61 ms·

Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans

537 points by _pius 6y ago

Ididntdothis 6y ago
This is such a weird company. They created big buzz over years and it seems they are just fading away quietly with nothing to show for the money they took in. Reminds me a little of Theranos (although not as criminal). Why do these investors keep pumping so much money into a company that has nothing to show? I thought they do due diligence.
- abhisuri97 6y ago
  It's just about taking a bet. I'm sure that magic leap must have had some demo (perhaps rehearsed) of a rudimentary alpha version they showed investors that was enough to convince people it was possible. From an investor standpoint, there isn't much downside outside of losing money. But the potential upside would have been huge.
- gamegoblin 6y ago
  I assume they must have had a killer demo. 1. Put the goggles on some investor's head (in a normal looking room, but with known lighting and spatial properties...). 2. Show them some flashy demo that has some limitations, but promise that with their investment, they will be able to remove those limitations. 3. Investors, who probably lack the deep knowledge of optics to know that those limitations aren't so trivial, throw money at them. Because if those limitations (e.g. FOV, opacity) were removed, it would be world-changing tech.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    Reminds me of Silicon Valley's fictional Keenan Feldspar and his VR demo (likely based on Magic Leap): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8MAV9jhf04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8MAV9jhf04
    - creato 6y ago
      Surely that was their take on Palmer Luckey and Oculus?
      - jagannathtech 6y ago
        Didn't seem Palmer had any reality distortion field.
  - DonHopkins 6y ago
    Now with COVID-19, they really DO have a killer demo: 1. Put the goggles on some investor's head. 2. Investor catches COVID-19 and dies. Nobody wants to share VR or AR gear any more. The whole idea of location based VR / AR entertainment centers is deadly now. If it's so great you can't believe it without trying it yourself, and nobody wants to stick their head in a device that anybody else has been drooling and coughing and vomiting in, it doesn't matter how great it is, nobody's going to try it.
    - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
      > Nobody wants to share VR or AR gear any more. The whole idea of location based VR / AR entertainment centers is deadly now. There's a price range where I could see buying one to be shared by everyone in my house, but not one for each individual. For example, Valve Index is in that category for me.
    - core-questions 6y ago
      Don't be such a wuss. None of that is something a little Lysol can't fix, and these places should have always been using such (though I imagine they don't).
      - VRay 6y ago
        You can disinfect your electronics with rubbing alcohol and/or removable covers, but don't put Lysol or other harsh cleaning agents on them
        catalogia 6y ago
        > Don't put lysol [on electronics] Why shouldn't I? The exterior surfaces of "electronics" are just glass, plastic or aluminum and lysol seems to work fine on all three. It's sold in plastic bottles so it's not like it'd create nerve gas or something. Not that I generally take marketing claims seriously, but lysol advertises itself as appropriate for use on electronics: https://www.lysol.com/cold-flu/home/how-to-clean-electronics-in-your-home/ https://www.lysol.com/cold-flu/home/how-to-clean-electronics... If there were any real danger, I expect their lawyers might not let them do that.
  - mattw815 6y ago
    I've had the opportunity to demo their product on 3 different occasions. Each time it was a clunky interaction, stopped working in the middle of the demo, and I left thinking my kid's Playstation VR could run circles around their tech.
    - qppo 6y ago
      they allegedly had an insane demo for investors only, before around 2016 (at least that's when I heard of it) you needed to sign an NDA to even get in the room to see it. The consumer product is quite lacking compared to what people said was a demonstration of game changing technology.
      - raverbashing 6y ago
        So: NDA, exclusive demo, controlled environment. It makes it sound to me more like a Séance (with its usual implications) than anything else. Or, for an easier to understand analogy, selling a Disney ride as if it was real.
- filoleg 6y ago
  I am not sure if financials really work out the way i assume, so i could totally be talking out of my ass here. But i have a feeling it could work as a really nice money laundering vehicle for investors (even though i dont think it was fully the case here), and the company doesn’t even need to be aware of it. You make X in dirty money, then invest it into a cool sounding company promising groundbreaking stuff that has a bunch of big known investors on board already. If the company does well, you take the clean money out with a nice profit on top. If it doesn’t work out, hopefully you pulled out at a level where you lost some money but not much. And it still returns you clean money at the end, so the goal is accomplished. Typically, this kind of money laundering is done through retail businesses like restaurants and such, but it is way easier to just drop those money as an investment into another company, rather than maintaining your own retail business. Plus, the amount of money you could launder by investing is way higher, since it isnt as suspicious to drop a few hundred millions on a startup investment, as opposed to claiming that your small restaurant that is almost always empty is bringing you tens of millions per year.
  - aero142 6y ago
    Is there some exception to money laundering rules I'm not aware of where the government doesn't investigate the source of cash if it is invested in a company from overseas?
    - filoleg 6y ago
      Oh, if it is a foreign power, they arent laundering it to prevent the US government from discovering the source, they are doing it to prevent discovering the source from their own governments. Because those foreign actors wouldn’t be running away from taxes from the US, since those money were never in the US in the first place. Also curious on how it would work. If a rich foreign national decides to invest into a random startup, i dont think US has the ability to look into where the money came from, unless that foreign national claims to have made those money in the US. Again, could totally be wrong here, so please someone correct me if that’s the case.
      - 6y ago
- ssully 6y ago
  I feel like I have heard rumors about amazing closed door tech demos for Magic Leap for years now, so I always assumed that's how they got so much money. The question then is did they just have a really good pitch/canned demo, or do a good job of stirring up rumors and riding off that.
- lgleason 6y ago
  One of the early seed investors is close friends with the founders of Google. Needless to say it wasn't surprising when Google funneled a bunch of cash into it. After that, I'm sure it made it easier to get others to follow suit.
- gkoberger 6y ago
  It's easy to say in hindsight, but investors were taking a bet based on the little bits of promising information they had a decade ago. Both sides knew the risks, and that's the whole point – VCs and the company both believed they could make something happen, and it seems they weren't able to, and that's just how this works.
  - bsanr2 6y ago
    This is it. Everyone knew that it was a hedge to get in on the ground floor in case the technology blew up faster than anyone could predict. Nobody wants to be the person who missed out on the next Google or Facebook, especially Google or Facebook.
- kick 6y ago
  Palmer Luckey (Oculus founder) has repeatedly dragged them for cheating on their demos. Given how much faith some investors have had in them, I imagine that's what happened there, too, at least for the first batches.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- netcan 6y ago
  In some sense, if these things didn't ever happen then it would be a sign that VC is broken. They're not supposed to be investing in sure things.
- Alex3917 6y ago
  > Reminds me a little of Theranos (although not as criminal). More like Dean Kamen's launch of "Ginger" in 2001.
  - swebs 6y ago
    The Segway actually launched and sold and delivered on its technical promises. The problem was that most people didn't want to spend $3000 on one.
    - Ididntdothis 6y ago
      And it’s really not very useful.
- alephnan 6y ago
  From the article: > Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. So maybe similar reasons to WeWork.
- throwaway55554 6y ago
  > ... with nothing to show for the money they took in They made some Incredibles 2 style goggles.
slg 6y ago
Does this officially place the Magic Leap's consumer device on the list of the biggest vaporware products in the history of the tech industry? I don't know whether there was some tech hurdle they could never get over or if they were just straight up selling a fantasy from the beginning, but this result has seemed to be the likely destination for years.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  There's something about using the word 'Magic' in your company's name [1]; great concept, likely amazing people, but in the end either vaporware or something that's way too ahead of its time. Maybe the 'Magic' is how they are able to get so much funding and attention for so little end result. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic
