11 ms·

Magic Leap is real and it’s a janky marvel

101 points by allenleein 8y ago

nimbius 8y ago
reminds me of the first cars i'd ever seen with massaging seats at the north american international auto show. Less of a massage, more so the sensation of sitting on some large, undulating, lovecraftian leather mass. There was the accountable whine of a team of motors, and once every few minutes a sharp audible pop could be heard. God bless Mercedes for trying to cover this all up by blasting classical through the car speakers though.
platz 8y ago
so, it's a more compact HoloLens, with better content/games?
- sp332 8y ago
  I dunno, would you describe every AR platform as "Hololens but a little different"? One thing that got briefly mentioned in the article is that the Magic Leap has an external computer, which you can put in a pocket or clip to your waist. It runs hot and it might cook itself if you block the airflow to the fans. Also, I've never heard of anyone needing to wander around for 4 minutes before the Hololens started tracking properly. On the plus side, Magic Leap has two different focal planes where HL only has one. Apparently this helps a lot in making users feel a sense of depth to the images.
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    You definitely have to wander around for Hololens to map the room in some cases. Have you used one? And this is definitely very similar to Hololens. In fact the main difference seems to be the field of view. Other than that, and the fact that you wear the brains on your hip instead of your head, how is it any different?
    - sp332 8y ago
      Well that external computer seems like a pretty different user experience to me. And having two focal planes can make a big difference. And no I haven't used either system. I guess what I'm asking is, can you imagine an AR platform that you would consider to be different? Or will you describe every AR system from now on as "very similar to HoloLens"?
      - IshKebab 8y ago
        Yeah I probably would because really Hololens more or less jumped to the endgame. The only thing that really needs to be improved in it is the terrible field of view. Everything else was very good - tracking, image quality, room scanning, etc. Oh and I guess the input system sucks. That's one other big difference of Magic Leap.
    - ericd 8y ago
      The computer being on the hip should make the headset much lighter/cooler than the hololens, which should make it less tiring to wear for longer periods.
- alasdair_ 8y ago
  >so, it's a more compact HoloLens, with better content/games? No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
  - drb91 8y ago
    People actually bought the iPod.
  - kipchak 8y ago
    Looking back I wonder if iTunes might have been the secret sauce for the iPad to work, rather than the iPod itself.
    - robterrell 8y ago
      For sure. I had a Rio player and an iPod. iTunes + iPod = music search, discovery, purchase, download, and transfer to device, all at once. For the Rio player I had to do all those steps manually.
memebox3f 8y ago
This cost 2.3B? 2.3B?! Its projectors and a couple of wave guides glued together. You could go to the moon with that cash. Capitalism needs a reboot.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sp332 8y ago
  No, it costs $2,300. They have developed the tech to do multiple stacked waveguides (12 I think?) but this device only does 2, probably for price reasons. Anyway the company is valued at $4.5 billion which has nothing to do with how much it will cost, only the amount of profit they think they can make from devices and patent licensing.
  - paulvorobyev 8y ago
    I think you misunderstood what he was saying. Magic Leap, as of now, has received $2.3B in the comments[1]. This is mentioned in the article's subtitle. [1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-leap https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-leap
    - sp332 8y ago
      Yes but what they're buying is a share of the company and its profits. No one is paying $2.3B to develop the tech.
  - memebox3v 8y ago
    Not for price reasons. Its because the more wave guides you super glue together the more image disruption you get. It's allready blocking a significant proportion of the light, not to mention the splitting out of colors.
  - kopo 8y ago
    Any idea what they are doing differently from the Vuzix Blade?
electricityUser 8y ago
But is Techcrunch real anymore? 5 comments on their article and 4 of them are spam?
- techntoke 8y ago
  Not really, they are just another PR company at this point.
moron4hire 8y ago
