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Magic Leap raises $827M in Series C
- zardo 11y agoThe rumor back in October was that Alibaba was leading a $1B funding round.
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- angersock 11y agoSeems a bit much, doesn't it? This might be the pets.com of the twenty-teens.
- zardo 11y agoThey need to fabricate their light field emitter photonic IC. I imagine that's pretty expensive.
- mosquito242 11y agoI don't know where I stand on this. To be raising such ridiculous amounts, they must have some incredible technology to demo. If they're anything close to what the second demo video shows, then they're basically building Tony Stark's home computer interface in Iron Man.
- sigmar 11y ago>To be raising such ridiculous amounts, they must have some incredible technology to demo. I used to think along this line too. But examples like Theranos make me more skeptical
- mosquito242 11y agoYeah that was the first example I thought of too in terms of recent cautionary tales. I think there are some key differences though, namely that as a Life Science company, the scrutinity and examination of Theranos' tech is much much harder to prove with certainty. It's why drugs have to go through such extensive trials to be brought to market. There's a certain amount of seeing is believing to Magic Leap. If I were to wear a Magic Leap headset and was able to play the game that they demo, I would sign on in a heartbeat. You can fake a demo, but you can't fake the game. And I'd imagine investors at this valuation/amount of money (which btw is 10x what Theranos raised total!) are definitely getting into the nuts and bolts, making sure that the tech isn't being faked.
- x0x0 11y agoTheranos has raised a little less than $90m according to crunchbase. These folks have already raised $592m.
- icedata 11y agoAccording to Fortune they have raised around $750M http://fortune.com/2015/10/28/theranos-is-seeking-to-raise-200-million-in-new-funding/ http://fortune.com/2015/10/28/theranos-is-seeking-to-raise-2...
- TeMPOraL 11y agoLet's hope so. We see a lot of promises with this and HoloLens, but somehow production versions are still not here. I'm still not really sure if the latter isn't just a prank, or at least mostly post-recording CG. > they're basically building Tony Stark's home computer interface in Iron Man. Since you're bringing up Marvel - I fear the reality, at least with first released products, will turn out somewhat like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeiJ2jHyy7U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeiJ2jHyy7U
- eric_h 11y ago> I'm still not really sure if the latter isn't just a prank, or at least mostly post-recording CG. The first video had a text disclaimer at the bottom of the entire video insisting that there was no post processing or CGI. The second video did not. I rest my case ;)
- codeisawesome 11y agoI... totally fell for that. Thanks for making me realise.
- FlyingLawnmower 11y agoHoloLens has been seen and used outside of the company, however. They have been touring several cities and showing off Hololens units to developers. I am not an MS employee, but I did get to try it out and do some Q+A with Hololens developers. http://www.inferse.com/36577/microsoft-hololens-roadshow-2015/ http://www.inferse.com/36577/microsoft-hololens-roadshow-201... I don't think any magic leap units have ever been used by those outside the company, but I'm excited to see what they come up with.
- zardo 11y agohttp://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534971/magic-leap/ http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534971/magic-l...
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- cbau 11y agoDoubtful the second video is real. Weta Workshop (http://wetaworkshop.com/ http://wetaworkshop.com/) which appears in the top right, "[HAS PROVIDED] DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING FOR FILM, TELEVISION AND CREATIVE INDUSTRIES FOR OVER 20 YEARS."
- prawn 11y agoI think the second video is meant to be a concept showing how AR could operate for work and play.
- jstelly 11y agoIn the first video you will notice that all of the augmented reality images are presented as added light over the background. That is much more plausible than the the second video where there are objects that can be darker than the background or even opaque. Maybe they have some solution for that but I would not expect it based on my knowledge of the area. In the next few years, I would expect any solution to those problems to come with other problems not visible in the second video.
- cma 11y agoIn the patents they have filed, the occlusion is done with moire patterns. Based on other acquisitions and job listings, the patterns seemed to be tuned into occlusion masks with layered MEMS optical shutters.
- fricken4 11y agoThe rumor is that they intend to scale up a silicon photonic chip fab, which is very ambitious, and expensive. It will either be a spectacular failure, or a bold step into the future. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/538146/magic-leap-needs-to-engineer-a-miracle/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/538146/magic-leap-needs...