  - Andrex 6y ago
    Some names are just too perfect. Starcraft Ghost The Phantom (games console) Duke Nukem Forever (though it eventually did come out)
    - iaw 6y ago
      > Duke Nukem Forever (though it eventually did come out) Duke Nukem (took) Forever
    - ModernMech 6y ago
      My favorite was the Guns and Roses album "Chinese Democracy" which took like a decade to release. They used to say democracy would come to China before the album would.
  - soneca 6y ago
    I remember a small delivery startup called "Magic" too that had quite an impact here in HN, then I never heard about it again. Edit: Here it is the HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819 They are still around though https://www.getmagic.com https://www.getmagic.com
TheSoftwareGuy 6y ago
Jesus Christ. I personally know two people that started working there right around when the lockdowns were starting to get put in place. They've probably been there less than a month.
- dragosmocrii 6y ago
  Happened to me to with a company within my trial period. It's amazing how many things you can learn about a company in times of difficulty, in my case leaving the company was happening with or without the layoff.. I hope your friend can find a replacement soon.
- SSchick 6y ago
  Yup, friend of mine started working there about 2 months ago. He was meant to move to work at their offices but then corona happened, now he has to deal with half his team being purged while working remotely and let's not talk about his morale right now.
- albertTJames 6y ago
  I find it shameful that a well funded company would do such a thing in a time of crisis. They're not in the tourism industry. It is sickening.
xiaolingxiao 6y ago
They're exploring a sale valued at $10B, but it's doubtful who would have the appetite to buy it at this valuation. Google declined a follow on round recently, Apple has been developing their own tech for years, and Facebook has quietly stepped away from AR/VR. Magic Leap is reminiscent of another company with "Magic" in its name: General Magic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic). They both made a product that evangelize the form factor in the public's (or some subset of it) eye, but alas is way ahead of its time in terms of tech, and content. It's easy to hate on Magic Leap and its self aggrandizing marketing. Although I personally never bought into the hype of Magic Leap in particular, they did inspire a whole generation of developers in a way that hasn't been done since the release of the original iPhone.
- cbsks 6y ago
  > Facebook has quietly stepped away from AR/VR Has Facebook de-prioritized Oculus? I haven't heard any news, but I'm also not following it closely.
  - Kiro 6y ago
    Not at all. xiaolingxiao is simply wrong or didn't know Oculus is Facebook.
- devindotcom 6y ago
  They did? I'm not a developer myself so I may have missed out on this, but I never sensed any enthusiasm about the platform. ARKit certainly brought a few people into that world, but I've never felt that Magic Leap inspired anything but skepticism practically since launch.
- strangeloops85 6y ago
  Not sure if Facebook is stepping away from AR/VR. Oculus/ Facebook reality labs is still hiring plenty of folks in the optics/ photonics world.. even making announcements over the last week on open positions.
  - 6y ago
lostgame 6y ago
This is unfortunately not a surprise. Magic Leap is now an example of why companies should ‘under promise and over deliver’. I don’t think the product could’ve ever lived up to the hype train.
xenospn 6y ago
Will VR/AR join 3D TV in the consumer tech hall of shame?
- modeless 6y ago
  VR is doing fine in gaming. The headsets are sold out everywhere and there are a lot of great games available. It won't overtake 2D gaming anytime soon but there's a healthy market.
  - monkeydust 6y ago
    Think VR has business applications. Training for example for manual, complex work. Data analysis possibly (exploring this at work).
nprz 6y ago
Are there other companies making progress in the augmented reality space? I've tried the Hololens v1 and was completely underwhelmed. The field of view is far too small and not impressive or immersive at all. Is the v2 much better? When will we get what Magic Leap was initially promising?
- filoleg 6y ago
  Hololens V2 is still not average-consumer-ready, but it is leaps and bounds closer to it than v1. I tried both myself, and the biggest improvements in v2, in my opinion, are: * Field of view. That’s the biggest one, as it felt like just a staring into a small rectangle with v1. With v2, I was actually able to read a NYT article in a web browser rather comfortably, moving the web browser around the room and such, with no significant field of view limitations felt. The limitations are still there, but you rarely ever hit them, while with v1 it was more like “almost the whole time you are using the device”. And it felt really annoying. * UI/UX. Everything is much more intuitive and smooth to operate. After the initial 5-10 mins, i didnt feel any jankiness and was able to perform all operations with no struggle. Also, v2 works without that annoying clicker/pointer device (that was pretty much a must for v1) rather well, just by tracking hands. And i would say it is even more precise without that device than v1 was WITH the device. * Ergonomics. The headset is lighter, feels more comfortable, doesn’t require as much fiddling around to get it sit well on your head. The flip up/down visor is such a great quality of life improvement, I am baffled that current consumer VR devices like Oculus or Vive haven’t implemented it. Especially since it would provide way more utility for VR than AR, because VR completely blocks out the real world.
- istorical 6y ago
  As with all VR/AR products, we feel like we're on the verge of something great within the next 1-2 years and something revolutionary within the next 3-5, but at least now there's Focals https://www.bynorth.com/ https://www.bynorth.com/ and Apple's expected product (hiring posts, acquisitions, and leaks point to a large team at work on something) as well as the Hololens team still iterating, and to me the most interesting stuff is actual software applications. FB/Oculus showed some interesting stuff in their last conference: Work on 'social teleportation' aka scanning the environment and bringing it into mixed reality / VR in order to 'call' someone in mixed reality and teleport to their living room and sit with them in 3D space, better and better face-scanning tech to create digital reproductions of your face with facial expressions mirrored to avatars: https://youtu.be/ybhYJ87U2Gs?t=523 https://youtu.be/ybhYJ87U2Gs?t=523 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbRvARuCoRU&ab_channel=Oculus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbRvARuCoRU&ab_channel=Oculu...
trollied 6y ago
Wow, they burned billions. Karl Guttag has blogged about them for years, debunking their technology. Hi blog is a good read for all things in the AR/VR space https://www.kguttag.com/ https://www.kguttag.com/
- tootie 6y ago
  Their tech is actually pretty decent. It's as good as anything else on the market. Their biggest mistake has been setting sky high expectations and just not coming close. If you got a cold demo of Magic Leap you'd probably be blown away. If you watch their simulated demo from however many years ago, then try on the headset you'll be sorely disappointed.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ7-F_vWUVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ7-F_vWUVE
  - daeken 6y ago
    > It's as good as anything else on the market. I've owned and extensively tested nearly every AR device that's been on the market in the last 10 years. I can conclusively say: the Magic Leap is garbage for anything more than short-term entertainment. Between the extremely dim visuals, the horrible rainbow effects on every bit of text you display, and the awful resolution, it's not just bad for anything other than games; it's nigh unusable. If I could go back and stop myself from spending the money on an ML1, I absolutely, without question would do so.
    - tootie 6y ago
      I've played with the ML and HoloLens and they are comparable. As someone who was raised on 8-bit games, it's mind-blowing. But really none of them are sharp enough to make you suspend disbelief that you're seeing something that isn't there. And I haven't seen any remotely compelling use case that would make them worth spending even $500 on. VR is much further ahead. Not quite mainstream, but it's got a real consumer niche and some really fun games and commercial uses.
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drewbeck 6y ago
Imo enterprise and military were always going to be the first successful applications for this tech. Smart money will stay in those lanes until the tech is mature.
alephnan 6y ago
> Citing COVID-19, CEO Rony Abovitz wrote in a blog post that the company needed to shift focus Right... because of Covid-19. As a counter example, Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch is doing phenomenal right now, in part due to Covid-19.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  Products consumers enjoy at home are getting a big bump, Startups relying utterly on the VC cash gravy train less so.
