological capabilities in the 2010s. In the 2030s though..
There's something about using the word 'Magic' in your company's name [1]; great concept, likely amazing people, but in the end either vaporware or something that's way too ahead of its time.
Maybe the 'Magic' is how they are able to get so much funding and attention for so little end result.
My favorite was the Guns and Roses album "Chinese Democracy" which took like a decade to release. They used to say democracy would come to China before the album would.
I think it’s up there, but still Google Glass takes the cake (or maybe General Magic).
Glass did release limited versions of stuff, unlike Magic Leap, but I think they spent way more money than Magic Leap. Magic Leap raised $2.6B [0]. Although I have no idea how much Google spent, I suspect it’s more than this when you factor in the barges and rollout plan that they had and didn’t use at all.
I don’t think that nomenclature had anything to do with glass failing as a consumer product - the glasses simply did not fulfill any need or desire that would lead to mass consumer adoption at their price point. When the iPad came out Apple was pilloried by the press and Twitter dummies for releasing a product that sounded like a feminine hygiene product. It didn’t hurt the product at all.
I would be glad to be a designated glasshole in return for a decent and affordable AR device to put on my face. Like, "shut up and take my money!" If you build it me and my fellow nerds will be waiting in line.
I don't know if that's really fair. Their devkit is subjectively on par or slightly better than the Hololens. Its not vapor but might just not be a hit.
They have amazing software running on a supercomputer, but weren't able to fit it into a pocket (with their portable NVidia-based device). Maybe in 20 years?
Ah, the death step of every failed VR/AR company. "Focus on enterprise customers" just means "draw out our demise for as long as possible in the hopes of drumming up some more VC before we file for bankruptcy."
Hopefully someone competent buys them before that happens.
Jesus Christ. I personally know two people that started working there right around when the lockdowns were starting to get put in place. They've probably been there less than a month.
Happened to me to with a company within my trial period. It's amazing how many things you can learn about a company in times of difficulty, in my case leaving the company was happening with or without the layoff.. I hope your friend can find a replacement soon.
Yup, friend of mine started working there about 2 months ago. He was meant to move to work at their offices but then corona happened, now he has to deal with half his team being purged while working remotely and let's not talk about his morale right now.
The Magic Leap device at least worked and had a wow factor even though it didn't have a market fit. I prefer Juicero. That's really a prime example of overhyped and overpriced tech investments.
Magic Leap is at least a tech product, though. And even though they had some actual device, the thing they marketed was complete fiction, they never brought the promise from that whale demo to market.
This is the modus operandi of every startup. Consumer products look great and can really wow people until you realize all of the money is in enterprise. This is why enterprise is always the largest business segment of large software companies - corporations have way more money than individuals and will provide recurring revenue.
This is such a weird company. They created big buzz over years and it seems they are just fading away quietly with nothing to show for the money they took in. Reminds me a little of Theranos (although not as criminal). Why do these investors keep pumping so much money into a company that has nothing to show? I thought they do due diligence.
1. Put the goggles on some investor's head (in a normal looking room, but with known lighting and spatial properties...).
2. Show them some flashy demo that has some limitations, but promise that with their investment, they will be able to remove those limitations.
3. Investors, who probably lack the deep knowledge of optics to know that those limitations aren't so trivial, throw money at them. Because if those limitations (e.g. FOV, opacity) were removed, it would be world-changing tech.
I've had the opportunity to demo their product on 3 different occasions. Each time it was a clunky interaction, stopped working in the middle of the demo, and I left thinking my kid's Playstation VR could run circles around their tech.
they allegedly had an insane demo for investors only, before around 2016 (at least that's when I heard of it) you needed to sign an NDA to even get in the room to see it.
The consumer product is quite lacking compared to what people said was a demonstration of game changing technology.
It makes it sound to me more like a Séance (with its usual implications) than anything else. Or, for an easier to understand analogy, selling a Disney ride as if it was real.
Now with COVID-19, they really DO have a killer demo:
1. Put the goggles on some investor's head.
2. Investor catches COVID-19 and dies.
Nobody wants to share VR or AR gear any more. The whole idea of location based VR / AR entertainment centers is deadly now.
If it's so great you can't believe it without trying it yourself, and nobody wants to stick their head in a device that anybody else has been drooling and coughing and vomiting in, it doesn't matter how great it is, nobody's going to try it.