In my work with the HoloLens, I found that it's really best when you're augmenting the real world rather than displaying generic graphics. I know that sounds kind of like a tautology "use an augmented reality device to augment the real world?!? What a novel idea!" But if you look closely at the extant apps on HoloLens, you will realize they are mostly VR applications that happen to be rendered in your living room. To wit, the content is not connected to the space in any way other than proximity. You can move the content somewhere else and it's the same content. Where I've found AR to really shine is in IoT settings. Take the real world with smart objects and add relevant data on top of them. That's the easiest thing to do, as the data is readily available and the UX is much more obvious than other potential use-cases. The real world becomes an anchor for the content and makes it much more believable, even when you lose the augmented graphics in the periphery as you move around. There may be other ways to augment the real world other than IoT. GIS and routing might be one, though the tech isn't solid enough yet to put in a fast moving car, on roads with wide varieties of weather conditions. Medical assistance (though not training, again, that's VR). Logistics and shipping--previous experience working in a grocery warehouse, I saw that new pickers struggle the most with finding things, and the most successful pickers have memorized the locations of things. ASIDE: I'm also very interested in augmented audio interfaces, spatialized audio through bone-conducting headphones, for a much better virtual assistant experience. I have two small kids and use Google Home a lot while I'm getting them ready to go somewhere or making them dinner. Having different reminders and features located in different parts of the house, with proper fall-off of volume, would be a huge improvement on our daily routine. What does this have to do with Magic Leap? I would be very happy if all that Magic Leap had to offer was "slightly better HoloLens". The HoloLens has been underwhelming for a lot of people, but I think even today at basically 5 years old, it still has a lot of untapped potential. ML is slightly cheaper than HL, which is always nice, and it's running an Android-like OS, which might bring more developers along (though personally I very much enjoy UWP on both desktop and MR Windows). We are so close on so many different concepts that incremental improvements can't come fast enough.
- zip1234 8y ago
  I would love an app that would render a 3d model in the real world. Imagine looking at the site of your new house with the latest plans from the architect and able to visualize exactly how it would look in it's surroundings.
jerf 8y ago
Who on Earth approved this trailer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45ZHNq9_7eY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45ZHNq9_7eY "Ha ha, you'll be such a dork with our product on your face!" That does not seem a wise marketing line.
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  Ahhh but they are 'converted' by the end; which is presented as a simile on how realistic the gameplay is.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  I'm surprised they'd use a single-player game for a trailer. My first thought for concisely showing the benefits would be something more like a Mario Party-style game, with four people but split across two physical locations.
- ipsum2 8y ago
  The "game footage captured on device" is super misleading, same thing that Hololens did. The field of view is actually a small portion of your entire display, it doesn't cover the entire lens.
- slg 8y ago
  Similarly the trailer shows one of the device's biggest flaws at 0:42-0:44. The limited FOV of AR devices breaks the immersion in a way that the limited FOV of VR devices doesn't. Any augmented object disappears from view if you aren't looking directly at it, but unlike with VR you can still see that area of the real world so the missing graphic is immediately noticeable. So complements to the marketing team for being truthful in how people will react to the device and its true capabilities, but it is just surprising that this type of thing was approved.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  There are two ways a marketing message can deal with a widely held negative conception about the product: ignore it, or try to convince people it's wrong. The former is usually the safer course. Trying to convince people they're wrong is really hard, but if you can pull it off, it can pay off big. Pepsi's "Pepsi Challenge" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Challenge) campaign from the 1970s and '80s is the canonical example of how to make an "actually, you're wrong" campaign work. Pepsi's market research found that the prevailing opinion of Pepsi was that it tasted too sweet, so people turned to Coke instead, just assuming that they wouldn't like Pepsi without ever really trying it. So Pepsi filmed commercials showing people taking a blind taste test of both Pepsi and Coke, and preferring Pepsi before being told which was which. The commercials worked -- they convinced people to give Pepsi a try, and enough of them found they liked it to drive up Pepsi sales for good. The "you'll look like a dork" fear strikes me as widely enough held to be one of the biggest challenges VR and AR have to overcome to break into the mass market, so it's not illogical that at least some marketers would decide they have to take it on directly.
creeble 8y ago
Reminds me a lot of the introduction of the Iridium phone. "Worldwide coverage! No more dead zones! This will change communications globally!" Then they saw the phone. And its antenna. And learned it only worked outdoors. And cost $2,000. ~$6B in satellite costs. It wasn't a failure (I still use mine once in a while), but it sure wasn't what people were expecting.
- walrus01 8y ago