  - alephnan 6y ago
    My point is that the Magic Leap CEO made it seem like there is a lack of consumer demand for gaming / entertainment products, due to a lack of job / financial prospects during Covid-19.
    - JakeTheAndroid 6y ago
      While there is absolutely a consumer market for gaming and entertainment, Magic Leap has nothing to offer in that space. The apps store they offer is very limited and it's mostly tours of locations, or design tools for making stuff that works with the spacial dimensions. They do not have any real games to play that the public at large would find fun for more than an hour or so. Their apps are like PoCs for what you can do with Magic Leap. If FF7R was on Magic Leap, I bet they'd be selling a lot more units and it'd be a great time for them. Instead, you're better off getting the Oculus or Valves VR where you have tons of actual games to play and support for streaming apps. There is no way for Magic Leap to capitalize on the consumer purchasing right now, because they don't have a catalog that supports the hardware to any meaningful degree. And they can't suddenly churn those things out in the space of a month since we've been hit with quarantine.
  - ilikehurdles 6y ago
    I've heard that VCs are doubling down on their portfolios and avoiding new company investing. Maybe Magic Leap was just not looking all that great to its VCs and they'd rather focus their resources on companies that are more likely to come out of this pandemic as big winners.
j2bax 6y ago
Makes me think of the Theranos funding scam, but more money and less health risks.
adam_fallon_ 6y ago
I sort of always knew it was the job of VCs to hype up their portfolio, but i've never seen it as bare faced as when Benedict Evans was shilling Magic Leap saying things along the lines of "Magic Leap was the coolest thing I'd seen since the iPhone. It's now much cooler than that." and "I’ve had the Magic Leap demo. It was worth going to Florida for." Well that looks a bit silly now doesn't it.
- cmelbye 6y ago
  Magic Leap is really cool to use. That doesn't mean it's a feasible product for the mainstream.
  - vernie 6y ago
    Not with its playing-card-sized FOV it isn't
    - sqs 6y ago
      Counterpoint: I thought it was really, really cool when I tried it for a couple hours. I have no affiliation with Magic Leap. The Magic Leap unit I tried was a friend's (so it wasn't as though Magic Leap sent me a free unit to try out and therefore could have biased me).
    - _bxg1 6y ago
      I tried out a HoloLens at a rich friend's house and had a similar experience, despite it also having a small FOV. It blew my mind and instantly registered as a really big deal. But as another commenter here pointed out, the hardware isn't there yet, and when it arrives it will require a vibrant software ecosystem. The difference is that Microsoft seems to understand that.
    - cpitman 6y ago
      I tried it a couple years ago at PAX Unplugged, and that was exactly my reaction. I felt like I was putting a lot of attention into shifting around my direction to frame the AR, and searching for content, because I was looking through a pipe.
chadlavi 6y ago
Magic Leap is like the story of overhyped, over-priced tech vaporware investments in the 2010s all embodied in one company.
- fastball 6y ago
  Not Theranos?
- whoisjuan 6y ago
  The Magic Leap device at least worked and had a wow factor even though it didn't have a market fit. I prefer Juicero. That's really a prime example of overhyped and overpriced tech investments.
  - chadlavi 6y ago
    Cripes, I forgot about that crazy scam. Magic Leap is at least a tech product, though. And even though they had some actual device, the thing they marketed was complete fiction, they never brought the promise from that whale demo to market.
  - NonEUCitizen 6y ago
    Juicero actually worked. It just didn't work as well as using your bare hands.
- latenightcoding 6y ago
  Thalmic Labs too.
duxup 6y ago
The sheer volume of cash and talent thrown into something that hadn't yet found a market is sort of amazing / seemed like a huge amount of cart before the horse. It seems generally like they decided to do X, Y, Z but needed to invent A, B, C before they could get there, let alone know if anyone wanted X, Y, Z.....
- qppo 6y ago
  I don't want to doxx myself so I'm intentionally leaving out details, and you can take this comment as rumor and baseless. But based on the people I know (personally) who work there - there wasn't a lot of talent being thrown at the product. I think their organization is incapable of bringing a product to market, even if that market existed.
  - duxup 6y ago
    Maybe that was part of the issue. They had a large volume of guys like me, unremarkable folks... trying to do remarkable things. Not a good recipie talent wise.
    - qppo 6y ago
      To use startup lingo, they were a unicorn turning into a zombie because they never hired people who knew how to run their organizations as a cockroach. A lot of the people that I know who went there were basically fresh out of college or academia, because there was no one else in Florida and ML operated in stealth for way too long. That's not a bad thing (who among us hasn't been a fresh, doe eyed engineer at a startup?), but when you throw a couple billion dollars at them before they've learned how to build anything... might not work out.
spullara 6y ago
The problem for AR is that there are no killer apps that aren't deeply privacy invading. What people want is something that basically googles the world around you giving you all the relevant information it can find. We are very quickly going down the path to making that entire use case illegal, especially for people. Without that use case, I'm really not sure there is much outside of things like How To instructions.
tempsy 6y ago
So many startups seem to be blowing up right now. Amazing how fragile the whole ecosystem was.
- Analemma_ 6y ago
  "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
xwdv 6y ago
What a cowardly way to lay off a bunch of people. Waiting for a crisis that requires you to push people to work from home, then quietly fire them with a curt email and cite difficulties from COVID-19. The respectable way is to get them in person, look them dead in the eye and admit to the failures of the company and product vision, and then let them go, apologizing profusely for your incompetence.
the_hoser 6y ago
Ah, the death step of every failed VR/AR company. "Focus on enterprise customers" just means "draw out our demise for as long as possible in the hopes of drumming up some more VC before we file for bankruptcy." Hopefully someone competent buys them before that happens.
adamc 6y ago
For the ignorant amongst us (by which I mean me), what are the enterprise applications of Magic Leap?
- coder543 6y ago
  Applications of Magic Leap would likely be similar to the industrial applications of HoloLens 2. Some examples: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8c3pDKdHEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8c3pDKdHEc - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTuKcm8s4QQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTuKcm8s4QQ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loGxO3L7rFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loGxO3L7rFE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pyiiO72ZwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pyiiO72ZwM If you search on youtube for "hololens industrial", you can find other demos. When HoloLens 2 was announced, I think Microsoft showed a number of demos of why companies would buy it for their employees to use on the job.
angry_octet 6y ago
What a lost opportunity to pivot from the inachievable (cinematic fully immersive VR) to the desperately needed (face to face equivalent interactions and entertainment). Time for the board to find new management.
gregjw 6y ago
Doubling down on corporate uses of AR.
braythwayt 6y ago
A little perpendicular to the subject, but this kind of thing always brings my mind back to iPhone. Apple had AT LEAST four kicks at the can with mobile devices. They had the "Knowledge Navigator" vaporware in 1987, twenty years before iPhone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_navigator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_navigator They started working on realizing the KN concept in 1987, and shipped Newton in 1993, fourteen years before iPhone. Alas, the state of tech was not up to their ambition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton They shipped iPod in 2001, six years before iPhone. In conjunction with iMacs that could rip CDs, they had a massive hit! https://www.apple.com/ipod/ https://www.apple.com/ipod/ Then they shipped iPhone in 2007. The greatest hit in product history. What made it possible to have so many kicks at the can was, of course, having a successful(ish) business selling Macs. With VC funding, you strip all the legacy/cash cow business out of the equation. In exchange, you get tremendous financial leverage for founders, but you also have a very limited window in which to ship a hit.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > Apple had AT LEAST four kicks at the can with mobile devices. Another interesting Apple mobile device "kick": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Rokr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Rokr