- oskarth 11y agoHow can a private investor feasibly do a fixed down-side, small-stakes shorting of Magic Leap? Hypothetically speaking.
- sseveran 11y agoYou might be able to find someone to create a derivative on it. You would probably need a non-trivial amount of money to make it happen.
- oskarth 11y agoThat's what I figured. I wish there was some SaaS-ish fund/Kickstarter where multiple small investors could go together for this kind of thing for a nominal fee.
- toby 11y agoThat would probably get shut down pretty quickly, as it would be essentially allowing a group of small-time players to make non-sports-related proposition bets.
- oskarth 11y agoWhat would be wrong with that? People do it informally all the time.
- eric_h 11y agoNothing, as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately the regulatory landscape disagrees. How betting on the performance of a company is any different from betting on the performance of an athlete or a horse just boggles my mind. Sure, in the short term the variance is lower, but it's still a fucking gamble. It's also the only legal way to gamble in all 50 states.
- toby 11y agoWrong? Nothing. It just tends to attract the attention of regulators when done at scale. Even Nevada doesn't allow casinos to run proposition bets on anything but sports.
- karcass 11y agoI didn't see in the article -- what was the post-money val?
- tristanj 11y agoPost-money valuation of $3.7 billion. It's from the forbes article, not sure why TC didn't include it. http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2015/12/09/secretive-augmented-reality-startup-magic-leap-raising-827-million/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2015/12/09/secretiv... Another source shows they were seeking to raise $1b at around a $4.5 billion valuation. This one is dated two months ago though. http://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/blog/morning-edition/2015/10/exclusive-magic-leap-close-to-receiving-a-1.html?ana=twt http://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/blog/morning-edition...
- untog 11y agoAugmented reality has been the sci-fi dream forever, but I'm really, really skeptical about its applications in real life. Not that they don't exist - the shoot-em-up game demoed in that video looks fantastic. The Gmail app looks horrendous. Worth billions? Depends on the implementation, and a demo video is very far from the real thing. I wouldn't be investing.
- hmate9 11y agoIt's applications are virtually limitless. Everything from manufactoring to gaming to content consumption can change with a good augmented reality device.
- untog 11y agoDidn't people say the same about Google Glass before it came out? I know, I know - this is very far from Google Glass. But all we have is a really broad concept and some flashy demo videos. "It's going to change content consumption in a limitless way" doesn't really mean anything. Based on past predictions, the way we consume content is supposed to have been revolutionized about 100 times by now.
- tlrobinson 11y agoGoogle Glass was a shitty augmented reality device. Magic Leap looks like it could be the real deal, if they can make the hardware unobtrusive enough. > the way we consume content is supposed to have been revolutionized about 100 times by now. It has been at least once a decade for at least my lifetime (personal computers, internet, mobile) I predict in 10 years VR/AR will be as boring as smartphones are now.
- OmarIsmail 11y agoVR in 10 years, and AR 10 years after that.
- tomphoolery 11y agoIt is a very niche market...But if you look back in technology history, you'll notice that the tech always seems to come before the applications. There has already been usage of Oculus Rift headsets during surgical procedures and medical consultations, so that patients don't have to fly halfway around the world to see the specialist for their extremely rare disorder or whatever. I can see contact lens-based augmented reality being very helpful in a surgical procedure.
- sterl 11y agoKinda amazing how these guys are past Series C now and still haven't released a product.
- teej 11y agoAlong these lines - is there an example of a technology company that succeeded after raising so much money without proving their product in the market?
- coldtea 11y agoIs there an example of a technology company that took billions in that had succeeded by their product? Most of these companies that get bought for billions or multi-billions just have eyeballs -- and little to monetize them.
- tlrobinson 11y agoWhen your product has been featured in nearly every science fiction movie of the last few decades does "the market" really need to be proven?
- ceejayoz 11y agoYes? Looking cool on TV doesn't mean it'll sell. Movie OSes have every keystroke and action make a sound and use 48pt font for everything. I wouldn't bet much on such an OS selling in the market.
- chao- 11y agoGiven the former omnipresence of flying cars in science fiction movies, I would say yes.
- tlrobinson 11y agoFlying cars don't exist. That's a technology problem, not a market problem.