  The second corporate incarnation of Iridium, which bought the whole network out of bankruptcy, has been extremely successful, however. It's the only truly global network that will function equally well in mountainous regions of northern Afghanistan, on the Antarctic polar ice cap plateau, in the middle of the south Indian Ocean, or elsewhere. The architecture and technology was way ahead of its time, with Ka-band satellite-to-satellite trunk links between satellites following each other in polar orbits. And voice codecs built with 1996-1997 technology that can fit intelligible voice into about 3000 bps. I agree that the late 1990s marketing which was trying to sell Iridium phones to international business travelers was ridiculous, however. Once the new Iridium corporation settled on the actually useful market of government, military, disaster response, maritime, expeditions and M2M data they've been wildly successful. The second and third generation handsets (9555 and Extreme) are much more reasonably sized and closer in user interface to a modern cellphone.
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    > It's the only truly global network that will function equally well in mountainous regions of northern Afghanistan, on the Antarctic polar ice cap plateau, in the middle of the south Indian Ocean, or elsewhere. Interesting. I only know a little about the market and products and always have been curious (and on the occasions I needed it, good info was hard to find): What about names like Intelsat, Inmarsat, Globalstar ...?
    - walrus01 8y ago
      Globalstar is an epic turd, network architecture wise.
roymurdock 8y ago
> its first product is a somewhat janky piece of magic > Magic Leap is about as impressive a piece of augmented or virtual reality hardware as I’ve seen. Other companies may have better fields of view and a more compact device, but they lack the variety of content that makes Magic Leap’s offerings shine. The early partnerships the company has inked have, indeed, paid off. the author nearly breaking their neck stretching to find some positive way to frame this train wreck of a company/product saying the hardware is the most impressive they've seen, but because the software from partners is good? HN needs a moratorium on TC paid advertising pieces / TC in general
- Holomakerbot 8y ago
  You’ll actually be hard pressed to find any press anywhere that thinks the hardware is bad.
  - roymurdock 8y ago
    > Other companies may have better fields of view and a more compact device it's right there in the original review my friend, even the paid-for TC journalist has to admit the hardware is inferior and "janky"
nakedrobot2 8y ago
Paid PR piece, anyone? And still the writer is reaching so far they're going all the way around the world back into their own ass trying to praise this thing. <rant> I'm so fucking done with MagicLeap. Their head conman CEO, who is, absolutely and by all accounts, an absolutely fantastic showman and salesman, has taken so much money and so much hype that it's not going to end well. Pretty much EVERYONE who has tried the magic leap headset has basically said 'meh'. It blocks around 85% of the incoming light [1], for fuck's sake. That's the first of a very long list of 'meh'. Why am I so pissed off about this? Because it's going to crash the AR industry (already on its knees because of an overhyped VR industry) and set it back years. Already, and for years now, no one wants to invest in an AR hardware startup because "how could you possibly beat Magic Leap? Fuck those guys. And the dumb investors who let themselves be fondled into throwing billions? Shame on you! </rant> The same thing happened to lightfield imaging with Lytro (who took "only" a few hundred million in comparison). Lightfield imaging has been stagnant ever since they took too much money and sucked all the oxygen out of an entire industry. [1] https://www.kguttag.com/2018/09/26/magic-leap-review-part-1-the-terrible-view-through-diffraction-gratings/ https://www.kguttag.com/2018/09/26/magic-leap-review-part-1-...
- moron4hire 8y ago
  > Why am I so pissed off about this? Because it's going to crash the AR industry (already on its knees because of an overhyped VR industry) and set it back years. Already, and for years now, no one wants to invest in an AR hardware startup because "how could you possibly beat Magic Leap? Found the guy who read the Palmer Luckey "Tragic Heap" article. I'm not allowed to give details, but from my own perspective, neither the VR or AR market are as fragile as you make it out to be.
- AJ007 8y ago
  I think there is plenty of money being spent on AR R&D right now. We are pretty sure Apple is. Michael Abrash discussed it during his Oculus Connect keynote a few weeks ago. Snapchat has certainly been public about what they want to do. This is the post-phone platform and it is really, really big. A few billion up in smoke isn't going to stop it. The crime here is Magic Leap hyped the hell out of their product, took tons of money, was extremely opaque about it, and then severely under-deliverd. Exact opposite of Valve and Oculus.
criddell 8y ago
Are journalists that were given early previews released from their NDA obligations? I'd be really curious to hear some of them explain if the released product is indeed what they were shown.
snickerbockers 8y ago
3DS did this in 2011 and it was better, too.
- kipchak 8y ago
  Faceraiders was great! It's a shame it didn't seem to go much of anywhere though for later games, it's a shame it and the Vita's more odd features didn't get more use.
just_myles 8y ago
That demo did look janky. Still promising in my opinion.

