7 ms·

I share the concern that there's still nothing too publically accessible, but the device itself isn't completely under wraps. The journalist in the Rolling Ston

I share the concern that there's still nothing too publically accessible, but the device itself isn't completely under wraps. The journalist in the Rolling Stone article[0] viewed a few demos built between the ML team, including one with Sigur Ros that's got a very small clip on youtube[1]. I suspect building a demo of this kind of tech that's remotely as impressive viewed on a website or youtube video is challenging. If I'd built the device as marketed I'd be concerned about giving half-baked first impressions that disrupt the hype machine, even if the device itself isn't half-baked. [0]https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/lightwear-introducing-magic-leaps-mixed-reality-goggles-w514479 https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/lightwear-intro... [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLtDeonCAYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLtDeonCAYE

bastawhiz 9y ago
The device is supposed to be in the hands of actual paying customers within a year and they don't even have pictures or video of it _doing something_. Sure it might not be perfect, but there's exactly zero evidence that this product isn't just a hollow chassis. If a demo at this point comes off as half baked, isn't that a gigantic red flag that this product isn't able to cash the checks that Magic Leap is writing? Nintendo announced the Switch about six months before it shipped. Before that they announced titles, showed game demos, and talked about titles in development. Magic Leap has shown us what could be a 3D printed mockup for all we know, and has announced (to my knowledge) exactly one thing for the console (mixed reality comics). Magic Leap should be marketing the hell out of this. It's a multi-billion dollar product, and yet they have exactly zero actual footage of the actual hardware even working. Their sizzle reels have been nothing but concept art. Something is very wrong with this.
- mustacheemperor 9y ago
  I agree that it is concerning, but I don't see how an entire multi page article of someone's hands-on experience with the device qualifies as "exactly zero evidence this product isn't just a hollow chassis."
  - bastawhiz 9y ago
    The article, remarkably, has scant few details on the author's experience with the product. This quote sums up my skepticism: >instead they were constructed to give visitors who pass through the facility under non-disclosure agreement, a chance to see the magic in action. It's a controlled environment with purpose-built demos for folks under NDA. There's no videos, renderings from actual hardware, or substantive critiques on the fidelity of the device's output. The only negative criticism is that it has a rectangular viewport which doesn't fill your field of view. I can't believe that's the only negative thing that could be said about this. Not a single comment on FPS, glitches, or any other problems. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I could totally see this demo as being fudged. The computations could be happening off-device with video streamed over wifi. We've heard before that Magic Leap has struggled to miniaturize their hardware, with the last version looking like a proton pack...what better way to demo it than to fake the demo? I want real evidence that the cute hockey puck has a real computer inside, not just anecdotes from an NDAed journalist in a lab environment.
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      > It's a controlled environment with purpose-built demos for folks under NDA Magic Leap pulled a similar stunt with The Information around the same time last year [1]. Seems like they found a more pliant journalist in The Rolling Stone. "In March of last year, it released a video online titled “Just Another Day in the Office at Magic Leap.” Shot from the perspective of one of its employees working at his desk, all appears normal until robots start falling from the ceiling and converging on the worker, who picks up a toy gun and starts blasting his enemies into tangled lumps of virtual metal. The video, viewed 3.4 million times on YouTube, was meant to demonstrate a game people were playing with Magic Leap’s headset. It had been used for more than a year to recruit employees to South Florida. 'This is a game we’re playing around the office right now,' Magic Leap wrote in the description of the video. But no such game existed at the time, according to two former employees with direct knowledge. The video was not actually filmed using any Magic Leap technology. It was made by New Zealand-based special effects company Weta Workshop, which has worked on movies like 'Mad Max: Fury Road' and 'The Hobbit,' the employees said. One of them called it an 'aspirational conceptual' video. The employees said some at the company felt the video misled the public. ... In addition to the bulky demo connected to a computer, Mr. Abovitz showed The Information a prototype of the compact device it intends to build. It looked as if somebody fastened electronics to every inch of a pair of wire-framed glasses. It had a multi-layered, flat lens. He would not turn the device on, but assured a reporter that it worked just as well as the larger, helmet-like device. Mr. Abovitz would not discuss details of the technology, repeatedly responding to probing questions with the phrase 'Squirrels and Sea Monkeys.'" I think Magic Leap is another Theranos. A second, independently-developed HoloLens makes for a respectable incremental business. But that nugget of truth has been leveraged to a $6 billion hallucination. Maintaining that hallucination could have forced management to lie to investors, to the public and to their employees. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/the-reality-behind-magic-leap https://www.theinformation.com/the-reality-behind-magic-leap
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- stickfigure 9y ago
  In their defense, it looks like some sort of dev kit is supposed to be in the hands of paying developers ("creators"). That might be a pretty raw product.