- pqdbr 11y agoMagic Leap has a patent application for "contact lenses" technology [1] Imagine if instead of having to put somewhat ridiculous and obtrusive glasses in front of your face, you could just use contact lenses that had this augmented reality capability. It would be ... life changing. [1] http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=2&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=94&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=%22magic+leap%22.AANM.&OS=AANM/%22magic+leap%22&RS=AANM/%22magic+leap%22 http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...
- tomphoolery 11y agodammit, now I really have to learn how to put contacts in...
- zyxley 11y agoIf you can fit the technology into contact lenses, you can presumably fit it into a normal-looking pair of glasses anyway.
- untog 11y agoDo you need to demonstrate any kind of working model in order to patent something? As far as I'm aware, you don't. I look at this as an aspirational patent - frankly, exactly the kind of thing you'd see from a company with so much money they can spend all day dreaming.
- angersock 11y agoIt's worse than that...these folks (or whoever inherits the patent) can now sue anybody that actually can get it working. This is a great example of patents being bullshit.
- ant6n 11y agoOr by the time this actually is possible, the patents will have expired.
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- emcq 11y agoIt's easy to think of reasons why this isn't a sound investment. However, here are some thoughts why this may be sensible: * This is largely Google's investment to cover possible future success of Facebook's Occulus or Microsoft's Hololens. * They could have valuable non-tangible patents or employees. This is way past the "acquihire" funding levels, but perhaps the technology itself is valuable. Perhaps they get around that valuation with 100M/year in patent licensing. For perspective, IBM Research provides ~O(1B)/year in revenue from licensing patents. * Magic leap has a technology that is going to revolutionize entertainment consumption. It could simply be good execution of augmented reality, but I don't think this is sufficient to get the market excited and stop using their mobile devices or TVs to consume a lot of entertainment. It seems like at best here it is a "better mousetrap" than Occulus or Hololens. I'd love to hear other thoughts why this could be a useful investment.
- ksenzee 11y agoI guess this makes me a pedant, but it bothers me to see big O notation used as a shortcut for "within an order of magnitude." It would probably be fine if everyone on HN had taken an algorithms class and knew the formal definition. In reality, a lot of people here are still learning what that capital O thing means, and if they see it used as "within an order of magnitude" we're doing them a disservice. (As someone who wormed their way into the field without a CS degree, I had to learn it on the job, so maybe it matters more to me than it should.) The point you were making, however, is well taken. There's just no way for us to know what patent-related assets are involved in a deal like this.
- Dwolb 11y agoCan anyone explain what force is recoiling the shooter's hand in the second video? Or is that gun computer-generated?
- scott_karana 11y agoEven if the graphics are real (and that's a big if), the video is certainly a staged "proof of concept", and the apps are not real. Thus, the shooter is recoiling the gun himself, to fit the narrative.
- JeffreyKaine 11y agoThe game could pick up on a recoiled hand to trigger the virtual gun. Try it really quickly. Hold your hand in front of you like you are holding a gun. recoil your hand. feels pretty cool, right? Now, just imagine that the software is tracking your hand and the gun shoots whenever you intentionally recoil.
- scott_karana 11y agoYes, it's true that the app could hand-track "recoil", just like it's seemingly tracking his gestures in the 3D GMail. I still think it's staged. The motions look way too "casual" and not deliberate enough to be interpreted easily in software without some revolutionary tech, in addition to the unrelated revolutionary tech needed to do the AR "live".
- zardo 11y agoImagination.
- biot 11y agoThe gun appears to be a real, physical device. Given that there must be a camera looking forward in order to interpret not only the scenery but recognize gestures, it's highly likely that what triggers the shot isn't the subtle pressing of a trigger (unless there's some kind of bluetooth connection here) but rather it's the "fake" recoil motion that the system recognizes as a gesture in order to trigger the shot.
- ljk 11y agostupid question: isn't this bad if your eyes are constantly focusing on something so close to you?
- josephpmay 11y agoWith ML's technology, you're not focusing on something close to you. That's a big part of what makes them worth so much money. They're able to project light at real focal planes.
- michaelbuckbee 11y agoThe money flowing into Augmented Reality in general isn't so much about 'augmented reality' as a thing today so much as it's a big audacious bet on it being the next wave of technology that replaces mobile phones.
- x0x0 11y agoThat finally makes this make sense to me; a bet on the future of smartphone UI.