  - braythwayt 6y ago
    Oh Gawd, I remember that. I believe that Apple never had any intention of making that successful, and were planning on backstabbing Motorola no matter how the Rokr turned out.
    - mikestew 6y ago
      "Planning"? Apple released the iPod Nano the same day the Rockr was announced. Mid-level candy bar phone with not much capacity to store said "tunes", or a cute little music player with 2-4 times what the Rockr would hold? The Rockr seemed to me to be one of those products that was only released because of inertia. Or released because Apple blind-sided Motorola with that announcement and, "well, the ad spend is already spent, so..."
nogabebop23 6y ago
"Because COVID" is a new generation's "Because 9-11" rationalization for otherwise indefensible behaviour.
gridlockd 6y ago
Proper move. Consumers care less about AR than even VR. For AR to be interesting, the reality needs to fit. That is possible in an amusement park where you can roam in an environment, but if you want to make a livingroom interesting, might as well cut out reality completely.
eagsalazar2 6y ago
This is approaching Theranos levels of sham and has already passed Juicero a long time ago.
mlazos 6y ago
This is the modus operandi of every startup. Consumer products look great and can really wow people until you realize all of the money is in enterprise. This is why enterprise is always the largest business segment of large software companies - corporations have way more money than individuals and will provide recurring revenue.
flyinglizard 6y ago
The product exists. Their intention was never to do vaporware or deceive anyone - Rony's a good hearted fellow - but they had too much money, so much that they thought they'd bend reality. Francis Ford Coppola famously said of producing Apocalypse Now: "We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane". This is really what Magic Leap felt like from the inside. So much money, so many famous people on board (and on the board), all these dreams of creating not new means of consuming content but all-new content and all-new use cases. Making this functional and beneficial to your everyday was not enough, Rony wanted a full on sci-fi universe right here and now. This company could snub reality for a long time and I'm honestly surprised it lived for this long. That said: 1. There absolutely exists a product and putting it on for the first time is a pretty exhilarating experience. Unfortunately Magic Leap failed to provide an convincing reason to put it on for the second and third time. 2. The company had very good talent. Unfortunately its management turned more awkward as you climbed the ranks - professional corporate survivors which needed to bridge reality between Rony's dreams for the next year and what's possible in the next 10 with their modest skillset. It was a bit of Hunger Games up top. 3. AR hardware startups need money, and lots of it. I estimate Magic Leap had about 50% overhead, meaning that given better management and direction - and a bit of hindsight no doubt - it could have been done with $1bn. It's still $1bn. 4. Consumer AR will come in a minimalistic form, such as Intel's deceased Project Vaunt (ironically enough, many of its Swiss optics team were brought on to Magic Leap following its termination in Intel). Minimal, stylish, useful - not something to wow you once over but to provide day in, day out value. An Apple watch rather than an Oculus. Source - I was there for few years, running some parts of their engineering. I don't regret a second of it.
npunt 6y ago
Magic Leap made one of the classic mistakes that other before-their-time products make: they tried to create a general purpose product because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts. When you're building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on fidelity, embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful processing, and compelling input methods. The real question in AR is what use cases can you hit without great fidelity? What sort of value can you unlock with a low-res postage stamp overlay and slow processor instead of full FOV? That's where the go-to market effort needs to be placed. A similar example of this overreach was in multifunction pen devices of the 90s (General Magic, Newton, EO Personal communicator). A great counter example is Apple Watch, which didn't chase the 'smartphone on your wrist' everything device, and instead picked a few key use cases, established a beachhead, and slowly added capabilities as the technology allowed. When a category-defining product has yet to emerge on the market, there are going to be a lot of people making predictable mistakes like this - mistiming ideas, scoping the wrong set of features, getting too excited about the wrong technologies, not leveraging their assets. If you're a product person interested in understanding more about these factors, I wrote an essay on the subject recently: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/ https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/
- didibus 6y ago
  I agree with you, but I also want to say it's often more complicated then this. Like, the Apple Watch example seems easy, but what happened to FitBit? FitBit went all in on your idea. Picked a single use case with a market, delivered on it. Yet Apple swooped in, took the market from them. Why is that? This is an open question, I don't claim to have the answer. It just seems that in this case, Apple was promising, as opposed to FitBit, that it would bring much more use cases to the user, a smartwatch on your wrist really, that seems like it was the messaging at least.
  - sh87 6y ago
    Also curious is the case of Pebble. Great product, priced right, small set of customers who swore by it, did one thing really really well. Now its dead.
zhoujianfu 6y ago
Two bad signs: 1. They were founded by a well-connected VC-type, in a hyped new industry. These companies always raise a lot of money (because of the connections and the hype) but rarely (never?) work out well. (See also 21.co for “blockchain”.) 2. A few years ago they contracted with my friend’s company to make some swag, it was a chromed 3D paperweight of their logo guy. I saw a prototype of it, and it was really nice and pretty cool. Then I heard magic leap had rejected it because they didn’t like some way the chrome plating came together at the point it was dipped or something? It was insane to me, that thing was pretty cool and totally professional, and I knew if that was emblematic of how they did business they were screwed..
peter303 6y ago
Niantic Pokeman Go is one of the few hits so far in AR.
aaron695 6y ago
Magic Leap <==> Theranos But I've said it for years, if I shorted it 2+ years ago I would have lost money! Not sure what that means. They are clearly pivoting off Covid-19 for more VC money, something I wouldn't have predicted last year. I guess if not Covid-19 it would be something else. How do you predict when they will fall off the end of the graph I guess is the question?
albertTJames 6y ago
Shame on them.
ineedasername 6y ago
> Citing COVID-19 That disease is going to get a whole lot of bad news laid at its feet. Basically if any company has anything bad they want to get off their chest, now is the time to do it.
blhack 6y ago
It was too expensive. That's why it failed. This doesn't seem that complicated. It was a really cool product. If it was $300 instead of $2300 I would have bought one.
danhhieu910 6y ago
couple of years ago when I first saw the Magic Leap, it's kind of magical to me, their tech is great and they advertised it to do big things to help the world (aquarium or 3d painting, I don't remember exactly what it was) Last year when re-visited their website and see their showcase with Spotify and NBA sport, I was very letdown. Why do I need VR app for Spotify? Why do they think it's importance to do something like that instead of make a bold product. So disappointed.
dopamean 6y ago
A little off topic and maybe a dumb question but why does a consumer products company that hasn't shipped a product yet and isn't selling anything have offices in 4 cities around the world? Like what are Magic Leap employees doing in New Zealand when HQ is in Florida?
fnord77 6y ago
To me the styling of their product looks like it is out of the 1990s (even though nothing like this existed in the 90s). I don't know what it is about it
blackrock 6y ago
Why not just have a VR, with a pair of cameras on it? Ensure that the frame rate is capable of 120 frames/second, or whatever value will make it comfortable for humans to see in real time. Then, overlay the digital artifacts on top of it. And skip frames, if you can’t compute the objects fast enough to match the frame rate. This way, you can put on the VR goggles, and still be able to walk around in the real world, without tripping and falling down. The AR stuff seemed way too complicated.
habosa 6y ago
Has any company ever raised more VC money and then produced so little? This has to be up there with Theranos, not sure if there are other contenders. Magic Leap is one of those companies where it seems like everyone (in tech) was rooting against them. Too confident, too much money, too little to show. The only people I ever heard defending them were people who were financially invested in them or in AR as a whole.

