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LeapMotion to be acquired for $30m by UltraHaptics
- bhouston 7y agoRaised $100m thus all investors are underwater and founders/employees got wiped out. I guess some investors got liquity preferences so maybe a few are at least whole. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/leap-motion https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/leap-motion
- karmakaze 7y agoThis is a bit sad but inevitable. They were trying to cover so much ground and execute to perfection. Whatever lead they had shrank with time and advances on fronts outside the hw and core dev may not see the light of day.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoI purchased one of the first LeapMotion devices, and I was not terribly impressed with the performance and returned it. Not sure whether the IP has much value with Google's Soli [1] project seeming to be further ahead. [1] https://atap.google.com/soli/ https://atap.google.com/soli/
- karmakaze 7y agoThat's too bad. I do hope someone continues to develop immersive AR rather than the AR/VR split we have how. ML should have been iterating on a platform and improvements to speed, FoV, etc. Feel sorry for the employees who really believed they would change the world. Note to self: be cautious of companies with 'magic' in name or operating in isolation.
- WillKirkby 7y agoMagic Leap != LeapMotion
- karmakaze 7y agoOh thanks Sorry. I remember them too the air fingers. Also a great idea. The latency and sometimes loss of virtual digits was quirky but I did have hopes it would get incorporared into a VR hmd. 30m is better than bust.
- kohanz 7y agoFor what it's worth, the performance improved quite a bit with subsequent firmware updates. It was quite a remarkable device that impressed anyone I let try it, but finding a mass-market use-case proved impossible. They tried to pivot to VR, but it was very late. I think going after the consumer market (with an app store to be filled with games) was a mistake. Easy to say in hindsight, of course.
- ScottFree 7y ago> the performance improved quite a bit with subsequent firmware updates. But it didn't improve enough to be useful for anything practical. The most useful thing I could make it do reliably was detect swiping your hand left and right. I was really hoping I could use it as a mouse replacement on laptops, but accurately tracking individual finger placement never materialized.
- jobigoud 7y agoLooks like you are making the classic confusion between Magic Leap and Leap Motion. Leap Motion is finger tracking.
- bhouston 7y agoAt least maybe the name confusion will stop. I must admit I think Magic Leap is going to see a similar fate.
- rasz 7y agoTheir whole value proposition was clever software to compute on stream from stereo cameras. Jumping from VR (small market) to automotive and piggybacking on self driving seemed as such an obvious move.
- tootie 7y agoI'm surprised Ultrahaptics had $30M to spend. Their product is super niche.
- joshu 7y agohow do you know it is $30m in cash?
- villgax 7y agoThey were launched right when ML was going mainstream & ability to infer the proprietary algos became widespread by simply learning hand state from their own data points & raw input images from commodity RGB cameras.