- ericd 11y agoYep, imagine a phone UI you don't have to hold in front of you as you walk across the street, and never have to pull out of your pocket. Then imagine it putting annotations into the real world - review scores of wines floating next to the bottles as you browse the wine aisle, or yelp stars floating next to the restaurants, GPS arrows floating in space, etc. etc. All assuming they solve the ridiculously hard power, miniaturization, object recognition, latency, etc problems. Even if you have to be tethered to a PC, though, it has a lot of potentially revolutionary uses.
- sixQuarks 11y agoI believe smartphones will be looked back from the future and seen as what they really are: a clunky way to interact with information. AR is definitely the future of all interfaces, not an audacious bet at all, pragmatic in fact.
- orangecat 11y agoAgreed. A functional heads-up display in normal-looking glasses would render almost every smartphone obsolete. Add a good way to do text input (air typing on an AR-projected keyboard?) and most laptops and desktops can go away too. If we're still poking at tiny screens in 2025, something has gone very wrong.
- RightWingRabble 11y agoMeh, I'm not so convinced. AR is certainly a great way to interact with real time information, but there's a time and a place for that. I don't want to be out at dinner and be interrupted with notifications while I'm having a conversation. Laptops and Mobile phones have one huge advantage that AR and even desktops don't have: they're easy to put away. Close the laptop, put the phone in your pocket or in a drawer and it's gone. I suppose you could do the same with glasses, but they're still more intrusive.
- srameshc 11y agoIt certainly is a morbid round of funding. But seems like they have a lot of current and future value. Reminds me of the time when DST invested in Facebook and I thought these guys are out of their mind. But if I look back, they are of course much smarter bunch who knows how much they will get back. Similarly many are in it for its potential technology and many are in it for the returns and they all know what they will get.
- geori 11y agoIf this turns out to be the successor to smartphones, then these comments will look like people laughing at the Instagram acquisition.
- LeoardoDavinci1 11y agoI'm still laughing. I would not have bought it. Then again, I'm not successful.
- shostack 11y agoFunny you mention that. Was just thinking about the book "Rainbow's End." In the near future, it had most people interacting with tactile "muscle-movement" based input, and contact lens displays. Wearables/wetwear are almost certainly going to be the future at some point. Our grandchildren will laugh when we tell them about having to hold a device in your hand with a tiny screen where you hunt and peck at an even tinier keyboard with your thumb. Of course we also won't be used to being bombarded with the inevitable massive, vision-filling AR ads that will come.
- shpx 11y agoI might sound like I'm joking, but as soon as I get an AR headset I'm building a computer vision system to detect billboards and overlaying a black rectangle over top. It's already possible to fill in items of a given class in images with deep learning, and it'll only get better.
- shostack 11y agoAgreed. I personally can't wait for the inevitable ad blocking war that ensues. Unfortunately, if I had to posit a guess, it would be that the main "application space" for AR won't be the free and open web. It will be the walled garden appstore(s). You'll have your staple apps, but they will all be self-contained, and the owners of the hardware/OS will have strict controls around the ability to do things like, block ads from their ad network (which might be the only one allowed on the device). Big tech companies don't like the users being able to control what they see through a browser that can install whatever plugins the user wants. Make no mistake, they want full control over the experience, and have no qualms about doing whatever it takes to own that experience. To not do so enables their competitors to claim a foothold in their territory.
- gtpasqual 11y agoIf this doesn't raise any flags, I don't know what else will.
- rsp1984 11y agoI've been working on AR and related technologies for almost the last decade and I've been part of the first handful of people working on Google Glass. Bottom line I've seen a lot of promising AR technologies come and go. My personal take on this is that they may indeed have some very good, if not revolutionary, display technology. However: The big, big obstacle to delivering credible AR is latency. Contrary to VR, true see-through AR needs to have total latencies (device motion --> display photon hits the retina) of no larger than 10 - 15 ms max. The reason is that in see-through AR you're essentially competing against the human visual system in latency and the HVS is very fast. Moreover the HVS is also extremely good in separating visual content into "layers". Whenever two things in your field of view don't move in perfect continuity with their surroundings (as it is when there AR content overlaid with latency) your brain will immediately separate them from one another, creating the impression of layers, and, in the case of see-through AR, breaking the AR illusion. So right now I'm a semi-believer. Iff they can sort out the latency problem and deliver stable yet ultrafast tracking in a wide variety of conditions (also by far not a trivial problem) then this has a bright future.