- tigershark 9y ago
  I guess you didn't follow it at all. Magic leap showed the demo to a lot of people and the Rolling Stones journalist extensively tested it. How can you suggest that it is just a plastic mockup? As for the content there are hundreds of people working on it both in house and in selected partners like Weta.
  - bastawhiz 9y ago
    I explained further here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15971433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15971433 It would be trivial to fake the demo. You can buy the parts to stream HD video wirelessly for a few hundred bucks. If they're using a small server farm to render the output, isn't that cheating? If they can show it to a journalist in a lab, why not make a marketing demo in a park? Like I said, I'll believe it when I see it.
    - ericd 9y ago
      Except it has to do a bunch of other things to do what they described convincingly.
enraged_camel 9y ago
Building a demo for this would be challenging, but come on. They have been at this for what... five years now, and had $2 billion to work with? Besides, hype can be very dangerous. Look at what happened with No Man's Sky. They rode the hype train to the Moon and came crashing down hard because the product utterly failed to meet expectations. That's why it's important to temper hype with regularly administered doses of realism.
- sombremesa 9y ago
  > Look at what happened with No Man's Sky. I feel like this is also an answer to the top comment in this thread - gamers are a target market for stuff like this because they are more likely to take risks based on hype without waiting for a technology to prove itself.
mbesto 9y ago
> he journalist in the Rolling Stone article It's called PR. Interesting that this came out in Rolling Stone and not another tech site. I obviously couldn't say for sure, but I don't see why it isn't implausible to think that they found a publication that was happy to roll over a few details in exchange for an exclusive dig. > “We went on this really crazy sprint from basically October 2014 to December 2017,” This is the part that startles me the most. 3 years of a "crazy sprint" with no revenues is extremely hard for companies to pull off. It leads to all sorts of problems internally and hiring decisions are usually rushed and lack direction. It's surprisingly much easier to do when you have paying customers, because you make decisions based on the market and not just your gut (Slack being a good example of this).
- tigershark 9y ago
  They got almost 2B$ of investment, I can't see why having 3 years of crazy sprint would be a problem.
  - mbesto 9y ago
    3 years... Also, having more money and no biz model is a bigger issue than you think.
    - DoreenMichele 9y ago
      Yeah. Can you say Duke Nukem Forever?
      - whywhywhywhy 9y ago
        I don't think we can really compare 3 years to the 15 years Duke Nukem Forever was in development for. If we're talking videogames plenty of games have 3 year development periods.
    - WillPostForFood 9y ago
      That's why Amazon's stock crashed and lost 90% of its value in 2001.
vanderZwan 9y ago
If the concern is interrupting the hype machine, why not use reaction videos? That worked for Enchroma glasses, which is in a very similar position: both are about doing something with your vision by wearing glasses, making it hard (impossible in Enchroma's case) to capture on video. http://enchroma.com/ http://enchroma.com/
Mahn 9y ago
> https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/lightwear-introducing-magic-leaps-mixed-reality-goggles-w514479 https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/lightwear-intro... This is very impressive if what it says is true. They've basically reinvented the concept of a digital computer display by projecting a sort of artificial light field into the eye. The amount of capital they've raised makes sense now, this sounds like a ridiculously big undertaking. What remains to be seen is whether all this work will be worth it as opposed to just better displays, but color me intrigued.
- sombremesa 9y ago
  It's just talking about a VRD, which is used by HoloLens as well. I imagine "light field" is just jargon to impress investors (it's not an impressive concept in itself - projecting a 'light field' on a 2D plane (retina) amounts to simply projecting light).
lvoudour 9y ago
The journalist in the Rolling Stone article[0] viewed a few demos built between the ML team, including one with Sigur Ros that's got a very small clip on youtube[1]. I suspect building a demo of this kind of tech that's remotely as impressive viewed on a website or youtube video is challenging. If I'd built the device as marketed I'd be concerned about giving half-baked first impressions that disrupt the hype machine, even if the device itself isn't half-baked. I hadn't read the article in rolling stone to be honest, but after reading it I get the impression that it would be even easier to prepare a more public demonstration (in a controlled environment) instead of this NDA shackled article. It wouldn't be that hard for example to show a video of the journalist in the room wearing the device and side-by-side a cloned view of what the journalist is visually experiencing. Something like what Steve Jobs did in the first iphone unveiling, but not live - an edited version would be more than fine, conveying both the visual experience and the journalists reactions. This is a ground breaking technology with so many non-gimmicky applications that it's mind boggling. I was thinking earlier this morning how it can be used for driving assistance: wear the headset in your car and get an overlaid "google maps" experience without ever having to get your eyes off the road, pair it with the car's sensors and get collision distance information, coloured lanes in dark roads, etc. How about (paired with sensors) measuring dimensions, inspecting components, counting objects, etc. in professional/industrial environments? I don;t know, maybe I'm wrong but I feel this obsession with secrecy is hurting both their product and the technology