Don't be such a wuss. None of that is something a little Lysol can't fix, and these places should have always been using such (though I imagine they don't).
be careful with alcohol, it can destroy screen coating as well. make sure to check website of specific hardware manufacturer.
"Facebook also noted that alcohol-based wipes and cleaners are not recommended for use on the lenses. The lenses can be damaged by alcohol, so users should opt to use a dry microfiber cloth instead. If a smudge is being stubborn, users can dab a small amount of water on the cloth as well, but alcohol should not be used on lenses at all, according to the company."
Why shouldn't I? The exterior surfaces of "electronics" are just glass, plastic or aluminum and lysol seems to work fine on all three. It's sold in plastic bottles so it's not like it'd create nerve gas or something.
Not that I generally take marketing claims seriously, but lysol advertises itself as appropriate for use on electronics: https://www.lysol.com/cold-flu/home/how-to-clean-electronics... If there were any real danger, I expect their lawyers might not let them do that.
Exterior surfaces for electronics are usually fine for stuff like Lysol. The fear is largely that if it gets inside on the electronic components it may leave behind conductive residues. Straight alcohol will entirely evaporate soon after application so a bit of ingress with the device powered off shouldn't cause any lasting effects, but who knows what makes up the fragrances and other ingredients in many cleaners.
Just use common sense. Wet a paper towel with the cleaner and wipe down the electronics with that, rather than dunking your phone into a bucket of the stuff.
Anytime I've seen public VR demos they had a disposable cover. A quick google search brings up [1] as one example, and I'm sure cheaper alternatives exist too.
I feel like I have heard rumors about amazing closed door tech demos for Magic Leap for years now, so I always assumed that's how they got so much money. The question then is did they just have a really good pitch/canned demo, or do a good job of stirring up rumors and riding off that.
It's easy to say in hindsight, but investors were taking a bet based on the little bits of promising information they had a decade ago. Both sides knew the risks, and that's the whole point – VCs and the company both believed they could make something happen, and it seems they weren't able to, and that's just how this works.
This is it. Everyone knew that it was a hedge to get in on the ground floor in case the technology blew up faster than anyone could predict. Nobody wants to be the person who missed out on the next Google or Facebook, especially Google or Facebook.
It's just about taking a bet. I'm sure that magic leap must have had some demo (perhaps rehearsed) of a rudimentary alpha version they showed investors that was enough to convince people it was possible. From an investor standpoint, there isn't much downside outside of losing money. But the potential upside would have been huge.
I am not sure if financials really work out the way i assume, so i could totally be talking out of my ass here. But i have a feeling it could work as a really nice money laundering vehicle for investors (even though i dont think it was fully the case here), and the company doesn’t even need to be aware of it.
You make X in dirty money, then invest it into a cool sounding company promising groundbreaking stuff that has a bunch of big known investors on board already. If the company does well, you take the clean money out with a nice profit on top. If it doesn’t work out, hopefully you pulled out at a level where you lost some money but not much. And it still returns you clean money at the end, so the goal is accomplished.
Typically, this kind of money laundering is done through retail businesses like restaurants and such, but it is way easier to just drop those money as an investment into another company, rather than maintaining your own retail business. Plus, the amount of money you could launder by investing is way higher, since it isnt as suspicious to drop a few hundred millions on a startup investment, as opposed to claiming that your small restaurant that is almost always empty is bringing you tens of millions per year.
I think that any funding source would still be subject to US money laundering rules and laws. If I try to invest $5M in Magic Leap, I have to be a qualified investor and the funding has to be received by some US bank. Also, it seems like having these holes in a company’s books would be found by reputable investor’s due diligence since it’s a pretty huge risk that could impact the return.
Not speaking from direct experience, only logical first principles. I think the money needs to be laundered before i vesting in US firms.
Is there some exception to money laundering rules I'm not aware of where the government doesn't investigate the source of cash if it is invested in a company from overseas?
Oh, if it is a foreign power, they arent laundering it to prevent the US government from discovering the source, they are doing it to prevent discovering the source from their own governments. Because those foreign actors wouldn’t be running away from taxes from the US, since those money were never in the US in the first place.
Also curious on how it would work. If a rich foreign national decides to invest into a random startup, i dont think US has the ability to look into where the money came from, unless that foreign national claims to have made those money in the US.
Again, could totally be wrong here, so please someone correct me if that’s the case.
