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Magic Leap CEO Promises Production Tests Have Begun For 'Mixed Reality' Headsets (mashable.com)
"[A]fter a particularly critical report earlier this week, the notoriously secretive company appears to be in damage control mode," writes Mashable. An anonymous reader summarizes their report:
Thursday a reporter "highlighted the company's first promotional video as more Weta Workshop special effects than a direct example of Magic Leap technology," and announced on Reddit that "employees in the company were concerned about [the first video] being misleading to the public" -- which apparently provoked a response Friday from the company's CEO.
"The message at first appears to be a simple status update, but then Abovitz gets more specific, indicating that the blog post is almost certainly an indirect response to the previous day's critical story. 'The units we are building now are for engineering and manufacturing verification/validation testing, early reliability/quality testing, production line speed, and a bunch of other important parameters. There is also a lot more going in our development of software, applications, cool creative experiences and overall operational readiness. Stay tuned -- the fun is just beginning.'"
Mashable adds that when reached for a comment, "the company gave a similarly short 'stay tuned' message, hinting that something may finally be about to be revealed. Or not... [W]ith billions on the line, it's beginning to look like the secretive, NDA-fueled, hype-framed honeymoon is over."
"The message at first appears to be a simple status update, but then Abovitz gets more specific, indicating that the blog post is almost certainly an indirect response to the previous day's critical story. 'The units we are building now are for engineering and manufacturing verification/validation testing, early reliability/quality testing, production line speed, and a bunch of other important parameters. There is also a lot more going in our development of software, applications, cool creative experiences and overall operational readiness. Stay tuned -- the fun is just beginning.'"
Mashable adds that when reached for a comment, "the company gave a similarly short 'stay tuned' message, hinting that something may finally be about to be revealed. Or not... [W]ith billions on the line, it's beginning to look like the secretive, NDA-fueled, hype-framed honeymoon is over."
Mixed reality = this clown's press releases.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Will it also be a 3D printed prototype? Let's make a hype black hole!
This comapny is simply repeating the "Secure VC millions based on hot air then go bust on purpose" model of the dot com era.
This thing might be neat, but if it takes a huge, expensive machine to run, it'll be a niche product no one will develop for, and it'll flop hard and fast.
Perhaps the naked emperor of Magic Leap can overlay some augmented reality clothing, before too many tech columnists start to call him out on it?
Any tech company based in Florida, land of the elder scam industry? Automatically suspect.
Earth is a single point of failure.
"No, I didn't see it, but it must be crap" = Bad reporting
Dude, I called this thing as being bullshit the first teaser they ever released how many years ago... I dunno why so many people fell into their bullshit, it was so obviously fake, and similar to several other fake VR/AR design concepts. Well produced CGI, now revealed to be from Weta Workshop, but still a piece of fiction. And to make things worse, the company was secretive and "couldn't reveal" any technical aspects, always a good sign for a leap of faith amirite?
It's like believing all these people working on Hyperloop development will actually come up with anything near what Elon Musk hallucinated about.
I wanna see all these companies involved in development after being funded in the order of I dunno how many millions coming out of their labs to say they finally managed to make something that works exactly like a maglev train, only with several drawbacks. It'll be beyond hillarious. Monorail indeed.
Nevermind stupid Kickstarter scams that are obviously made by and for stupid people without any scientific knowledge like Solar freaking Roadways, smartphones projected on your wrist, laser razors, impossibly thin NFC or bluetooth rings or some crap... it's stuff like this Magic Leap crap that I get worried about. Huge money and time sinks that leads nowhere. Hyperloop, Terrafugia flying car, and whatnot. Tech media becoming a huge echochamber loop of hype and press release bullshit without any publication stopping to think about things logically.
And then there are times that even big companies get suckered into shit like that not knowing what to do afterwards. You have concepts like Phonebloks, now defunct Project Ara, and Tango which just released it's first commercial phablet, started 10 years ago with that video with the WiiMote experiment from Johnny Lee. Though there probably were lessons learned with both projects, I can only imagine how much time, money and resources were sunk into these projects that anyone with enough sense could see that while they were cool ideas, there was no path into a marketable end project anywhere. And I don't want to sound like a hipster or something but I knew these ideas were bound to fail back when first rumors came around... like lots of other people I guess.
Maybe I'm an asshole pessimist and it really is this sort of stuff that moves tech forwards... but Project Ara always seemed like a cool but infeasible concept to me because it's completely impractical and incompatible with how smartphones are made and sold, I always kinda knew that stuff like Project Tango was destined to die because despite showing some cool stuff, it's not something anyone but perhaps the tiniest niche of people needs on their smartphone (same for Amazon Fire Phone), I never liked the whole 3D movie/TVs idea because of how inconvenient it was and how incompatible for a home TV environment it seemed, VR might end up dying if all the major companies that invested in it don't change their sales strategy - they are not devices for the masses nor they will ever be, and all companies entered the whole deal without thinking about marketability of it, I never got into the whole wearables and specially smartwatch smarband stuff as something to be marketed for everyone... yeah, I guess I'm an asshole after all. :P
Admitedly I also favored the idea of HD-DVD over Blu-ray because it was cheaper to produce... and even though I still didn't buy into Blu-ray (or 4K and HDR for that matter) to this day, the standard only won because of sheer corporate backing. It's all about the practicality of those ideas. I still have my DVD movie collection that will eventually become digital only, because everything over fullHD are marginal gains that I don't see enough benefit to invest into. VHS to DVD was definitely great and necessary, but I don't see much over this (biased opinion because my vision isn't 20/20).
