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Magic Leap CEO Defends His AR Company After Leaked Photo (mashable.com)
Saturday Business Insider claimed that augmented reality company Magic Leap was "scrambling to finish a working prototype before an important board meeting next week," publishing a photo described by their source as an early January prototype. An anonymous reader quotes Mashable:
The image depicts a man with a kit on his back that looks as if it's in the early stages of development, but [CEO Rony] Abovitz's tweet suggested it was not intended as consumer technology. "The photo you are all excited about is NOT what you think it is," he wrote. "The photo shows an @magicleap R&D test rig where we collect room/space data for our machine vision/machine learning work. We do this in order to understand lighting, texture, various surfaces."
As Mashable noted earlier, the leaked photo has done little to assuage fears the company's technology has been overhyped... A December report in The Information raised questions about whether Magic Leap was ready for primetime amid concerns that much of its work could not be commercialised or miniaturised. Two former employees also reportedly told the outlet a promotional video showing the technology in action was in fact created by the special effects company, Weta Workshop.
Magic Leap raised $1.39 billion from investors (including Google), and Abovitz's last tweet Saturday reassured fans that "We will not let you down." Mashable even suggested that "this might just be a bit of clever marketing spin by Magic Leap to greatly lower expectations before unveiling a polished product in the coming months... The worst case scenario is that this does represent the latest version of the company's prototype meant for consumers, in which case there's very little chance we will see a Magic Leap device available to consumers any time in 2017."
Magic Leap raised $1.39 billion from investors (including Google), and Abovitz's last tweet Saturday reassured fans that "We will not let you down." Mashable even suggested that "this might just be a bit of clever marketing spin by Magic Leap to greatly lower expectations before unveiling a polished product in the coming months... The worst case scenario is that this does represent the latest version of the company's prototype meant for consumers, in which case there's very little chance we will see a Magic Leap device available to consumers any time in 2017."
Said no investor, ever, when given news the likes of "Abovitz's last tweet Saturday reassured fans that 'We will not let you down.'"
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
This shows that:
(1) Either some of the conjectures here are wrong, because Google (et. al.) carefully performed their due diligence and vetted the technology thoroughly
(2) There's way too much cash flowing around and people are investing in stupid shit again
(3) Both
I think it's kinda ironic that the article complains about a product being vaporware but doesn't even talk about WHAT it is supposed to be. I'm used to TFS not even mentioning it, pretty much assuming everyone has heard about some arcane project that is maybe interesting to 5 percent of the audience, but that the articles linked to don't explain it, that's new.
5 links deep in, we finally learn that it's yet another augmented reality gadget. At least that's what it looks like. Whether it is, I still don't know: All I really got was a YouTube video that had no sound (except some silly elevator music).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I just used a Hololens Dev Kit. Most importantly, I used it not at a gaming convention, but at a robotics convention where it wasn't Microsoft using it, it was the robotics company who took 2 months and put together a limited but entirely functional interface to their robot and you could actually control the robot with holographic buttons and see status reports and data about the robot on a holographic monitor. It had control interfaces set in particular points in space, so you could walk around the robot and the buttons and screens would stay fixed, or you could change your control setup and move the screens and buttons closer to you. They also put together an introductory tutorial, and a little holographic engineer walked me through how to use the interface and spoke to me through the audio.
It was the most awesome thing I'd ever seen, and the guys only had 2 months to play with it and put together a functional interface. Plus the headset was light and comfortable, had good speakers for audio interactions, and the guy at the robotics company was even talking to me about their early experimenting with integrating a microphone so you can control the thing with voice commands as well as hand interactions.
The field of view on the dev kit for the holographic overlay is limited, but I'm hopeful they can expand it for the commercial release. But even as it stands, everything Magic Leap has promised is in trouble, because the Hololens does it, is well designed, is light and comfortable, doesn't require a belt for the hardware and has no cable. It's lack of cable means it's limited to about 2 to 3 hours of use for power constraints, but that's fine. They haven't announced a launch date yet but it's supposed to be this year; when it does then Magic Leap is going to have radically advance what they're doing because they'll have a hard time coming to market if the Hololens already has a foothold.
I know, I know. "Blah blah blah link in the summary to some ad ladened site or just fucking google it."
But how about the editors learn how to write a proper summary?
By the way, if it had mentioned what a magic leap is I would have bitch about how they stated the obvious and they shouldn't need to explain what it is on a tech site. The moral of the story is that you just can't win with low self esteem nerds who have to find something to bitch about no matter what it is so they can feel smug and superior.
catcha: extremes
Leak a photo of the current prototype.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
All I want is an eyetap already. Prism, camera, display... no parallax.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
what the hell does this even have to do with the article?
No, kind of like every parasitic snowflake that failed to report to Canada after Trump won.
Well this is slashdot, not CNN, so
Trump has done most of the things he said he would do. Sorry snowflake.
