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The Secretive $4.5 Billion Startup 'Magic Leap' Is Gearing Up To Release A Consumer Version of Its Tech (forbes.com)
Magic Leap is an incredibly secretive company based in Florida that develops "mixed reality" technology. While the company was valued at $4.5 billion in its latest round of financing, Magic Leap has never released a product. "It has never given a public demonstration of a product, never announced a product, and never explained the proprietary 'lightfield' technology that powers its products," writes David M. Ewalt for Forbes. That may be about to change, however, as the CEO Rony Abovitz said in a rare interview that the company has spent a billion dollars perfecting a prototype and has begun constructing manufacturing lines in Florida (Editor's note: may be paywalled, alternate source), gearing up for a release of a consumer version of its technology. "We are building a new kind of contextual computer," Abovitz says. "We're doing something really, really different." The final product of theirs is expected to fit into a pair of glasses when everything is said and done. "When you're wearing the device, it doesn't block your view of the world; the hardware projects an image directly onto your retina through an optics system built into a piece of semitransparent glass (the product won't fry your eyeballs; it's replicating the way we naturally observe the world instead of forcing you to stare at a screen)." Forbes adds: The hardware also constantly gathers information, scanning the room for obstacles, listening for voices, tracking eye movements and watching hands. As a result, mixed-reality objects are aware of their environment and have the ability to interact with the real world. On Magic Leap's hardware a Pokemon might escape capture by ducking behind your couch or, assuming you live in a "smart" home, turning off your lights and hiding in the dark. In one of its demos the Magic Leap team shows off a computer-generated "virtual interactive human," life-size and surprisingly realistic. Abovitz and his team imagine virtual people (or animals or anything else) as digital assistants -- think Siri on steroids, except with a physical presence that makes her easier to work with and harder to ignore. Ask your virtual assistant to deliver a message to a coworker and it might walk out of your office, reappear beside your colleague's desk via his or her own MR headset and deliver the message in person. Ewalt goes on to write about Abovitz's life growing up and the past companies he has founded, which have ultimately helped lead him to Magic Leap.
or the USA Presidential Election.
And it failed because no one wanted to spend $999 on a pair of glasses that spy on you constantly and could be easily hacked and reveal all kinds of sensitive data (credit card numbers, etc.)
Amazingly, Magic Leap is actually listed on his site under "Other Works" ... Apparently, Neal is their Chief Futurist
http://www.nealstephenson.com/magic-leap.html
mrt
On Magic Leap's hardware a Pokemon might escape capture by ducking behind your couch or, assuming you live in a "smart" home, turning off your lights and hiding in the dark.
It's all fun and games until someone dies from falling down the stairs in the dark because a pokemon switched off their internet-vulnerable lights.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
What the fuck systemd? You just decided you needed to clean up my /tmp file system for me? Well fuck you. /tmp
stuoid systemd deleting my files from
fuck you
It deleted your porn, too. Only the furry stuff.
Last time a heard a story like this we got the Segway.
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Curious that you'd think of Snow Crash ahead of Virtual Light. Although I guess the VL tech skipped the photons and went straight for the optic nerve.
Forture Magazine is more and more running articles originally authored by PR agencies under the guise of an "original" "investigative" article signed off by one of their own writers/editors. This whole article looks and smells a lot to me like the hype buildup for the Segway device - and how well did that all go?
It was a pretty good article. Well written and didn't sound like total hypus pocus.
There are only two reasons to keep a product secret while still talking about it:
1 can't be true since they explained what to expect from the product in this very article. Thus, it must be 2.
The hype machine on this reminds me of Dean Kaman's hype for the project Ginger that turned out to be the segway. It was a remarkable achievement that fell flat like a thud. One could see how they might have imagined greatness for it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
And it's not Ross perot. No that's the sound the 4.5billion dollars of magical wealth transfer makes when the investors discover they have just fleeced.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I haven't seen anything from this company that gives me confidence that this is a real product. Nothing that they've shown -- some of which has been produced by Weta Works, or nothing their marketeers, engineers, etc. have said. It all came off as incohesive bullshit.
If they can really pull of what their fake-videos have shown, I will gladly buy their product. But until they show something( anything ) that's not just another produced-video, this stinks of a scam.
The initial video demo for Magic Leap looked very impressive, but it was just a concept video and was quite misleading. The problem is that the video shows various virtual objects that are darker than the background, e.g. The dark red robot against the cream wall at 49 seconds in.
Unlike the composited lies of the initial video, all their subsequent videos are shot through their device and it is abundantly clear that they are using an additive light technology (much like you would get from bouncing an image off a piece of glass at 45 degrees). The first thing you notice is that all of the videos shot through the device are in rather dark rooms, some very dark indeed. If you look at this shopping demo you will see that the eyes of the weird yellow lamp creature are meant to be black, but the grey background shows through them. This is a limitation of additive light.