537 points by _pius 6y ago

This is such a weird company. They created big buzz over years and it seems they are just fading away quietly with nothing to show for the money they took in. Reminds me a little of Theranos (although not as criminal). Why do these investors keep pumping so much money into a company that has nothing to show? I thought they do due diligence.

abhisuri97 6y ago
It's just about taking a bet. I'm sure that magic leap must have had some demo (perhaps rehearsed) of a rudimentary alpha version they showed investors that was enough to convince people it was possible. From an investor standpoint, there isn't much downside outside of losing money. But the potential upside would have been huge.
gamegoblin 6y ago
I assume they must have had a killer demo. 1. Put the goggles on some investor's head (in a normal looking room, but with known lighting and spatial properties...). 2. Show them some flashy demo that has some limitations, but promise that with their investment, they will be able to remove those limitations. 3. Investors, who probably lack the deep knowledge of optics to know that those limitations aren't so trivial, throw money at them. Because if those limitations (e.g. FOV, opacity) were removed, it would be world-changing tech.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  Reminds me of Silicon Valley's fictional Keenan Feldspar and his VR demo (likely based on Magic Leap): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8MAV9jhf04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8MAV9jhf04
  - creato 6y ago
    Surely that was their take on Palmer Luckey and Oculus?
    - jagannathtech 6y ago
      Didn't seem Palmer had any reality distortion field.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  Now with COVID-19, they really DO have a killer demo: 1. Put the goggles on some investor's head. 2. Investor catches COVID-19 and dies. Nobody wants to share VR or AR gear any more. The whole idea of location based VR / AR entertainment centers is deadly now. If it's so great you can't believe it without trying it yourself, and nobody wants to stick their head in a device that anybody else has been drooling and coughing and vomiting in, it doesn't matter how great it is, nobody's going to try it.
  - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    > Nobody wants to share VR or AR gear any more. The whole idea of location based VR / AR entertainment centers is deadly now. There's a price range where I could see buying one to be shared by everyone in my house, but not one for each individual. For example, Valve Index is in that category for me.
  - core-questions 6y ago
    Don't be such a wuss. None of that is something a little Lysol can't fix, and these places should have always been using such (though I imagine they don't).
    - VRay 6y ago
      You can disinfect your electronics with rubbing alcohol and/or removable covers, but don't put Lysol or other harsh cleaning agents on them
      - catalogia 6y ago
        > Don't put lysol [on electronics] Why shouldn't I? The exterior surfaces of "electronics" are just glass, plastic or aluminum and lysol seems to work fine on all three. It's sold in plastic bottles so it's not like it'd create nerve gas or something. Not that I generally take marketing claims seriously, but lysol advertises itself as appropriate for use on electronics: https://www.lysol.com/cold-flu/home/how-to-clean-electronics-in-your-home/ https://www.lysol.com/cold-flu/home/how-to-clean-electronics... If there were any real danger, I expect their lawyers might not let them do that.
- mattw815 6y ago
  I've had the opportunity to demo their product on 3 different occasions. Each time it was a clunky interaction, stopped working in the middle of the demo, and I left thinking my kid's Playstation VR could run circles around their tech.
  - qppo 6y ago
    they allegedly had an insane demo for investors only, before around 2016 (at least that's when I heard of it) you needed to sign an NDA to even get in the room to see it. The consumer product is quite lacking compared to what people said was a demonstration of game changing technology.
    - raverbashing 6y ago
      So: NDA, exclusive demo, controlled environment. It makes it sound to me more like a Séance (with its usual implications) than anything else. Or, for an easier to understand analogy, selling a Disney ride as if it was real.
filoleg 6y ago
I am not sure if financials really work out the way i assume, so i could totally be talking out of my ass here. But i have a feeling it could work as a really nice money laundering vehicle for investors (even though i dont think it was fully the case here), and the company doesn’t even need to be aware of it. You make X in dirty money, then invest it into a cool sounding company promising groundbreaking stuff that has a bunch of big known investors on board already. If the company does well, you take the clean money out with a nice profit on top. If it doesn’t work out, hopefully you pulled out at a level where you lost some money but not much. And it still returns you clean money at the end, so the goal is accomplished. Typically, this kind of money laundering is done through retail businesses like restaurants and such, but it is way easier to just drop those money as an investment into another company, rather than maintaining your own retail business. Plus, the amount of money you could launder by investing is way higher, since it isnt as suspicious to drop a few hundred millions on a startup investment, as opposed to claiming that your small restaurant that is almost always empty is bringing you tens of millions per year.
- aero142 6y ago
  Is there some exception to money laundering rules I'm not aware of where the government doesn't investigate the source of cash if it is invested in a company from overseas?
  - filoleg 6y ago
    Oh, if it is a foreign power, they arent laundering it to prevent the US government from discovering the source, they are doing it to prevent discovering the source from their own governments. Because those foreign actors wouldn’t be running away from taxes from the US, since those money were never in the US in the first place. Also curious on how it would work. If a rich foreign national decides to invest into a random startup, i dont think US has the ability to look into where the money came from, unless that foreign national claims to have made those money in the US. Again, could totally be wrong here, so please someone correct me if that’s the case.
    - 6y ago
ssully 6y ago
I feel like I have heard rumors about amazing closed door tech demos for Magic Leap for years now, so I always assumed that's how they got so much money. The question then is did they just have a really good pitch/canned demo, or do a good job of stirring up rumors and riding off that.
lgleason 6y ago
One of the early seed investors is close friends with the founders of Google. Needless to say it wasn't surprising when Google funneled a bunch of cash into it. After that, I'm sure it made it easier to get others to follow suit.
gkoberger 6y ago
It's easy to say in hindsight, but investors were taking a bet based on the little bits of promising information they had a decade ago. Both sides knew the risks, and that's the whole point – VCs and the company both believed they could make something happen, and it seems they weren't able to, and that's just how this works.
- bsanr2 6y ago
  This is it. Everyone knew that it was a hedge to get in on the ground floor in case the technology blew up faster than anyone could predict. Nobody wants to be the person who missed out on the next Google or Facebook, especially Google or Facebook.
kick 6y ago
Palmer Luckey (Oculus founder) has repeatedly dragged them for cheating on their demos. Given how much faith some investors have had in them, I imagine that's what happened there, too, at least for the first batches.
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netcan 6y ago
In some sense, if these things didn't ever happen then it would be a sign that VC is broken. They're not supposed to be investing in sure things.
Alex3917 6y ago
> Reminds me a little of Theranos (although not as criminal). More like Dean Kamen's launch of "Ginger" in 2001.
- swebs 6y ago
  The Segway actually launched and sold and delivered on its technical promises. The problem was that most people didn't want to spend $3000 on one.
  - Ididntdothis 6y ago
    And it’s really not very useful.
alephnan 6y ago
From the article: > Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. So maybe similar reasons to WeWork.
throwaway55554 6y ago
> ... with nothing to show for the money they took in They made some Incredibles 2 style goggles.

slg 6y ago

Does this officially place the Magic Leap's consumer device on the list of the biggest vaporware products in the history of the tech industry? I don't know whether there was some tech hurdle they could never get over or if they were just straight up selling a fantasy from the beginning, but this result has seemed to be the likely destination for years.