The US has many levers with which to find out where a foreign national's money comes from, simplest being to tie them up in a review of them being a possible security risk or not. This might be applicable too:
There's always exceptions to rules if you're sufficiently (politically) powerful, e.g. the tradeoff of going after someone causes an unacceptable loss to someone higher up in your own chain of command.
One of the early seed investors is close friends with the founders of Google. Needless to say it wasn't surprising when Google funneled a bunch of cash into it. After that, I'm sure it made it easier to get others to follow suit.
Palmer Luckey (Oculus founder) has repeatedly dragged them for cheating on their demos. Given how much faith some investors have had in them, I imagine that's what happened there, too, at least for the first batches.
The product exists. Their intention was never to do vaporware or deceive anyone - Rony's a good hearted fellow - but they had too much money, so much that they thought they'd bend reality. Francis Ford Coppola famously said of producing Apocalypse Now: "We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane".
This is really what Magic Leap felt like from the inside. So much money, so many famous people on board (and on the board), all these dreams of creating not new means of consuming content but all-new content and all-new use cases. Making this functional and beneficial to your everyday was not enough, Rony wanted a full on sci-fi universe right here and now.
This company could snub reality for a long time and I'm honestly surprised it lived for this long.
That said:
1. There absolutely exists a product and putting it on for the first time is a pretty exhilarating experience. Unfortunately Magic Leap failed to provide an convincing reason to put it on for the second and third time.
2. The company had very good talent. Unfortunately its management turned more awkward as you climbed the ranks - professional corporate survivors which needed to bridge reality between Rony's dreams for the next year and what's possible in the next 10 with their modest skillset.
It was a bit of Hunger Games up top.
3. AR hardware startups need money, and lots of it. I estimate Magic Leap had about 50% overhead, meaning that given better management and direction - and a bit of hindsight no doubt - it could have been done with $1bn. It's still $1bn.
4. Consumer AR will come in a minimalistic form, such as Intel's deceased Project Vaunt (ironically enough, many of its Swiss optics team were brought on to Magic Leap following its termination in Intel). Minimal, stylish, useful - not something to wow you once over but to provide day in, day out value. An Apple watch rather than an Oculus.
Source - I was there for few years, running some parts of their engineering. I don't regret a second of it.
What a lost opportunity to pivot from the inachievable (cinematic fully immersive VR) to the desperately needed (face to face equivalent interactions and entertainment). Time for the board to find new management.
That disease is going to get a whole lot of bad news laid at its feet. Basically if any company has anything bad they want to get off their chest, now is the time to do it.
The problem for AR is that there are no killer apps that aren't deeply privacy invading. What people want is something that basically googles the world around you giving you all the relevant information it can find. We are very quickly going down the path to making that entire use case illegal, especially for people. Without that use case, I'm really not sure there is much outside of things like How To instructions.
Has any company ever raised more VC money and then produced so little? This has to be up there with Theranos, not sure if there are other contenders.
Magic Leap is one of those companies where it seems like everyone (in tech) was rooting against them. Too confident, too much money, too little to show. The only people I ever heard defending them were people who were financially invested in them or in AR as a whole.
The sheer volume of cash and talent thrown into something that hadn't yet found a market is sort of amazing / seemed like a huge amount of cart before the horse.
It seems generally like they decided to do X, Y, Z but needed to invent A, B, C before they could get there, let alone know if anyone wanted X, Y, Z.....
I don't want to doxx myself so I'm intentionally leaving out details, and you can take this comment as rumor and baseless.
But based on the people I know (personally) who work there - there wasn't a lot of talent being thrown at the product. I think their organization is incapable of bringing a product to market, even if that market existed.
To use startup lingo, they were a unicorn turning into a zombie because they never hired people who knew how to run their organizations as a cockroach. A lot of the people that I know who went there were basically fresh out of college or academia, because there was no one else in Florida and ML operated in stealth for way too long. That's not a bad thing (who among us hasn't been a fresh, doe eyed engineer at a startup?), but when you throw a couple billion dollars at them before they've learned how to build anything... might not work out.
Are there other companies making progress in the augmented reality space? I've tried the Hololens v1 and was completely underwhelmed. The field of view is far too small and not impressive or immersive at all. Is the v2 much better? When will we get what Magic Leap was initially promising?
Hololens V2 is still not average-consumer-ready, but it is leaps and bounds closer to it than v1.
