Slashdot Mirror
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."
This comapny is simply repeating the "Secure VC millions based on hot air then go bust on purpose" model of the dot com era.
Will it also be a 3D printed prototype? Let's make a hype black hole!
That's only acceptable if the unit is then delivered by a drone...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Any tech company based in Florida, land of the elder scam industry? Automatically suspect.
Earth is a single point of failure.
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.
... and you can buy it with bitcoin.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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!