bastawhiz 9y ago

The device is supposed to be in the hands of actual paying customers within a year and they don't even have pictures or video of it _doing something_. Sure it might not be perfect, but there's exactly zero evidence that this product isn't just a hollow chassis. If a demo at this point comes off as half baked, isn't that a gigantic red flag that this product isn't able to cash the checks that Magic Leap is writing? Nintendo announced the Switch about six months before it shipped. Before that they announced titles, showed game demos, and talked about titles in development. Magic Leap has shown us what could be a 3D printed mockup for all we know, and has announced (to my knowledge) exactly one thing for the console (mixed reality comics). Magic Leap should be marketing the hell out of this. It's a multi-billion dollar product, and yet they have exactly zero actual footage of the actual hardware even working. Their sizzle reels have been nothing but concept art. Something is very wrong with this.

mustacheemperor 9y ago
I agree that it is concerning, but I don't see how an entire multi page article of someone's hands-on experience with the device qualifies as "exactly zero evidence this product isn't just a hollow chassis."
- bastawhiz 9y ago
  The article, remarkably, has scant few details on the author's experience with the product. This quote sums up my skepticism: >instead they were constructed to give visitors who pass through the facility under non-disclosure agreement, a chance to see the magic in action. It's a controlled environment with purpose-built demos for folks under NDA. There's no videos, renderings from actual hardware, or substantive critiques on the fidelity of the device's output. The only negative criticism is that it has a rectangular viewport which doesn't fill your field of view. I can't believe that's the only negative thing that could be said about this. Not a single comment on FPS, glitches, or any other problems. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I could totally see this demo as being fudged. The computations could be happening off-device with video streamed over wifi. We've heard before that Magic Leap has struggled to miniaturize their hardware, with the last version looking like a proton pack...what better way to demo it than to fake the demo? I want real evidence that the cute hockey puck has a real computer inside, not just anecdotes from an NDAed journalist in a lab environment.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > It's a controlled environment with purpose-built demos for folks under NDA Magic Leap pulled a similar stunt with The Information around the same time last year [1]. Seems like they found a more pliant journalist in The Rolling Stone. "In March of last year, it released a video online titled “Just Another Day in the Office at Magic Leap.” Shot from the perspective of one of its employees working at his desk, all appears normal until robots start falling from the ceiling and converging on the worker, who picks up a toy gun and starts blasting his enemies into tangled lumps of virtual metal. The video, viewed 3.4 million times on YouTube, was meant to demonstrate a game people were playing with Magic Leap’s headset. It had been used for more than a year to recruit employees to South Florida. 'This is a game we’re playing around the office right now,' Magic Leap wrote in the description of the video. But no such game existed at the time, according to two former employees with direct knowledge. The video was not actually filmed using any Magic Leap technology. It was made by New Zealand-based special effects company Weta Workshop, which has worked on movies like 'Mad Max: Fury Road' and 'The Hobbit,' the employees said. One of them called it an 'aspirational conceptual' video. The employees said some at the company felt the video misled the public. ... In addition to the bulky demo connected to a computer, Mr. Abovitz showed The Information a prototype of the compact device it intends to build. It looked as if somebody fastened electronics to every inch of a pair of wire-framed glasses. It had a multi-layered, flat lens. He would not turn the device on, but assured a reporter that it worked just as well as the larger, helmet-like device. Mr. Abovitz would not discuss details of the technology, repeatedly responding to probing questions with the phrase 'Squirrels and Sea Monkeys.'" I think Magic Leap is another Theranos. A second, independently-developed HoloLens makes for a respectable incremental business. But that nugget of truth has been leveraged to a $6 billion hallucination. Maintaining that hallucination could have forced management to lie to investors, to the public and to their employees. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/the-reality-behind-magic-leap https://www.theinformation.com/the-reality-behind-magic-leap
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
stickfigure 9y ago
In their defense, it looks like some sort of dev kit is supposed to be in the hands of paying developers ("creators"). That might be a pretty raw product.
tigershark 9y ago
I guess you didn't follow it at all. Magic leap showed the demo to a lot of people and the Rolling Stones journalist extensively tested it. How can you suggest that it is just a plastic mockup? As for the content there are hundreds of people working on it both in house and in selected partners like Weta.
- bastawhiz 9y ago
  I explained further here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15971433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15971433 It would be trivial to fake the demo. You can buy the parts to stream HD video wirelessly for a few hundred bucks. If they're using a small server farm to render the output, isn't that cheating? If they can show it to a journalist in a lab, why not make a marketing demo in a park? Like I said, I'll believe it when I see it.
  - ericd 9y ago
    Except it has to do a bunch of other things to do what they described convincingly.