Now people who have used the device say they were blown away and I'm quite sure that if I saw their Star Wars demo in a conveniently darked room, I would also be amazed. The problem is that people who have experienced the device in darkened rooms might come away with the impression that it can show dark objects, or rather, realistically lit objects, in a normal well-lit environment. In an outdoor environment, or even a well-lit room, the objects could look very washed-out, or at the very least, very bright, glowy and unnatural. If you just want to shoot glowing space aliens or read some glowy text, that isn't an issue. However, if people are expecting to see realistic naturally lit objects that actually look like they belong in your current environment, I think they may be sorely disappointed. The additive light limitations could also be a big problem for shopping applications. After all, it's a bit difficult to see how that dark green couch is going to look in your lounge if the wall behind it just shows through. Google's project tango has the advantage there since it can just composite naturally lit objects over the video feed.
I'm not saying their device couldn't be really useful, or even pretty amazing in certain situations and environments, but I think the limitations will cause issues and may put a lot of people off buying one. I could also be wrong, and for some reason they have been refusing to show their amazing light-blocking technology in their demo videos, but that seems unlikely.
P.S. Although they have been more honest in their videos recently, I should point out that their website still shows concept images that misleadingly give the impression that they are able to show objects darker than the background. I should also point out that Magic Leap have been far more honest than Microsoft who seem to exclusively composite their videos to hide their crappy field of view and similar additive light limitations.
Maybe, except NOW Clippy would look like he's walking back and forth along the top of your monitor. With some appropriate haptics, you could probably even give him a satisfying punch, send him flying, and watch him splatter onto the wall.
It's a non-story with nothing interesting to say because nobody knows enough to be able to talk about it. What the fuck is the point of articles like this?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
It's a scam. They always are.
1. It will be a really nice display technology.
2. It will be ruined by plays to create a new "platform" owned by magic leap.
3. It will be filled to the hilt with malware/spyware.
4. It won't work with GPUs powerful enough to take advantage of the new display.
Let me make a wild guess: we are talking about a pair of glasses with more or less transparent displays for lenses and some sort of eye tracking tech? Hard to imagine how this has cost billions to develop. Thousands, I can believe, or even millions, but billions? Let's see the goods, that all I can say.
This is actually not a scam. You should read up on Rony and his buddies from Washington. And all their patents.
I'll nutshell it for you. Rony is a weird guy that made a fortune in the medical field. His friends hold a bunch of imaging patents on how to generate visual data by vibrating a fiber optic cable, this is how they will create the light field display. It's an absolutely ingenious setup.
Rony has been obsessed with VR/AR for decades, before it was cool the first time. This is a passion project that was initially funded by himself and the fortune he made in the medical industry..
He is definitely a weird dude but trust me this shit is happening, there is no one to scam, he could be sitting in Bermuda with all the hookers, black jack and hot grits he could want but he decided to take a massive personal risk on this. Check out his old bee fortune blog and he drones on about the same VR/at stuff that's he's actually pursuing now.
Wow, that citation FTA is awfull. The examples it gives are just for selling the future to people stuck in the past..
Skeuomorphisms in Augomented Reality..?!
There certainly is a place for that in games, but certainly not the "virtual assistant" use case.
From Wikipedia:
Yep sounds like a virtual assistent that walks out of my office in VR. These examples are just for selling the future to people stuck in the past.
Abovitz and his team imagine virtual people (or animals or anything else) as digital assistants -- think Siri on steroids, except with a physical presence that makes her easier to work with and harder to ignore. Ask your virtual assistant to deliver a message to a coworker and it might walk out of your office, reappear beside your colleague's desk via his or her own MR headset and deliver the message in person.
I'll buy them for my entire department if it means I can inflict Clippy on other people.
I knew I needed to stop reading Slashdot and finish my PhD when I started to miss articles by Bennett Haselton.
In Germany, a third of the population wears correction glasses (or contact lenses) permanently. More than 60% wear correction glasses or lenses at least part of the time. More than 60% wear sunglasses. And that is just the consumer market.
I could not find numbers on the actual use of protective eyewear in the workplace, but just looking at the most obvious industries, ie. anyone dealing with chemicals, sparks, dusts, body fluids and excrements and so on, there definitely is a market for such a thing. Aircraft mechanics alone would probably form a profitable market, if the value provided is high enough. It could be a real boon in healthcare or construction.
While I agree that this will never reach the ubiquity of smartphones or even MP3 players, I would not discount it so broadly.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Can it run proper porn VR?
When 'secret developments' are hyped, and the detail is left obscure to scare up interest, it ends up in a damp squib of an implementation; a project that 'fails to commercialise' as they said about Project Ginger, aka Segway.
I was right. How did I guess?
Truly amazing. Now fuck off.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I'm sitting in South Florida right now and you're absolutely right. There's no "secretive" tech being developed here. There's some tech, yes, but nothing on the cutting-edge at all. However, there is a constant stream of scam-bait coming from a bunch of old men who moved here from Jersey. They're always pitching some BS and I'm sure that's what this is.
It's a scam. They always are.