I don't know why people are still reporting on this scam.
It's simple people: this company scammed people out of their money to pay big bucks for a famous special effects company to produce a fake ad for a product that doesn't exist, because they wanted to scam even more people out of their money. It's also why they keep this stupid "secrecy" thing around the whole deal: because they both want the press to keep talking about it, and because they don't have anything to show.
The gullible tech press ate the whole shit as if it was some imported chocolate mousse and spit it all over.
It's not a whole lot different from lots of Kickstarter campaigns. I don't even know why this one is getting so much special treatment.
Just open the Kickstarter page and search for some ridiculously miraculous products. Or go watch the original Pokemon Go teaser campaign. Magic Leap cannot deliver what they promised because what they promised is impossible. In the most optimal scenario it'll be something like Hololens. But it'll more likely be comparable to lower end AR/VR devices.
Facebook assigned a colossal value to this whole space with their acquisition. Even if Magic Leap uses backpacks and wildly forward looking demonstrations, they're spending time, money, and engineering on technology that are at least commensurate with the other companies in this space ... or litigating revenue from it.
Since when did the size of the hardware required to develop and train a neural network have anything to do with the size of the hardware needed to tap into the network's abilities?
On the one hand, we have smartphones and cloud datacenters, orders of magnitude apart. On another we have biological organisms and the entire universe, even more radically different in size. This is just dumb.
So which chip vendor's unmet promises are to blame for the continual delays of Magic Leap? I've seen a lot of chip vendors over promise and under deliver causing even well established companies to stumble. At this point if Magic Leap is holding out for some yet to be released silicon they will burn through all of their funding and end up liquidating unless the chip vendor buys an equity stake, IMHO.
... in a hamfisted manner has little to no chance of sticking. The man is dumb as a box of rocks, unfortunately. Despite all of his bluster he is apparently unable to operate with the required tact and subtlety necessary to effect changes he desires. There is the possiblity that everything he is doing publicly is a ruse to distract everyone and he is going to surprise us with the masterful maneuvers he's been making behind the scenes but ... given how dumb he has appeared to be at just about every opportunity, I doubt it.
When he won I was at first disgusted, then somewhat hopeful as I thought, maybe the guy, despite being scum, can actually effect some interesting and valuable changes to the status quo of politics, maybe he can make some meaningful things happen that others couldn't because of their political ties.
But seeing how hamfisted he's been in everything he's tried, and failed thus far, to do ... I am holding out little hope at this point.
This story is insane. Prototypes of things involving emerging technology are NEVER, EVER, **EVER** tiny & compact.
In the early 1980s, pre-Commodore Amiga showed off their new computer's prototype at Comdex. It was a rack the size of a small refrigerator stuffed with handmade (wire-wrapped) logic boards. Two years later, it was an attractive-looking desktop computer with nifty open space underneath that was big enough to tuck the keyboard into.
The first version of Android was developed for a device that was a "phone" only in the sense that it could be used to make and receive phone calls, but was REALLY several cubic feet of prototype boards connected with ribbon cables and LITERAL duct tape.
It would be a HUGE mistake for MagicLeap to prematurely commit to a controller design just for the sake of early miniaturization. I'd rather see them implement the controller as an 802.11ad-connected semi-dumb remote frame buffer, and offload the back-end heavy lifting to a desktop PC that's as big as it needs to be to do its job and impress everyone.
The fact is, landfills around the world are littered with the corpses of prematurely-optimized hardware that ended up being inadequate for their intended purpose. That's why first-gen routers usually have more ram, faster processors, and better chipsets than second-gen routers... the first-gen ones are slightly over-engineered to give them headroom to handle more advanced capabilities, while the second-gen ones are pruned back to the bare minimum specs capable of running the first-gen model's firmware 9-15 months after release.
this is off topic but the dude has been in office only about 4 weeks. Give it a rest snow flake.
Whatever, coward.
that puts our arms constantly in the air, swiping at things and moving things around. If you've ever actually done this, you will quickly learn that after 5-10 minutes, your arms become uncomfortably tired.
Eye candy and practicality seldom go together.
Snowflake says what?
A lot of the important bits of AR are in the software, not the form factor of your hardware. Obviously they have an early SoC prototype from some vendor (probably nvidia) still on it's original development board.
What, you mean by actually starting to do some of the most important things that he said he WOULD do, repeatedly, while campaigning? How awful!
The commenter who didn't read the article is modded +4 insightful while the people who did read the article and corrected him haven't been modded up at all.
To anyone with mod points who actually reads this: this is why you're supposed to have your threshold set to -1 when modding (even 0 would be an improvement). If you're filtering out the lower level comments, you miss stuff like this and wind up modding up blatantly wrong post.
probably that you're an idiot, who has no rebuttals, and is desperate to convince yourself you didn't do something incredibly stupid by supporting someone who is more and more obviously showing himself to be a buffoon?