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Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap, Says Oculus Cofounder (palmerluckey.com)
Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus, has something to say about the competing Magic Leap gear. He writes: The title of this review was carefully chosen, not glibly. I want what is best for VR and all other technologies on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum, Magic Leap included. Unfortunately, their current offering is a tragedy in the classical sense, even more so when you consider how their massive funding and carefully crafted hype sucked all the air out of the room in the AR space. It is less of a functional developer kit and more of a flashy hype vehicle that almost nobody can actually use in a meaningful way, and many of their design decisions seem to be driven by that reality. It does not deliver on almost any of the promises that allowed them to monopolize funding in the AR investment community.
yeah I think we can all clearly see that now, nothing new in this article. Even the few that believed their initial hype have all but gone silent, they just have a small set of loyal followers that won't remove their blinkers.
Dammit, I wanted that VC money!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The only thing I could read this as, he's cranky that investors didn't give him their money.
revolution just like we are currently in the 3D printer revolution? Witness all the 3D printed cars and houses we currently have.
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Mmmmm, shorts!
Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus, has something to say about the competing Magic Leap gear.
Founder of company bashes competitor. News at 11...
It is less of a functional developer kit and more of a flashy hype vehicle that almost nobody can actually use in a meaningful way, and many of their design decisions seem to be driven by that reality.
That is unfortunately a fair description of most VR technology that has ever been developed in the last 30 years. The hype has always exceeded the reality substantially even as far back as the early 1990s (see the movie Lawnmower Man back in 1992 for an example of the hype train in the form of a terrible movie). Understand that I used to make my living with VR tech and it has a soft spot in my heart. But the market potential of VR has been blown WAY out of proportion to the reality of it. AR is a huge market. VR not so much, particularly the bits requiring an immersive headset. Where VR is useful it's incredibly helpful but literally every application of it is the very definition of a niche market.
It does not deliver on almost any of the promises that allowed them to monopolize funding in the AR investment community.
AR != VR so I'm not really sure what he's on about. If investors are confusing the two then they are morons. But frankly most of the AR investment seems quite healthy because it's being done by companies like Google, Apple, and the like. You'll note that aside from Facebook, none of the other big tech companies are worried much about VR but they are spending a LOT of money on AR because there are vast, obvious, and hugely profitable applications for the tech. The closest VR comes to a mass market application is for games but even that is still a pretty small population segment and market compared to AR technology. AR tech includes all sorts of location aware smartphone tech, heads up displays, self driving and driver assisting car tech, warehousing, skilled trades, and so much more. VR is useful for some games and a few niche simulations like flight simulators and other training applications plus a bit of marketing. I'm not saying VR is useless, just that it's a smaller market opportunity than AR. Orders of magnitude smaller.
That seems to be headed for the bargain bin rather quickly, too.
Is Palmer Luckey talking about Magic Leap or Oculus Rift rift here?
The way he blew the Rift launch is one of the most epic failures in tech history. To start with so much hype and so much VC and such a market lead. Then to putter around wasting years, pissing off the fanbase with constant delays and a complete lack of communication, string people along expecting a launch any day a year before the product hit the street. Then to release it at more than double the price he had said it would cost and completely kill the early adoption, handing the market to the competition that was at one point years behind. Only to have repeated price cuts the first year as nobody cared to buy at his insanely high price point. And let's not forget him selling out to facebook in the middle of all this.
Palmer Lucky has got to be one of the last people anyone should be listening to in the VR industry.
More marketing than product, more hype than results. Valuable only when viewed in isolation from context.
Dhould have gone into production
Because only the rich are allowed access to capital, you're sitting ducks for these kinds of scams.
Is this that hard to grasp?
There's a billion dollar industry in contacts and laser surgery to get rid of glasses, which are comparatively unobtrusive. For AR to hit the mainstream, it needs to offer at least the same experience - and there has to be a SUBSTANTIAL benefit to doing so.