It could also be a prelude to another "Florida man" story.
There are only two reasons to keep a product secret while still talking about it:
1 can't be true since they explained what to expect from the product in this very article. Thus, it must be 2.
You left out number 3:
You are about to go live, and need to hype up the potential customer base.
It seems they have all the cash they need, are starting up production lines, and probably determined it was time to start generating general interest.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You might even say: "I'll believe it when I see it"
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Why does this feel like Dean Kamen and "IT" (Segway) all over again?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I imagine this thing to be the device that Riker brought back from Risa in "The Game"
Come on Wesley, try it! Everyone is doing it!
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
"Silicon swamp" (soon to be "Silicon Reef", courtesy of your friendly neighborhood CO2 emitters...)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
William Shakespeare said “the eyes are the window to your soul.” I agree. I adore the eyes of the opposite sex.
From that standpoint, I see sunglasses as "windowshades that hide the soul."
Don't like 'em. At all. When I shoot portraits, I make sure any glasses are off. Indoors or out. Nothing nice or sexy about them.
For those times when the sun is hurting your eyes or compromising your vision, yeah, ok. Just like raincoats in the rain. You shouldn't wear them with any idea that they make you look good; they don't. They just keep exigent circumstances from ruining your day sometimes.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's not that simple. Weight of glasses is a big problem...enough so that it's the reason my optometrist always recommends plastic lenses over glass.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Abovitz and his team imagine virtual people (or animals or anything else) as digital assistants -- think Siri on steroids, except with a physical presence that makes her easier to work with and harder to ignore. Ask your virtual assistant to deliver a message to a coworker and it might walk out of your office, reappear beside your colleague's desk via his or her own MR headset and deliver the message in person.
So ... instant messaging, with a more-intrusive and less-efficient user experience, crossed with a feeble simulacrum of actual in-person interaction.
If that's the typical use case for their additive-light augmented-reality tech, then no thanks.
AR proponents have always been keen on pointing out potential applications, in entertainment (who needs more entertainment options?), and education (where I feel it's hugely overrated), and in industry (where there are certainly valid ones, but they're too obvious to be exciting). I've always found them underwhelming, and none of them seem particularly socially transformative, the way the automobile, say, or television were.
People say this a lot, but I still wear sunglasses whenever I'm outside, and I see a lot of other people doing the same. None of us afaik are raging against it, although irises that have dynamic built in polarization and light filtering would be nice.
Glasses are the most accepted method of modifying your vision, be it sun, near/far sighted or night vision.
To people posting comments like the above, feel free to complete your assertion by letting us know what vision products should be if not worn over your eyes..... or just stfu, you're not adding anything at all.
Previous "glasses" have failed, such as google glass. Many concept products fail, regardless of if they are glasses. Many glasses products succeed, such as, well, this'll be a long list that goes from HTC Vive through to Oakleys, and probably further. Claiming Google Glasses failed because they were glasses is borderline imbecilic - there's a whole hell of a lot more to it than that. Google "google glass failure" you'll learn a little bit.
Perhaps you're right though, the global eyewear market isn't that big: https://www.statista.com/stati... (excerpt: In 2013, the market value of the global eyewear market amounted to 90.3 billion U.S. dollars.)
Just realised I'm replying to an AC, usually wouldn't bother, but now I've written it....
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
So how do the hardcore VR geeks find out which county they need to break the law in?
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
Except you can mod your clippy to be dressed only in revealing underwear......
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
That's not so tricky. You blind a person by putting too much energy (via light/radiation) into their retinal cells. Staring at the sun and lasers can do this. Ensuring your projection device doesn't have enough power to do this isn't too difficult.
There could potentially be "long term use damage" but this kind of damage is a temporary type that heals over time (though can take over a year for bad cases) And this is most likely something the user would notice as it occurred, with plenty of time to rectify.
tldr; No point worrying about it blinding you unless you're a pre-certification product tester.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
Some of us have been following this for a while, and know it's got some very smart minds behind it's publicly deep pockets.
Lots of people on this thread who are just scanning the article and reacting, without doing their own research, so those of us who have are happy to share some of it here.
This is slashdot though, so we'll still get the uneducated making authoritative statements and assumptions, and the rest of slashdot trying to push what real discussion that can be had.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
No, that'd mean they're keeping an open mind. This is clearly the wrong place for that :)
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
Hmm... https://www.microsoft.com/micr... Sure, it's 3 grand, but people have it and are developing on it already: https://forums.hololens.com/
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
For the protective eyewear scenario, this is a minor issue, there you often have contraptions that make even slightly heavier gear comfortable to wear. For everybody else, just wait a few iterations. We didn't exactly start with pocket-sized 'mobile' phones either.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
I left it out for a reason. If you want to hype up a customer base and your product is really doing what you claim it does, then there is no reason not to show it.
Seems like they're talking it up as they're preparing the final bits. However, after re-reading everything in TFS, I see that they haven't even demo'd a prototype. That's a red flag considering they're talking ramping up production lines.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.