101 points by allenleein 8y ago

reminds me of the first cars i'd ever seen with massaging seats at the north american international auto show. Less of a massage, more so the sensation of sitting on some large, undulating, lovecraftian leather mass. There was the accountable whine of a team of motors, and once every few minutes a sharp audible pop could be heard. God bless Mercedes for trying to cover this all up by blasting classical through the car speakers though.

platz 8y ago

so, it's a more compact HoloLens, with better content/games?

sp332 8y ago
I dunno, would you describe every AR platform as "Hololens but a little different"? One thing that got briefly mentioned in the article is that the Magic Leap has an external computer, which you can put in a pocket or clip to your waist. It runs hot and it might cook itself if you block the airflow to the fans. Also, I've never heard of anyone needing to wander around for 4 minutes before the Hololens started tracking properly. On the plus side, Magic Leap has two different focal planes where HL only has one. Apparently this helps a lot in making users feel a sense of depth to the images.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  You definitely have to wander around for Hololens to map the room in some cases. Have you used one? And this is definitely very similar to Hololens. In fact the main difference seems to be the field of view. Other than that, and the fact that you wear the brains on your hip instead of your head, how is it any different?
  - sp332 8y ago
    Well that external computer seems like a pretty different user experience to me. And having two focal planes can make a big difference. And no I haven't used either system. I guess what I'm asking is, can you imagine an AR platform that you would consider to be different? Or will you describe every AR system from now on as "very similar to HoloLens"?
    - IshKebab 8y ago
      Yeah I probably would because really Hololens more or less jumped to the endgame. The only thing that really needs to be improved in it is the terrible field of view. Everything else was very good - tracking, image quality, room scanning, etc. Oh and I guess the input system sucks. That's one other big difference of Magic Leap.
  - ericd 8y ago
    The computer being on the hip should make the headset much lighter/cooler than the hololens, which should make it less tiring to wear for longer periods.
alasdair_ 8y ago
>so, it's a more compact HoloLens, with better content/games? No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
- drb91 8y ago
  People actually bought the iPod.
- kipchak 8y ago
  Looking back I wonder if iTunes might have been the secret sauce for the iPad to work, rather than the iPod itself.
  - robterrell 8y ago
    For sure. I had a Rio player and an iPod. iTunes + iPod = music search, discovery, purchase, download, and transfer to device, all at once. For the Rio player I had to do all those steps manually.

memebox3f 8y ago

This cost 2.3B? 2.3B?! Its projectors and a couple of wave guides glued together. You could go to the moon with that cash. Capitalism needs a reboot.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sp332 8y ago
No, it costs $2,300. They have developed the tech to do multiple stacked waveguides (12 I think?) but this device only does 2, probably for price reasons. Anyway the company is valued at $4.5 billion which has nothing to do with how much it will cost, only the amount of profit they think they can make from devices and patent licensing.
- paulvorobyev 8y ago
  I think you misunderstood what he was saying. Magic Leap, as of now, has received $2.3B in the comments[1]. This is mentioned in the article's subtitle. [1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-leap https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-leap
  - sp332 8y ago
    Yes but what they're buying is a share of the company and its profits. No one is paying $2.3B to develop the tech.
- memebox3v 8y ago
  Not for price reasons. Its because the more wave guides you super glue together the more image disruption you get. It's allready blocking a significant proportion of the light, not to mention the splitting out of colors.
- kopo 8y ago
  Any idea what they are doing differently from the Vuzix Blade?

electricityUser 8y ago

But is Techcrunch real anymore? 5 comments on their article and 4 of them are spam?

techntoke 8y ago
Not really, they are just another PR company at this point.