- x0x0 11y agoSince you're an expert: what about these videos is hard? The things that jumped out at me are: 1 - the robot moving behind the table leg (ie you have to do depth recognition of objects in the scene) 2 - the user's hand interacting with the artificial elements in the scene. Some code had to recognize a hand and figure out which element it was touching. What strikes you as the hard parts of those videos besides the real-time requirement?
- fchollet 11y agoThese two things are non-trivial, but not particularly hard in themselves. However, doing them at ultra-low latency becomes quite a challenge. Doing anything at ultra-low latency is already a challenge, but especially so when what you're trying to do is running a deep neural net for entity recognition or gesture recognition.
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- colinshark 11y agoI can't get past the fact that the software, in order to interact with the 3D world, will be expensive and cumbersome to make. Also, people (your income) born before AR tech generally don't want hardware on their face. This, and Hololens, and similar, will fail for a while, and I'm thinking it will be decades. I'm placing my bet now.
- prawn 11y agoIf they see it through, the software will eventually be used by almost everyone. And the thing about software is that it's essentially free to duplicate, meaning that it need not be expensive and cumbersome at scale. If they get it working well with glasses or contact lenses, it will win through. The ability to spin up displays as needed (massive TV in your living room, a screen in the kitchen, shower, ceiling of the bedroom, outside, etc) will mean that fewer and fewer rely on physical displays. Not to mention the availability of more contextual information (tourism, sports, researching, gardening, socialising, etc).
- Keyframe 11y agoThose video look pre-made as fuck. I don't care if it says it's not. If it's not it has some magic tracking going on as well. Would love to hear about that.
- kazinator 11y ago"Is this a dagger which I see before me?" "No, dude, someone is feeding shit into your AR headset! Told you not to open that suspicous 'Thane of Cawdor' e-mail!"
- free2rhyme214 11y agoDoes anyone think Google will buy Magic Leap?
- amima 11y agoNow it would not surprise me much even if they go public (IPO), before releasing the actual product to the market. That would be a nice precedent for the tech startup industry.
- kafkaesq 11y agoGlaciers are melting; forests are burning; coral reefs are blanching; ocean levels are rising, water tables are dropping. The ecosystems that sustain our food supply chains are collapsing; those that aren't collapsing, are being poisoned; and the tiny niches relatively immune from these threats are being bought by hedge funds and private equity firms. Our education system is being gutted; so are our retirement plans. Our healthcare system seems to resiliently resist nearly all efforts at meaningful reform. Every movement we make, physical or virtual, is being relentlessly tracked, recorded, indexed and archived by an exponentially growing number of surveillance systems, private and governmental, for perpetuity. And these guys are getting $1.4b so we can... shoot imaginary robots at the office?
- joelg 11y agoYou could have said the same thing about the black plague and the printing press in the 14th century...
- kafkaesq 11y agoExcept that all of those problems I mentioned are basically man-made, and the solutions are manifestly available to us... if only we'd care to get our act together. In the face of the Black Death, our species was basically helpless (and there doesn't seem to be any scientific consensus yet as to how, exactly, it "ended.")
- meta_pseudo 11y agoIn that case I would also like to hear your opinions about stock market :D, in all seriousness there are people and companies who are trying to tackle some of the problems you mentioned and getting funded. Look on the positive side, tools and research by these guys can be used in education and medicine! I understand most of focus in on the entertainment market but we can't blame particular set of people for that happening, magic leap is essentially promising something we have been looking forward to from so many years(since we saw stuff in sci-fi movies)!
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- ljw1001 11y agoAn $800,000,000 investment in an unknown company called Magic Leap shows that some people have no sense of irony
- juskrey 11y agoThe bubble is going to blow hard. Period.
- gavanwoolery 11y agoI have reliable sources who have tried the tech. It is real, but many years out from mainstream (5-10 seems like a probable range). However, their first teaser video* is almost definitely fake (if I were to place a bet). It looks like a prerendered video, not an interactive application, or even a static lightfield video. *source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM
- sidthekid 11y agoWould this be usable by those who normally wear contact lenses?
- dharma1 11y agolast I read was they were getting into silicon photonics manufacturing. Sounds expensive, and very patentable. Would be great if someone with better knowledge would expand on the engineering challenges they face.