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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.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo".
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.
Pretty impressive to be "years" behind schedule, 2 years after you founded the company. They should declare "time bankruptcy" and start from scratch.
It sounds like those investors had a very mixed reality already.
The reality is that the tech industry has reached a dead end with the death of Moore's Law.
It's absolutely adorable that you think all progress in the tech industry is rooted in Moore's Law and that nothing more can be accomplished if we see a slowing in the rate at which we pack transistors into a given area on a chip.
You will see incremental progress from here on out, but no more large leaps like we have had for the previous 40 years.
All progress is incremental and Moore's Law is nothing if not incremental. If you didn't know that then you didn't understand what was going on. Moore's Law was just a observation of the fast but incremental development of semiconductor manufacturing. However it isn't the end-all-be-all of tech. It's not some fundamental law of nature, just an empirical observation of incremental change.
People will over-believe what they see. I learned this many years ago, preparing animations on a SGI workstation for use in courtrooms. If a lawyer showed up with an animation of an accident, the jury took it as real and would rule for his client.
It's a two edged sword for tech. Can't get any money unless I show a mockup or prototype. However, once a customer sees a mockup or prototype, they think it's mere inches away from production even though I tell them it's miles. I've even been told I just wanted extra money to "do science projects" instead of heading straight for production when I've tried to warn people how immature the tech was.
Florida-based start-up
Wait, a scam in Florida? That's unpossible!
Yes, it turns out all the breathtakingly rendered 3D augmented-reality monsters in the demos were just the native fauna of Florida.
There is a good argument for better software design being more important than Moore's Law when it comes to complex breakthroughs in computing. It can be hard to quantify how algorithm improvements compare to hardware improvements, but the field of numerical algorithms gives some insight.
In the field of numerical algorithms, however, the improvement can be quantified. Here is just one example, provided by Professor Martin Grötschel of Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin. Grötschel, an expert in optimization, observes that a benchmark production planning model solved using linear programming would have taken 82 years to solve in 1988, using the computers and the linear programming algorithms of the day. Fifteen years later – in 2003 – this same model could be solved in roughly 1 minute, an improvement by a factor of roughly 43 million. Of this, a factor of roughly 1,000 was due to increased processor speed, whereas a factor of roughly 43,000 was due to improvements in algorithms! Grötschel also cites an algorithmic improvement of roughly 30,000 for mixed integer programming between 1991 and 2008.
My guess is we have plenty of room for improvement as we find ways to live within the confines of physics. Even if we don't find a better alternative to silicon based computing, advances in computer science has the potential to improve our computational ability by a factor of millions without needing Moore's law.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
Do you? This happened in the early 90s, actually. HW Bush implemented it, Clinton repealed it his first year in office.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
I saw this first hand when I purchased an HP 49G calculator.
Many operations that would hang the 48G for seconds were instant.
If memory serves, they had the same processor, but the 49G had been optimized. When reading that it seemed like BS, but when using it, it was a shocking increase in speed.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Years ago my boss worked for a software company that sold layout and design software (desktop publishing essentially) to newspapers. They were quite successful and had a lot of clients across the world. They had a few ideas of some cool new features that they would like to build into their next release, and the boss thought it would be neat to demonstrate these future features at a major trade show, to get the clients excited. So they mocked up a convincing demo of how the product *would* work, complete with scripted mistakes (undo) and everything. They did this all live with a guy pretending to interact with the software. But it was all faked.
Well, they were right about the clients and potential clients. They were pretty excited. Very excited as a matter of fact. So excited that all of the companies that had signed on to buy their current version of the software immediately canceled their orders in anticipation of this new version. The problem was of course that it didn't exist and wouldn't for years if ever. Unfortunately that little demo completely killed the company. Their real product just couldn't compete with the hype of their imaginary product. Had they been honest about it up front, they would probably done fine and eventually implement many of those cool features.
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.
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So reporter Kevin Kelly - went to magic leap, put on the prototype and says:
Magic Leap’s solution is an optical system that creates the illusion of depth in such a way that your eyes focus far for far things, and near for near, and will converge or diverge at the correct distances. In trying out Magic Leap’s prototype, I found that it worked amazingly well close up, within arm’s reach, which was not true of many of the other mixed- and virtual-reality systems I used. I also found that the transition back to the real world while removing the Magic Leap’s optics was effortless, as comfortable as slipping off sunglasses, which I also did not experience in other systems. It felt natural.
Is he a shill? Like folks have said here. . it's really hard to deliver. . if it wasn't, every nerd with an idea would be making a billion bucks selling us our dream come true. But this article is painfully missing facts, and sloppy with f, u, and d.
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