moron4hire 8y ago

In my work with the HoloLens, I found that it's really best when you're augmenting the real world rather than displaying generic graphics. I know that sounds kind of like a tautology "use an augmented reality device to augment the real world?!? What a novel idea!" But if you look closely at the extant apps on HoloLens, you will realize they are mostly VR applications that happen to be rendered in your living room. To wit, the content is not connected to the space in any way other than proximity. You can move the content somewhere else and it's the same content. Where I've found AR to really shine is in IoT settings. Take the real world with smart objects and add relevant data on top of them. That's the easiest thing to do, as the data is readily available and the UX is much more obvious than other potential use-cases. The real world becomes an anchor for the content and makes it much more believable, even when you lose the augmented graphics in the periphery as you move around. There may be other ways to augment the real world other than IoT. GIS and routing might be one, though the tech isn't solid enough yet to put in a fast moving car, on roads with wide varieties of weather conditions. Medical assistance (though not training, again, that's VR). Logistics and shipping--previous experience working in a grocery warehouse, I saw that new pickers struggle the most with finding things, and the most successful pickers have memorized the locations of things. ASIDE: I'm also very interested in augmented audio interfaces, spatialized audio through bone-conducting headphones, for a much better virtual assistant experience. I have two small kids and use Google Home a lot while I'm getting them ready to go somewhere or making them dinner. Having different reminders and features located in different parts of the house, with proper fall-off of volume, would be a huge improvement on our daily routine. What does this have to do with Magic Leap? I would be very happy if all that Magic Leap had to offer was "slightly better HoloLens". The HoloLens has been underwhelming for a lot of people, but I think even today at basically 5 years old, it still has a lot of untapped potential. ML is slightly cheaper than HL, which is always nice, and it's running an Android-like OS, which might bring more developers along (though personally I very much enjoy UWP on both desktop and MR Windows). We are so close on so many different concepts that incremental improvements can't come fast enough.

zip1234 8y ago
I would love an app that would render a 3d model in the real world. Imagine looking at the site of your new house with the latest plans from the architect and able to visualize exactly how it would look in it's surroundings.

jerf 8y ago

Who on Earth approved this trailer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45ZHNq9_7eY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45ZHNq9_7eY "Ha ha, you'll be such a dork with our product on your face!" That does not seem a wise marketing line.

Jaruzel 8y ago
Ahhh but they are 'converted' by the end; which is presented as a simile on how realistic the gameplay is.
crooked-v 8y ago
I'm surprised they'd use a single-player game for a trailer. My first thought for concisely showing the benefits would be something more like a Mario Party-style game, with four people but split across two physical locations.
ipsum2 8y ago
The "game footage captured on device" is super misleading, same thing that Hololens did. The field of view is actually a small portion of your entire display, it doesn't cover the entire lens.
slg 8y ago
Similarly the trailer shows one of the device's biggest flaws at 0:42-0:44. The limited FOV of AR devices breaks the immersion in a way that the limited FOV of VR devices doesn't. Any augmented object disappears from view if you aren't looking directly at it, but unlike with VR you can still see that area of the real world so the missing graphic is immediately noticeable. So complements to the marketing team for being truthful in how people will react to the device and its true capabilities, but it is just surprising that this type of thing was approved.
smacktoward 8y ago
There are two ways a marketing message can deal with a widely held negative conception about the product: ignore it, or try to convince people it's wrong. The former is usually the safer course. Trying to convince people they're wrong is really hard, but if you can pull it off, it can pay off big. Pepsi's "Pepsi Challenge" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Challenge) campaign from the 1970s and '80s is the canonical example of how to make an "actually, you're wrong" campaign work. Pepsi's market research found that the prevailing opinion of Pepsi was that it tasted too sweet, so people turned to Coke instead, just assuming that they wouldn't like Pepsi without ever really trying it. So Pepsi filmed commercials showing people taking a blind taste test of both Pepsi and Coke, and preferring Pepsi before being told which was which. The commercials worked -- they convinced people to give Pepsi a try, and enough of them found they liked it to drive up Pepsi sales for good. The "you'll look like a dork" fear strikes me as widely enough held to be one of the biggest challenges VR and AR have to overcome to break into the mass market, so it's not illogical that at least some marketers would decide they have to take it on directly.

creeble 8y ago

Reminds me a lot of the introduction of the Iridium phone. "Worldwide coverage! No more dead zones! This will change communications globally!" Then they saw the phone. And its antenna. And learned it only worked outdoors. And cost $2,000. ~$6B in satellite costs. It wasn't a failure (I still use mine once in a while), but it sure wasn't what people were expecting.