geerlingguy 6y ago
There's something about using the word 'Magic' in your company's name [1]; great concept, likely amazing people, but in the end either vaporware or something that's way too ahead of its time. Maybe the 'Magic' is how they are able to get so much funding and attention for so little end result. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic
- Andrex 6y ago
  Some names are just too perfect. Starcraft Ghost The Phantom (games console) Duke Nukem Forever (though it eventually did come out)
  - iaw 6y ago
    > Duke Nukem Forever (though it eventually did come out) Duke Nukem (took) Forever
  - ModernMech 6y ago
    My favorite was the Guns and Roses album "Chinese Democracy" which took like a decade to release. They used to say democracy would come to China before the album would.
- soneca 6y ago
  I remember a small delivery startup called "Magic" too that had quite an impact here in HN, then I never heard about it again. Edit: Here it is the HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819 They are still around though https://www.getmagic.com https://www.getmagic.com

TheSoftwareGuy 6y ago

Jesus Christ. I personally know two people that started working there right around when the lockdowns were starting to get put in place. They've probably been there less than a month.

dragosmocrii 6y ago
Happened to me to with a company within my trial period. It's amazing how many things you can learn about a company in times of difficulty, in my case leaving the company was happening with or without the layoff.. I hope your friend can find a replacement soon.
SSchick 6y ago
Yup, friend of mine started working there about 2 months ago. He was meant to move to work at their offices but then corona happened, now he has to deal with half his team being purged while working remotely and let's not talk about his morale right now.
albertTJames 6y ago
I find it shameful that a well funded company would do such a thing in a time of crisis. They're not in the tourism industry. It is sickening.

xiaolingxiao 6y ago

They're exploring a sale valued at $10B, but it's doubtful who would have the appetite to buy it at this valuation. Google declined a follow on round recently, Apple has been developing their own tech for years, and Facebook has quietly stepped away from AR/VR. Magic Leap is reminiscent of another company with "Magic" in its name: General Magic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic). They both made a product that evangelize the form factor in the public's (or some subset of it) eye, but alas is way ahead of its time in terms of tech, and content. It's easy to hate on Magic Leap and its self aggrandizing marketing. Although I personally never bought into the hype of Magic Leap in particular, they did inspire a whole generation of developers in a way that hasn't been done since the release of the original iPhone.

cbsks 6y ago
> Facebook has quietly stepped away from AR/VR Has Facebook de-prioritized Oculus? I haven't heard any news, but I'm also not following it closely.
- Kiro 6y ago
  Not at all. xiaolingxiao is simply wrong or didn't know Oculus is Facebook.
devindotcom 6y ago
They did? I'm not a developer myself so I may have missed out on this, but I never sensed any enthusiasm about the platform. ARKit certainly brought a few people into that world, but I've never felt that Magic Leap inspired anything but skepticism practically since launch.
strangeloops85 6y ago
Not sure if Facebook is stepping away from AR/VR. Oculus/ Facebook reality labs is still hiring plenty of folks in the optics/ photonics world.. even making announcements over the last week on open positions.
- 6y ago

lostgame 6y ago

This is unfortunately not a surprise. Magic Leap is now an example of why companies should ‘under promise and over deliver’. I don’t think the product could’ve ever lived up to the hype train.

xenospn 6y ago

Will VR/AR join 3D TV in the consumer tech hall of shame?

modeless 6y ago
VR is doing fine in gaming. The headsets are sold out everywhere and there are a lot of great games available. It won't overtake 2D gaming anytime soon but there's a healthy market.
- monkeydust 6y ago
  Think VR has business applications. Training for example for manual, complex work. Data analysis possibly (exploring this at work).

nprz 6y ago

Are there other companies making progress in the augmented reality space? I've tried the Hololens v1 and was completely underwhelmed. The field of view is far too small and not impressive or immersive at all. Is the v2 much better? When will we get what Magic Leap was initially promising?

filoleg 6y ago
Hololens V2 is still not average-consumer-ready, but it is leaps and bounds closer to it than v1. I tried both myself, and the biggest improvements in v2, in my opinion, are: * Field of view. That’s the biggest one, as it felt like just a staring into a small rectangle with v1. With v2, I was actually able to read a NYT article in a web browser rather comfortably, moving the web browser around the room and such, with no significant field of view limitations felt. The limitations are still there, but you rarely ever hit them, while with v1 it was more like “almost the whole time you are using the device”. And it felt really annoying. * UI/UX. Everything is much more intuitive and smooth to operate. After the initial 5-10 mins, i didnt feel any jankiness and was able to perform all operations with no struggle. Also, v2 works without that annoying clicker/pointer device (that was pretty much a must for v1) rather well, just by tracking hands. And i would say it is even more precise without that device than v1 was WITH the device. * Ergonomics. The headset is lighter, feels more comfortable, doesn’t require as much fiddling around to get it sit well on your head. The flip up/down visor is such a great quality of life improvement, I am baffled that current consumer VR devices like Oculus or Vive haven’t implemented it. Especially since it would provide way more utility for VR than AR, because VR completely blocks out the real world.
istorical 6y ago
As with all VR/AR products, we feel like we're on the verge of something great within the next 1-2 years and something revolutionary within the next 3-5, but at least now there's Focals https://www.bynorth.com/ https://www.bynorth.com/ and Apple's expected product (hiring posts, acquisitions, and leaks point to a large team at work on something) as well as the Hololens team still iterating, and to me the most interesting stuff is actual software applications. FB/Oculus showed some interesting stuff in their last conference: Work on 'social teleportation' aka scanning the environment and bringing it into mixed reality / VR in order to 'call' someone in mixed reality and teleport to their living room and sit with them in 3D space, better and better face-scanning tech to create digital reproductions of your face with facial expressions mirrored to avatars: https://youtu.be/ybhYJ87U2Gs?t=523 https://youtu.be/ybhYJ87U2Gs?t=523 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbRvARuCoRU&ab_channel=Oculus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbRvARuCoRU&ab_channel=Oculu...

trollied 6y ago

Wow, they burned billions. Karl Guttag has blogged about them for years, debunking their technology. Hi blog is a good read for all things in the AR/VR space https://www.kguttag.com/ https://www.kguttag.com/

tootie 6y ago
Their tech is actually pretty decent. It's as good as anything else on the market. Their biggest mistake has been setting sky high expectations and just not coming close. If you got a cold demo of Magic Leap you'd probably be blown away. If you watch their simulated demo from however many years ago, then try on the headset you'll be sorely disappointed.
- fastball 6y ago
  Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ7-F_vWUVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ7-F_vWUVE
- daeken 6y ago
  > It's as good as anything else on the market. I've owned and extensively tested nearly every AR device that's been on the market in the last 10 years. I can conclusively say: the Magic Leap is garbage for anything more than short-term entertainment. Between the extremely dim visuals, the horrible rainbow effects on every bit of text you display, and the awful resolution, it's not just bad for anything other than games; it's nigh unusable. If I could go back and stop myself from spending the money on an ML1, I absolutely, without question would do so.
  - tootie 6y ago
    I've played with the ML and HoloLens and they are comparable. As someone who was raised on 8-bit games, it's mind-blowing. But really none of them are sharp enough to make you suspend disbelief that you're seeing something that isn't there. And I haven't seen any remotely compelling use case that would make them worth spending even $500 on. VR is much further ahead. Not quite mainstream, but it's got a real consumer niche and some really fun games and commercial uses.

