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tl;dr: No specs, no demos, no video or images of what is seen through the glasses. The only functionality demonstrated live was a green LED on the glasses. E
by _iyig 8y ago
tl;dr:
No specs, no demos, no video or images of what is seen through the glasses.
The only functionality demonstrated live was a green LED on the glasses.
Even in a world where the glasses work 100% as advertised, I’m still skeptical that goggle-vision AR will be a multi-billion dollar industry. Who wants to run around playing AR video games in their house or office? Who’d want to wear goggles and buckle a gaming PC to their belt just to check e-mail and watch YouTube? Where is the market for Magic Leap’s ideal, everything-works AR headset?
Some might say industry, architecture, or medicine, but that doesn’t appear to be their focus right now, and it’s hard for me to see those niche applications justifying their billions in investment so far.
- ben_w 8y agoWhile this particular AR may be overhyped, I do expect AR to become a multi-billion-US$ industry before 2025. Even if it’s just two apps, Sunglasses.app and Google Maps pasted onto your view with no careful design, that’s still worth $30 and could run on that year’s version of the Raspberry Pi Zero. 30 million units per billion dollars, doesn’t feel unreasonable.
- dwighttk 8y agoIs sunglasses.app just slightly darkening the lenses so they work as sunglasses?
- ben_w 8y agoPretty much. People already pay a premium for photochromic lenses that take minutes to adjust, LCD can do the same in milliseconds.
- throw_away2 8y agoI just want the Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses
- oceanswave 8y agoOh come on, let me have just a little bit of peril?
- ghaff 8y agoI can certainly construct scenarios where magic AR tech could be a breakout product category. Glasses that look approximately like other glasses. No social stigma. Able to automagically project directions, identify people, display information about places/objects. Unobtrusive control through a watch, vocal commands, or other means. Etc. But that's asking a lot. I'd probably be willing to stipulate it will happen at some point, for at least some use cases (e.g. industrial). But Not sure that 5-ish years will do it.
- pipio21 8y agoRemember that even the first serious cinematographers, like Lumiere brothers considered cinema just a "toy" with no practical applications. From my perspective AR applications in the future will be huge in all areas as it means a new way to interface with 3d editing on real time. But having said that, I do not believe Magic Leap will be the one who bring this to the table. I see magic Leap as the Altavista or pets.com of the Internet, burning investor money like crazy and trowing things to the wall expecting something to stick.
- mmt 8y ago> the Altavista or pets.com of the Internet, burning investor money I'm not sure it's fair to lump Altavista with pets.com. The latter burned through something like 300 megabucks in just over 2 years. The former was the first full-text search engine for the web and generated tens of megabucks of revenue, though they couldn't come up with a business model to keep it going (and eventualy lost out to Google on search quality [1], IIRC). I'm not sure we'll ever know how much it cost DEC to build and run it, but it seems credible that they at least came close to breaking even. [1] Though I still miss their richer query language, incuding the NEAR keyword.
- aigen001 8y agoHere's a couple fun to think about ideas for AR. - Take a tour of the Colosseum during its peak years. - Architects might find that they can save money on design by building bland looking buildings with facades that enable easy AR projection onto them. - AR could potentially replace smartphones if they can provide a better user experience.