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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."
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 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.
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.
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.