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drewbeck 6y ago

Imo enterprise and military were always going to be the first successful applications for this tech. Smart money will stay in those lanes until the tech is mature.

alephnan 6y ago

> Citing COVID-19, CEO Rony Abovitz wrote in a blog post that the company needed to shift focus Right... because of Covid-19. As a counter example, Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch is doing phenomenal right now, in part due to Covid-19.

throwaway2048 6y ago
Products consumers enjoy at home are getting a big bump, Startups relying utterly on the VC cash gravy train less so.
- alephnan 6y ago
  My point is that the Magic Leap CEO made it seem like there is a lack of consumer demand for gaming / entertainment products, due to a lack of job / financial prospects during Covid-19.
  - JakeTheAndroid 6y ago
    While there is absolutely a consumer market for gaming and entertainment, Magic Leap has nothing to offer in that space. The apps store they offer is very limited and it's mostly tours of locations, or design tools for making stuff that works with the spacial dimensions. They do not have any real games to play that the public at large would find fun for more than an hour or so. Their apps are like PoCs for what you can do with Magic Leap. If FF7R was on Magic Leap, I bet they'd be selling a lot more units and it'd be a great time for them. Instead, you're better off getting the Oculus or Valves VR where you have tons of actual games to play and support for streaming apps. There is no way for Magic Leap to capitalize on the consumer purchasing right now, because they don't have a catalog that supports the hardware to any meaningful degree. And they can't suddenly churn those things out in the space of a month since we've been hit with quarantine.
- ilikehurdles 6y ago
  I've heard that VCs are doubling down on their portfolios and avoiding new company investing. Maybe Magic Leap was just not looking all that great to its VCs and they'd rather focus their resources on companies that are more likely to come out of this pandemic as big winners.

j2bax 6y ago

Makes me think of the Theranos funding scam, but more money and less health risks.

adam_fallon_ 6y ago

I sort of always knew it was the job of VCs to hype up their portfolio, but i've never seen it as bare faced as when Benedict Evans was shilling Magic Leap saying things along the lines of "Magic Leap was the coolest thing I'd seen since the iPhone. It's now much cooler than that." and "I’ve had the Magic Leap demo. It was worth going to Florida for." Well that looks a bit silly now doesn't it.

cmelbye 6y ago
Magic Leap is really cool to use. That doesn't mean it's a feasible product for the mainstream.
- vernie 6y ago
  Not with its playing-card-sized FOV it isn't
  - sqs 6y ago
    Counterpoint: I thought it was really, really cool when I tried it for a couple hours. I have no affiliation with Magic Leap. The Magic Leap unit I tried was a friend's (so it wasn't as though Magic Leap sent me a free unit to try out and therefore could have biased me).
  - _bxg1 6y ago
    I tried out a HoloLens at a rich friend's house and had a similar experience, despite it also having a small FOV. It blew my mind and instantly registered as a really big deal. But as another commenter here pointed out, the hardware isn't there yet, and when it arrives it will require a vibrant software ecosystem. The difference is that Microsoft seems to understand that.
  - cpitman 6y ago
    I tried it a couple years ago at PAX Unplugged, and that was exactly my reaction. I felt like I was putting a lot of attention into shifting around my direction to frame the AR, and searching for content, because I was looking through a pipe.

chadlavi 6y ago

Magic Leap is like the story of overhyped, over-priced tech vaporware investments in the 2010s all embodied in one company.

fastball 6y ago
Not Theranos?
whoisjuan 6y ago
The Magic Leap device at least worked and had a wow factor even though it didn't have a market fit. I prefer Juicero. That's really a prime example of overhyped and overpriced tech investments.
- chadlavi 6y ago
  Cripes, I forgot about that crazy scam. Magic Leap is at least a tech product, though. And even though they had some actual device, the thing they marketed was complete fiction, they never brought the promise from that whale demo to market.
- NonEUCitizen 6y ago
  Juicero actually worked. It just didn't work as well as using your bare hands.
latenightcoding 6y ago
Thalmic Labs too.

duxup 6y ago

The sheer volume of cash and talent thrown into something that hadn't yet found a market is sort of amazing / seemed like a huge amount of cart before the horse. It seems generally like they decided to do X, Y, Z but needed to invent A, B, C before they could get there, let alone know if anyone wanted X, Y, Z.....

qppo 6y ago
I don't want to doxx myself so I'm intentionally leaving out details, and you can take this comment as rumor and baseless. But based on the people I know (personally) who work there - there wasn't a lot of talent being thrown at the product. I think their organization is incapable of bringing a product to market, even if that market existed.
- duxup 6y ago
  Maybe that was part of the issue. They had a large volume of guys like me, unremarkable folks... trying to do remarkable things. Not a good recipie talent wise.
  - qppo 6y ago
    To use startup lingo, they were a unicorn turning into a zombie because they never hired people who knew how to run their organizations as a cockroach. A lot of the people that I know who went there were basically fresh out of college or academia, because there was no one else in Florida and ML operated in stealth for way too long. That's not a bad thing (who among us hasn't been a fresh, doe eyed engineer at a startup?), but when you throw a couple billion dollars at them before they've learned how to build anything... might not work out.

spullara 6y ago

The problem for AR is that there are no killer apps that aren't deeply privacy invading. What people want is something that basically googles the world around you giving you all the relevant information it can find. We are very quickly going down the path to making that entire use case illegal, especially for people. Without that use case, I'm really not sure there is much outside of things like How To instructions.

tempsy 6y ago

So many startups seem to be blowing up right now. Amazing how fragile the whole ecosystem was.

Analemma_ 6y ago
"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."
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xwdv 6y ago

What a cowardly way to lay off a bunch of people. Waiting for a crisis that requires you to push people to work from home, then quietly fire them with a curt email and cite difficulties from COVID-19. The respectable way is to get them in person, look them dead in the eye and admit to the failures of the company and product vision, and then let them go, apologizing profusely for your incompetence.

the_hoser 6y ago

Ah, the death step of every failed VR/AR company. "Focus on enterprise customers" just means "draw out our demise for as long as possible in the hopes of drumming up some more VC before we file for bankruptcy." Hopefully someone competent buys them before that happens.

adamc 6y ago

For the ignorant amongst us (by which I mean me), what are the enterprise applications of Magic Leap?

coder543 6y ago
Applications of Magic Leap would likely be similar to the industrial applications of HoloLens 2. Some examples: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8c3pDKdHEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8c3pDKdHEc - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTuKcm8s4QQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTuKcm8s4QQ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loGxO3L7rFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loGxO3L7rFE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pyiiO72ZwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pyiiO72ZwM If you search on youtube for "hololens industrial", you can find other demos. When HoloLens 2 was announced, I think Microsoft showed a number of demos of why companies would buy it for their employees to use on the job.

angry_octet 6y ago

What a lost opportunity to pivot from the inachievable (cinematic fully immersive VR) to the desperately needed (face to face equivalent interactions and entertainment). Time for the board to find new management.

gregjw 6y ago

Doubling down on corporate uses of AR.

braythwayt 6y ago

A little perpendicular to the subject, but this kind of thing always brings my mind back to iPhone. Apple had AT LEAST four kicks at the can with mobile devices. They had the "Knowledge Navigator" vaporware in 1987, twenty years before iPhone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_navigator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_navigator They started working on realizing the KN concept in 1987, and shipped Newton in 1993, fourteen years before iPhone. Alas, the state of tech was not up to their ambition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton They shipped iPod in 2001, six years before iPhone. In conjunction with iMacs that could rip CDs, they had a massive hit! https://www.apple.com/ipod/ https://www.apple.com/ipod/ Then they shipped iPhone in 2007. The greatest hit in product history. What made it possible to have so many kicks at the can was, of course, having a successful(ish) business selling Macs. With VC funding, you strip all the legacy/cash cow business out of the equation. In exchange, you get tremendous financial leverage for founders, but you also have a very limited window in which to ship a hit.