VR doesn't require interaction with the outside world (by definition) so you don't care you've got stupid shit on your head. The tech is capable of providing that experience.
AR requires a SUBSTANTIAL advance in laser projection, lenses, and/or another technology to be viable. I wish more companies would go public with AR focus so I can short the living hell out of them; it's not ready, anyone using this technology knows it's at least 5+ years out, which is a long, long time in tech.
Ultimately there's a case for it, and it might even dominate, but the technology just isn't ready yet.
I worked in a VR lab in 1996. Even made Popular Science. AR is in a similar state to VR back then.
This seems very obvious to me; the VC bucks should be going into the laser projection and lens tech, not this monstrosity.
..don't panic
Why is it all these VR people claim this is the future for industry and business, and yet all their demo's are just about some sort of VR game play? I have yet to see any of these companies offering any really good reasons to buy into this stuff. Its pricy, and it doesn't appear ready for prime time.
First, Palmer Luckey is a douche.
Second, Magic Leap's tech is much different than existing AR/VR fare. They are having to build their entire graphics stack from scratch. No existing libraries will handle light field calculations. Hardware requirements are probably insane. They probably have bitten off more than they can chew and their first product reflects that.
Oh, and Palmer Luckey is a douche.
Eh, Oculus had plenty of VC money and plenty of money in general.
Not at all. That funding has been curtailed for the Oculus team. They have almost nothing to invest on long term projects like AR and are at the stage where they primarily work on trade show demos for Facebook.
Magic Leap is all hype, and I say this having worked closely with that company in early phases. But all these VR/AR companies are hype. There is some key technology that needs to be developed or miniaturized because this stuff is really good, and it's optimistically 5 years out and realistically 15 years. Silicon Valley doesn't have that kind of patience, we won't be talking about either of these two teams in a few years.
How the hell is this guy still free and walking around the street never mind working in tech? Pepe is a hate crime.
Pappa John's founder quoted as saying: "Pizza hut sucks". Also of note: AT&T thinks Verizon sucks, Ford doesn't like GM, Bing has nothing nice to say about Google, and Bud would like to see Miller in the pit of misery (dilly dilly)
You will never solve the motion sickness problem.
Regarding motion sickness, first not everybody is affected the same. (Just like not everybody is sea sick)
Some where already happy with the tech 20 years ago (VFX1-era) and since then it's only getting better (better resolution, wider field of view, more responsiveness).
For the rest, the problem has been studied, is quite well understood (basically, sensory input has to match each other. Thus there should be as little lag as possible between head motion and update of image), and since the recent Occulus wave there has been a lot of effort to solve this problem (ultra-fast display, ultra-short frame duration to avoid percieved blur, and extremely fast and precise positioning relying on cameras instead of slow accelerometers, etc.) we're slowly approaching the point were it's solved for the biggest part of the population.
AR has potential.
For AR to work any reliable, a lot of the EXACT SAME problems as the motion-sickness need to by addressed : fast display update, extremely precise and responsive positioning, otherwise the "A" part risks to lag behind the "R" part.
And in addition to the above there's a ton of OTHER new exotic tech that needs to be developed to address the mixing of "A" into the "R".
(That's also where lies the downfall of Magic Leap. There was all this new tech being researched back then that showed promises : waveguides, lightfields, etc. All this could give hopes of generating SciFi-style augmented glasses.
Turns out almost none of this research has turned up a good and light-weight mixing tech, so Magic Leap has to fall back to what's basically the same approach as IO-Glasses back in the mid 90s only with slightly better resolution, but still as bulcky and no that much better FOV).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
What are some of the niches where VR is incredibly useful?
I think the poster meant that *AR* is the incredibly useful tech.
It's basically useful whenever you would need some head-up type display to give extra information.
But the problem is that these are tons of small specific tasks.