walrus01 8y ago
The second corporate incarnation of Iridium, which bought the whole network out of bankruptcy, has been extremely successful, however. It's the only truly global network that will function equally well in mountainous regions of northern Afghanistan, on the Antarctic polar ice cap plateau, in the middle of the south Indian Ocean, or elsewhere. The architecture and technology was way ahead of its time, with Ka-band satellite-to-satellite trunk links between satellites following each other in polar orbits. And voice codecs built with 1996-1997 technology that can fit intelligible voice into about 3000 bps. I agree that the late 1990s marketing which was trying to sell Iridium phones to international business travelers was ridiculous, however. Once the new Iridium corporation settled on the actually useful market of government, military, disaster response, maritime, expeditions and M2M data they've been wildly successful. The second and third generation handsets (9555 and Extreme) are much more reasonably sized and closer in user interface to a modern cellphone.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > It's the only truly global network that will function equally well in mountainous regions of northern Afghanistan, on the Antarctic polar ice cap plateau, in the middle of the south Indian Ocean, or elsewhere. Interesting. I only know a little about the market and products and always have been curious (and on the occasions I needed it, good info was hard to find): What about names like Intelsat, Inmarsat, Globalstar ...?
  - walrus01 8y ago
    Globalstar is an epic turd, network architecture wise.

roymurdock 8y ago

> its first product is a somewhat janky piece of magic > Magic Leap is about as impressive a piece of augmented or virtual reality hardware as I’ve seen. Other companies may have better fields of view and a more compact device, but they lack the variety of content that makes Magic Leap’s offerings shine. The early partnerships the company has inked have, indeed, paid off. the author nearly breaking their neck stretching to find some positive way to frame this train wreck of a company/product saying the hardware is the most impressive they've seen, but because the software from partners is good? HN needs a moratorium on TC paid advertising pieces / TC in general

Holomakerbot 8y ago
You’ll actually be hard pressed to find any press anywhere that thinks the hardware is bad.
- roymurdock 8y ago
  > Other companies may have better fields of view and a more compact device it's right there in the original review my friend, even the paid-for TC journalist has to admit the hardware is inferior and "janky"

nakedrobot2 8y ago

Paid PR piece, anyone? And still the writer is reaching so far they're going all the way around the world back into their own ass trying to praise this thing. <rant> I'm so fucking done with MagicLeap. Their head conman CEO, who is, absolutely and by all accounts, an absolutely fantastic showman and salesman, has taken so much money and so much hype that it's not going to end well. Pretty much EVERYONE who has tried the magic leap headset has basically said 'meh'. It blocks around 85% of the incoming light [1], for fuck's sake. That's the first of a very long list of 'meh'. Why am I so pissed off about this? Because it's going to crash the AR industry (already on its knees because of an overhyped VR industry) and set it back years. Already, and for years now, no one wants to invest in an AR hardware startup because "how could you possibly beat Magic Leap? Fuck those guys. And the dumb investors who let themselves be fondled into throwing billions? Shame on you! </rant> The same thing happened to lightfield imaging with Lytro (who took "only" a few hundred million in comparison). Lightfield imaging has been stagnant ever since they took too much money and sucked all the oxygen out of an entire industry. [1] https://www.kguttag.com/2018/09/26/magic-leap-review-part-1-the-terrible-view-through-diffraction-gratings/ https://www.kguttag.com/2018/09/26/magic-leap-review-part-1-...

moron4hire 8y ago
> Why am I so pissed off about this? Because it's going to crash the AR industry (already on its knees because of an overhyped VR industry) and set it back years. Already, and for years now, no one wants to invest in an AR hardware startup because "how could you possibly beat Magic Leap? Found the guy who read the Palmer Luckey "Tragic Heap" article. I'm not allowed to give details, but from my own perspective, neither the VR or AR market are as fragile as you make it out to be.
AJ007 8y ago
I think there is plenty of money being spent on AR R&D right now. We are pretty sure Apple is. Michael Abrash discussed it during his Oculus Connect keynote a few weeks ago. Snapchat has certainly been public about what they want to do. This is the post-phone platform and it is really, really big. A few billion up in smoke isn't going to stop it. The crime here is Magic Leap hyped the hell out of their product, took tons of money, was extremely opaque about it, and then severely under-deliverd. Exact opposite of Valve and Oculus.

criddell 8y ago

Are journalists that were given early previews released from their NDA obligations? I'd be really curious to hear some of them explain if the released product is indeed what they were shown.

snickerbockers 8y ago

3DS did this in 2011 and it was better, too.

kipchak 8y ago
Faceraiders was great! It's a shame it didn't seem to go much of anywhere though for later games, it's a shame it and the Vita's more odd features didn't get more use.

just_myles 8y ago

That demo did look janky. Still promising in my opinion.