CharlesW 6y ago
> Apple had AT LEAST four kicks at the can with mobile devices. Another interesting Apple mobile device "kick": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Rokr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Rokr
- braythwayt 6y ago
  Oh Gawd, I remember that. I believe that Apple never had any intention of making that successful, and were planning on backstabbing Motorola no matter how the Rokr turned out.
  - mikestew 6y ago
    "Planning"? Apple released the iPod Nano the same day the Rockr was announced. Mid-level candy bar phone with not much capacity to store said "tunes", or a cute little music player with 2-4 times what the Rockr would hold? The Rockr seemed to me to be one of those products that was only released because of inertia. Or released because Apple blind-sided Motorola with that announcement and, "well, the ad spend is already spent, so..."

nogabebop23 6y ago

"Because COVID" is a new generation's "Because 9-11" rationalization for otherwise indefensible behaviour.

gridlockd 6y ago

Proper move. Consumers care less about AR than even VR. For AR to be interesting, the reality needs to fit. That is possible in an amusement park where you can roam in an environment, but if you want to make a livingroom interesting, might as well cut out reality completely.

eagsalazar2 6y ago

This is approaching Theranos levels of sham and has already passed Juicero a long time ago.

mlazos 6y ago

This is the modus operandi of every startup. Consumer products look great and can really wow people until you realize all of the money is in enterprise. This is why enterprise is always the largest business segment of large software companies - corporations have way more money than individuals and will provide recurring revenue.

flyinglizard 6y ago

The product exists. Their intention was never to do vaporware or deceive anyone - Rony's a good hearted fellow - but they had too much money, so much that they thought they'd bend reality. Francis Ford Coppola famously said of producing Apocalypse Now: "We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane". This is really what Magic Leap felt like from the inside. So much money, so many famous people on board (and on the board), all these dreams of creating not new means of consuming content but all-new content and all-new use cases. Making this functional and beneficial to your everyday was not enough, Rony wanted a full on sci-fi universe right here and now. This company could snub reality for a long time and I'm honestly surprised it lived for this long. That said: 1. There absolutely exists a product and putting it on for the first time is a pretty exhilarating experience. Unfortunately Magic Leap failed to provide an convincing reason to put it on for the second and third time. 2. The company had very good talent. Unfortunately its management turned more awkward as you climbed the ranks - professional corporate survivors which needed to bridge reality between Rony's dreams for the next year and what's possible in the next 10 with their modest skillset. It was a bit of Hunger Games up top. 3. AR hardware startups need money, and lots of it. I estimate Magic Leap had about 50% overhead, meaning that given better management and direction - and a bit of hindsight no doubt - it could have been done with $1bn. It's still $1bn. 4. Consumer AR will come in a minimalistic form, such as Intel's deceased Project Vaunt (ironically enough, many of its Swiss optics team were brought on to Magic Leap following its termination in Intel). Minimal, stylish, useful - not something to wow you once over but to provide day in, day out value. An Apple watch rather than an Oculus. Source - I was there for few years, running some parts of their engineering. I don't regret a second of it.

npunt 6y ago

Magic Leap made one of the classic mistakes that other before-their-time products make: they tried to create a general purpose product because they didn't have a killer app that could focus their efforts. When you're building a product without a focused use case, you are pulled in a ton of different directions. In AR, this means focusing on fidelity, embodied in high resolution, wide field of view visuals, powerful processing, and compelling input methods. The real question in AR is what use cases can you hit without great fidelity? What sort of value can you unlock with a low-res postage stamp overlay and slow processor instead of full FOV? That's where the go-to market effort needs to be placed. A similar example of this overreach was in multifunction pen devices of the 90s (General Magic, Newton, EO Personal communicator). A great counter example is Apple Watch, which didn't chase the 'smartphone on your wrist' everything device, and instead picked a few key use cases, established a beachhead, and slowly added capabilities as the technology allowed. When a category-defining product has yet to emerge on the market, there are going to be a lot of people making predictable mistakes like this - mistiming ideas, scoping the wrong set of features, getting too excited about the wrong technologies, not leveraging their assets. If you're a product person interested in understanding more about these factors, I wrote an essay on the subject recently: https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/ https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/

didibus 6y ago
I agree with you, but I also want to say it's often more complicated then this. Like, the Apple Watch example seems easy, but what happened to FitBit? FitBit went all in on your idea. Picked a single use case with a market, delivered on it. Yet Apple swooped in, took the market from them. Why is that? This is an open question, I don't claim to have the answer. It just seems that in this case, Apple was promising, as opposed to FitBit, that it would bring much more use cases to the user, a smartwatch on your wrist really, that seems like it was the messaging at least.
- sh87 6y ago
  Also curious is the case of Pebble. Great product, priced right, small set of customers who swore by it, did one thing really really well. Now its dead.

zhoujianfu 6y ago

Two bad signs: 1. They were founded by a well-connected VC-type, in a hyped new industry. These companies always raise a lot of money (because of the connections and the hype) but rarely (never?) work out well. (See also 21.co for “blockchain”.) 2. A few years ago they contracted with my friend’s company to make some swag, it was a chromed 3D paperweight of their logo guy. I saw a prototype of it, and it was really nice and pretty cool. Then I heard magic leap had rejected it because they didn’t like some way the chrome plating came together at the point it was dipped or something? It was insane to me, that thing was pretty cool and totally professional, and I knew if that was emblematic of how they did business they were screwed..

peter303 6y ago

Niantic Pokeman Go is one of the few hits so far in AR.

aaron695 6y ago

Magic Leap <==> Theranos But I've said it for years, if I shorted it 2+ years ago I would have lost money! Not sure what that means. They are clearly pivoting off Covid-19 for more VC money, something I wouldn't have predicted last year. I guess if not Covid-19 it would be something else. How do you predict when they will fall off the end of the graph I guess is the question?

albertTJames 6y ago

Shame on them.

ineedasername 6y ago

> Citing COVID-19 That disease is going to get a whole lot of bad news laid at its feet. Basically if any company has anything bad they want to get off their chest, now is the time to do it.

blhack 6y ago

It was too expensive. That's why it failed. This doesn't seem that complicated. It was a really cool product. If it was $300 instead of $2300 I would have bought one.

danhhieu910 6y ago

couple of years ago when I first saw the Magic Leap, it's kind of magical to me, their tech is great and they advertised it to do big things to help the world (aquarium or 3d painting, I don't remember exactly what it was) Last year when re-visited their website and see their showcase with Spotify and NBA sport, I was very letdown. Why do I need VR app for Spotify? Why do they think it's importance to do something like that instead of make a bold product. So disappointed.

dopamean 6y ago

A little off topic and maybe a dumb question but why does a consumer products company that hasn't shipped a product yet and isn't selling anything have offices in 4 cities around the world? Like what are Magic Leap employees doing in New Zealand when HQ is in Florida?

fnord77 6y ago

To me the styling of their product looks like it is out of the 1990s (even though nothing like this existed in the 90s). I don't know what it is about it

blackrock 6y ago

Why not just have a VR, with a pair of cameras on it? Ensure that the frame rate is capable of 120 frames/second, or whatever value will make it comfortable for humans to see in real time. Then, overlay the digital artifacts on top of it. And skip frames, if you can’t compute the objects fast enough to match the frame rate. This way, you can put on the VR goggles, and still be able to walk around in the real world, without tripping and falling down. The AR stuff seemed way too complicated.

habosa 6y ago

Has any company ever raised more VC money and then produced so little? This has to be up there with Theranos, not sure if there are other contenders. Magic Leap is one of those companies where it seems like everyone (in tech) was rooting against them. Too confident, too much money, too little to show. The only people I ever heard defending them were people who were financially invested in them or in AR as a whole.