Magic Leap Used Fake Tech Demos and Is 'Years' Behind Schedule (ibtimes.co.uk)

New submitter drunkdrone writes: Magic Leap's coveted mixed reality technology has been the subject of intense speculation since it broke ground in 2014. Having secured billions of dollars in funding from some of the world's biggest tech giants, the secretive start-up has managed to stay at the centre of the VR/AR conversation despite showing little of the so-called revolutionary technology it has in the works. Now, the Magic Leap hype bubble may be about to burst in spectacularly disappointing fashion. According to reports, the Florida-based start-up is years behind on its plans and may have used deceptive product demos in order to keep interest in its tech alive. The Verge, which quotes an exclusive article from The Information, reports that Magic Leap's mixed reality technology has long since been overtaken by other products already on the market such as Microsoft's HoloLens, which Magic Leap's technology is said to most closely resemble. Allegedly, Magic Leap has struggled to scale-down a bulky piece of laser projection equipment used within the headset's display. "The crux of the problem appears to be Magic Leap's gamble on a so-called fibre scanning display, which shines a laser through a fibre optic cable that moves rapidly back and forth to draw images out of light," reports the Verge.

Comments

Well, there's that old saying...

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo".

Re:Well, there's that old saying...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, "hardware is hard."

Theranos II ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note to VCs and other money-types.

When a candidate talks about 'revolutionary technology' make sure you see it actually working before you give them mountains of bucks. Oh, and make sure you get it independently tested, too.

Tech has already changed the meaning of 'innovative' to 'same as last year's model minus an interface port' now they're turning revolutionary into some ironic hipster term.

Re:Theranos II ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree but these guys typically just say something like "this is proprietary and integral to the success of the company so we can't let people outside the company see how it actually works, you can just look at the results".

Then greedy investors, not wanting to miss out on the next Apple, Microsoft , Google or Facebook let their emotions get the best of them. The urge to not miss out mixed with the plausible narrative of high tech secrets along with other idiot investors plowing in millions in at the same time (can all of these people be dumb? is the thought).

The reality is that even professional investors get taken for a ride by their emotions and let all sorts of biases into the decision making process. Hardly anyone anymore is analytical and fact based, despite claims to that they are. It is all about the narrative, the "who" is involved and who else has supposedly done due diligence and it becomes a self fulfilling circle jerk of supposedly competent people all investing in the same thing mostly because they all think the other person has done more research and more diligence than them.

Oftentimes this can actually work and the billions of dollars can produce the currently non-existent technology. Other times it doesn't work.

At the end of the day though the real problem is with greedy INVESTORS who are more than willing to let people get away with not sharing information because they think they will miss out on the opportunity.

Re:Common

[Diss Champ]

As far as software goes, isn't processing speed the only thing that matters? Adding more RAM, doing parallel computing, etc are just other ways of increasing the processing speed too.

On the contrary, software could go a long way to utilize the parallelism better. Heck, most consumer software if re-written carefully would achieve speedups well beyond a couple Moore's Law generations.
Doing that re-writing properly would probably also cost more, which is why people have been happy to follow the hardware route for so long.

Re:"Years"

[slew]

Pretty impressive to be "years" behind schedule, 2 years after you founded the company. They should declare "time bankruptcy" and start from scratch.

Not that I'm defending them, but Magic leap gave their first technology demo in 2011, so it wasn't just 2 years ago the started...

It was 2 years ago they closed their "A" round of financing ($50M) which was technically when they started their "clock"
Google lead their "B" round of financing ($542M)
And earlier this year, Alibaba lead their "C" round of financing (~$800M at a $4.5B valuation),

So they've raised ~$1.4B to date, but I'm guessing the"C" round financiers are shortly about to take a bath...

FWIW, Magic Leap doesn't seem to be organized like a tech venture, but more like a entertainment studio. From all reports, the tech that they seem like they are developing is adapted from medical tech: a single fiber scanning endoscope technology worked on at University of Washington by Eric Seibel. The chief technical officer of Magic Leap is Brian Schowengerdt who was Mr. Seibel's research partner. Apparently, the idea is to reverse the endoscope from being a camera to being a projector. Of course there are issues involved in adapting any technology, so it's not unexpected that they have run into a boat load of trouble and are years behind. Such is the nature of high tech.

Re: Finally!

[Gavagai80]

Failing because you bet on the wrong tech? Fine. But faking tech demos to dupe investors? Go to jail. One of the stupidities of blind worship of capitalism is that capitalism only works if everybody has access to accurate information.