I tried both myself, and the biggest improvements in v2, in my opinion, are:
* Field of view. That’s the biggest one, as it felt like just a staring into a small rectangle with v1. With v2, I was actually able to read a NYT article in a web browser rather comfortably, moving the web browser around the room and such, with no significant field of view limitations felt. The limitations are still there, but you rarely ever hit them, while with v1 it was more like “almost the whole time you are using the device”. And it felt really annoying.
* UI/UX. Everything is much more intuitive and smooth to operate. After the initial 5-10 mins, i didnt feel any jankiness and was able to perform all operations with no struggle. Also, v2 works without that annoying clicker/pointer device (that was pretty much a must for v1) rather well, just by tracking hands. And i would say it is even more precise without that device than v1 was WITH the device.
* Ergonomics. The headset is lighter, feels more comfortable, doesn’t require as much fiddling around to get it sit well on your head. The flip up/down visor is such a great quality of life improvement, I am baffled that current consumer VR devices like Oculus or Vive haven’t implemented it. Especially since it would provide way more utility for VR than AR, because VR completely blocks out the real world.
As with all VR/AR products, we feel like we're on the verge of something great within the next 1-2 years and something revolutionary within the next 3-5, but at least now there's Focals https://www.bynorth.com/ and Apple's expected product (hiring posts, acquisitions, and leaks point to a large team at work on something) as well as the Hololens team still iterating, and to me the most interesting stuff is actual software applications. FB/Oculus showed some interesting stuff in their last conference: Work on 'social teleportation' aka scanning the environment and bringing it into mixed reality / VR in order to 'call' someone in mixed reality and teleport to their living room and sit with them in 3D space, better and better face-scanning tech to create digital reproductions of your face with facial expressions mirrored to avatars:
A little off topic and maybe a dumb question but why does a consumer products company that hasn't shipped a product yet and isn't selling anything have offices in 4 cities around the world? Like what are Magic Leap employees doing in New Zealand when HQ is in Florida?
couple of years ago when I first saw the Magic Leap, it's kind of magical to me, their tech is great and they advertised it to do big things to help the world (aquarium or 3d painting, I don't remember exactly what it was)
Last year when re-visited their website and see their showcase with Spotify and NBA sport, I was very letdown. Why do I need VR app for Spotify? Why do they think it's importance to do something like that instead of make a bold product. So disappointed.
VR is doing fine in gaming. The headsets are sold out everywhere and there are a lot of great games available. It won't overtake 2D gaming anytime soon but there's a healthy market.
Imo enterprise and military were always going to be the first successful applications for this tech. Smart money will stay in those lanes until the tech is mature.
To me the styling of their product looks like it is out of the 1990s (even though nothing like this existed in the 90s). I don't know what it is about it
If you search on youtube for "hololens industrial", you can find other demos. When HoloLens 2 was announced, I think Microsoft showed a number of demos of why companies would buy it for their employees to use on the job.
What a cowardly way to lay off a bunch of people. Waiting for a crisis that requires you to push people to work from home, then quietly fire them with a curt email and cite difficulties from COVID-19.
The respectable way is to get them in person, look them dead in the eye and admit to the failures of the company and product vision, and then let them go, apologizing profusely for your incompetence.
Proper move. Consumers care less about AR than even VR. For AR to be interesting, the reality needs to fit.
That is possible in an amusement park where you can roam in an environment, but if you want to make a livingroom interesting, might as well cut out reality completely.
But I've said it for years, if I shorted it 2+ years ago I would have lost money!
Not sure what that means.
They are clearly pivoting off Covid-19 for more VC money, something I wouldn't have predicted last year. I guess if not Covid-19 it would be something else.
How do you predict when they will fall off the end of the graph I guess is the question?
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 processing, and compelling input methods.
The real question in AR is what use cases can you hit without great fidelity? What sort of value can you unlock with a low-res postage stamp overlay and slow processor instead of full FOV? That's where the go-to market effort needs to be placed.
A similar example of this overreach was in multifunction pen devices of the 90s (General Magic, Newton, EO Personal communicator). A great counter example is Apple Watch, which didn't chase the 'smartphone on your wrist' everything device, and instead picked a few key use cases, established a beachhead, and slowly added capabilities as the technology allowed.
When a category-defining product has yet to emerge on the market, there are going to be a lot of people making predictable mistakes like this - mistiming ideas, scoping the wrong set of features, getting too excited about the wrong technologies, not leveraging their assets.
If you're a product person interested in understanding more about these factors, I wrote an essay on the subject recently: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/