Heh, I got lost into my rant and changed the subject... whatevs. Give me your hatred folks.
Old and busted: It's a cross between the virtual and the real.
New hotness: It's a cross between Project Xanadu and the Segway.
Have you ever thought of owning a bridge? I'm the exclusive agent contracted to facilitate the sale of the Brooklyn Bridge. Contact me in complete confidence and you could own this valuable artery into New York! Who needs augmented reality when you can have actual reality!
That WetaWorks demo was obvious bullshit from day one. All of Magic Leap's demos have been obvious bullshit outside of the first solar system demo, and it's taken until now for people to catch on? REALLY? The writing was on the board. No hardware to show... WetaWorks... And if anyone watched their promo video, it only drove home that this was all bullshit as everyone interviewed spoke nothing but bullshit -- the main scammer even had the ray-gun prop from the one of the fake demos in his office.
I wish Google an all of those other rich-morons had consulted with me, they would have saved a few hundred million on this scam that's akin to perpetual energy at the moment and I'd had a few more bucks in my pocket. Hey, anyone interested in buying virtual property on the moon?
BUT hey, maybe I'm wrong, and I hope I am, because this kind of tech would be awesome.
"Bit #1: videos we released @magicleap that are shot through ML technology say "Shot directly through Magic Leap technology"
Jeez, every post here has written them off. Funny shit.
I'll wait and see what they release first.
I hold no expectations from Magic leap, but my hope is at the least they are doing some good basic research on the problems involved with good AR. I hope they set it up so that if they fail miserably one of the companies that invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the company can take up where they left off and deliver on the hype in the next 5-10 years. This is the type of research that would not have otherwise been done, and I am glad it is being done by someone (in theory at least). For something that could have significant lasting impacts on how we interact with the world, investing 5% the cost of the Apollo program doesn't seem that crazy. Especially since there doesn't seem to be much (any?) effect on the average taxpayer.
I did some digging on the interwebs looking for the real tech behind Magic Leap, surprisingly, I found that they actually do have the key people who invented core pieces of technology, when put together results in a high resolution high frame rare light field display, in other words, digital holography movies where your eye or any camera can actually focus on the near and far objects in a display.
Start by googling the keywords "scanning fiber technology", follow the trail of clues from there and you will quickly realize the tech they have is real and it works. I'll just list a few clues below:
* Scanning Fiber Endoscope, Eric Seibel, Ph.D. 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
But this is a camera not a display! Yes, the scanning fiber tech works both ways, you can put light sensors or light sources on the other end
* Eric Seibel - Research Professor at University of Washington's Department of Bioengineering, http://www.me.washington.edu/r...
Check out his selected publications on "New displays are a fiber scanned microdisplay and a true 3D display that mimics the natural conditions of depth perception by adding both accommodative cues as well as stereographic cues." first author is Schowengerdt, B.T. who now works for Magic Leap.
* True 3D Displays, https://depts.washington.edu/h...
* 3D Displays using Scanning Laser Projection. SID Symposium Digest of Technical Papers 2012, http://imgur.com/a/IRZK7
* Ultra-High Resolution Scanning Fiber Display for HMDs, DoD Air Force grant, 2013, to Brian Schowengerdt, Magic Leap, https://www.sbir.gov/content/u...
but Project Ara always seemed like a cool but infeasible concept to me because it's completely impractical and incompatible with how smartphones are made and sold,
Yet, Fairphone 2 smartphone are already on the market.
Okay, they are not as modular as Project Ara.
Project Ara wanted some kind of "universal bus for absolutely everything", and the end user able to plug whatever the fuck he wanted.(You want to plug 3 screens on your phone ? You're welcome !)
Fariphone 2 is much more simplistic - the phone is made of a few module which are more or less documented and standised (meaning that they could make a later camera module with better specs, or a connector module with USB-C instead of micro USB, etc... as long as it used the same pogo pins), and leaves a standard connector for 3rd parties and hacker to abuse with USB and charging pogo pins.
(A little bit more evolved but reminiscent of the Jolla concept of a modular "Other Half" back-cover and available I2C pins and RFID antena for the hacker to play with).
But maybe that's why project Ara has folded, while Fairphone2 are on the display of a shop in my neighborhood.
The former was over complex piece of technology that would require a huge leap in technology to solve a problem that not too many people on the market cared about.
The latter was a baby step, just one level above the Fariphone1 (which was simply an end-user reparable smartphone). Surfing on the same repairable argument that was the success of the previous model, while incrementing over it (now because it's standardised module, the smartphone won't be fucked once the online shop runs out of replacement part - like screens for Fairphone1 - they could just produce another module as long as it follows the same spec)
Okay you can't still randomly replace module, like throwing the camera module to put an extra battery in (different pinouts, unlike the "single bus to rule them all" of Ara) and if you really want an extra screen on the back of your only option is the USB pogopins.
But it enabled Fairphone to make a real device that actually ships.
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