enraged_camel 9y ago

Building a demo for this would be challenging, but come on. They have been at this for what... five years now, and had $2 billion to work with? Besides, hype can be very dangerous. Look at what happened with No Man's Sky. They rode the hype train to the Moon and came crashing down hard because the product utterly failed to meet expectations. That's why it's important to temper hype with regularly administered doses of realism.

sombremesa 9y ago
> Look at what happened with No Man's Sky. I feel like this is also an answer to the top comment in this thread - gamers are a target market for stuff like this because they are more likely to take risks based on hype without waiting for a technology to prove itself.

mbesto 9y ago

> he journalist in the Rolling Stone article It's called PR. Interesting that this came out in Rolling Stone and not another tech site. I obviously couldn't say for sure, but I don't see why it isn't implausible to think that they found a publication that was happy to roll over a few details in exchange for an exclusive dig. > “We went on this really crazy sprint from basically October 2014 to December 2017,” This is the part that startles me the most. 3 years of a "crazy sprint" with no revenues is extremely hard for companies to pull off. It leads to all sorts of problems internally and hiring decisions are usually rushed and lack direction. It's surprisingly much easier to do when you have paying customers, because you make decisions based on the market and not just your gut (Slack being a good example of this).

tigershark 9y ago
They got almost 2B$ of investment, I can't see why having 3 years of crazy sprint would be a problem.
- mbesto 9y ago
  3 years... Also, having more money and no biz model is a bigger issue than you think.
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    Yeah. Can you say Duke Nukem Forever?
    - whywhywhywhy 9y ago
      I don't think we can really compare 3 years to the 15 years Duke Nukem Forever was in development for. If we're talking videogames plenty of games have 3 year development periods.
  - WillPostForFood 9y ago
    That's why Amazon's stock crashed and lost 90% of its value in 2001.

vanderZwan 9y ago

If the concern is interrupting the hype machine, why not use reaction videos? That worked for Enchroma glasses, which is in a very similar position: both are about doing something with your vision by wearing glasses, making it hard (impossible in Enchroma's case) to capture on video. http://enchroma.com/ http://enchroma.com/

Mahn 9y ago

> https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/lightwear-introducing-magic-leaps-mixed-reality-goggles-w514479 https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/lightwear-intro... This is very impressive if what it says is true. They've basically reinvented the concept of a digital computer display by projecting a sort of artificial light field into the eye. The amount of capital they've raised makes sense now, this sounds like a ridiculously big undertaking. What remains to be seen is whether all this work will be worth it as opposed to just better displays, but color me intrigued.

sombremesa 9y ago
It's just talking about a VRD, which is used by HoloLens as well. I imagine "light field" is just jargon to impress investors (it's not an impressive concept in itself - projecting a 'light field' on a 2D plane (retina) amounts to simply projecting light).

lvoudour 9y ago

The journalist in the Rolling Stone article[0] viewed a few demos built between the ML team, including one with Sigur Ros that's got a very small clip on youtube[1]. I suspect building a demo of this kind of tech that's remotely as impressive viewed on a website or youtube video is challenging. If I'd built the device as marketed I'd be concerned about giving half-baked first impressions that disrupt the hype machine, even if the device itself isn't half-baked. I hadn't read the article in rolling stone to be honest, but after reading it I get the impression that it would be even easier to prepare a more public demonstration (in a controlled environment) instead of this NDA shackled article. It wouldn't be that hard for example to show a video of the journalist in the room wearing the device and side-by-side a cloned view of what the journalist is visually experiencing. Something like what Steve Jobs did in the first iphone unveiling, but not live - an edited version would be more than fine, conveying both the visual experience and the journalists reactions. This is a ground breaking technology with so many non-gimmicky applications that it's mind boggling. I was thinking earlier this morning how it can be used for driving assistance: wear the headset in your car and get an overlaid "google maps" experience without ever having to get your eyes off the road, pair it with the car's sensors and get collision distance information, coloured lanes in dark roads, etc. How about (paired with sensors) measuring dimensions, inspecting components, counting objects, etc. in professional/industrial environments? I don;t know, maybe I'm wrong but I feel this obsession with secrecy is hurting both their product and the technology