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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."
... 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.