There are tons of them so the market is very vast (nearly everybody could use some AR tech at some point)
But each task is vastly different and specific (think getting head-up navigation instructions while driving vs. a surgeon getting useful data hands free while operating. Both are useful, but beside both needing some AR equipment, there's not much else in common)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
whole thing off. /s
I would like to coin a new term:
Hype-Wear
Please feel free to use it for all this crap.
Are we pretending that we don't remember that the Oculus creator shitposted for Trump?
I mean. Its just as bad.
Big killer of mine in any VR when they did that.
Besides not having the rig.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
No? So it's still miles better than the oculus.
There is no industry, just another gimmick nobody actually wants to buy, a la 3D television.
There's a variety of very solid products out there and several very solid SDKs as well.
That's a "build it and they will come" argument. We could have an honest disagreement about how "solid" the products are but there is no argument that they have improved quite a lot. But just because the technology has advanced doesn't mean it will be adopted widely or that there are use cases people care about. Ask yourself what problem is this tech solving for people and then what are its advantages and disadvantages over the alternatives. VR is mostly a solution in search of a problem. Doesn't matter how solid the products or SDKs are if there isn't a real world use case that matters to a lot of people in the real world. It's got some utility in entertainment, a tiny bit in marketing, and a bit in high end simulations. Entertainment is probably the largest of these but even there it is a niche within the market.
What we are seeing currently is nothing at all like the toys of the past with games, big platforms, and even the bloody porn industry getting in on the action.
"Toys"? I was working with supercomputers costing 6 figures, CAVE systems, and 3D headsets as far back as 20 years ago. ALL of the things you mention were being worked on then and they certainly weren't toys. They simply didn't have much of a use case and still don't for the most part. VR gaming isn't likely to be a mainstream thing though it should be a viable market segment. And while I have no doubt that porn will likely become one of the major uses of VR, its still going to be a niche industry (most people don't need VR to get their rocks off to porn). Not to mention the problems with motion sickness which for quite a lot of people are impossible to prevent. VR is useful tech but there is way too much koolaid being consumed about how big its impact is going to be.
VR is smaller than AR in the same way that desktop home PCs are smaller than workplaces. You're conflating two very different target markets.
Conflating them? No. Not even a little. Yes the markets are different and that was my point. VR simply has FAR fewer viable use cases and the ones it does have mostly are smaller financial opportunities. VR is useful (and cool) but be realistic about what the actual market for it is.
In the consumer space VR is far larger than AR and so far have done a far better job at demonstrating adoption, and technological readiness.
The market opportunity in VR is not even CLOSE to being larger than AR, in the consumer space or business. Almost every smartphone and tablet made is getting AR technology built into it TODAY but you aren't going to see many people strapping them to their forehead any time soon. Even in gaming and porn AR has some seriously large opportunities (see Pokemon Go and similar) but AR is not nearly as limited in use cases. I've already used AR on my smartphone for astronomy, tracking airplanes, sign translation, virtual street signs, and games and I'm not even really pushing the envelope.
What are some of the niches where VR is incredibly useful?
Simulations (think flight simulators or other forms of training), certain games, porn, sales/marketing, architecture (virtual walkthroughs), and education are common market segments. Probably in some cases also remote operation. Most of these are sort of niche segments within a larger industry segment.
The main limitation of VR is that it's a cool technology but there just aren't a lot of use cases which are economically sensible in the real world. Simulation and virtual walkthroughs are where it historically has really shined. Gaming has become more of a thing lately as the technology has improved but it's only a fraction of a percent of the overall industry. Same with porn, marketing, etc.
In another bizarre departure from competing devices, the trackpad is not clickable.
Actually, it is.
At best it would just be another HoloLens which is damning it with faint praise. Nothing that has been seen of the project (very little) suggests it even reaches even that far. The recent SDK demo was pretty lamentable.
Makes mental note to avoid Oculus products from now on...
Requiem for the American Dream
VR headsets will be every bit as popular as 3D TV.
I'm having a hard time reading "No Man's Sky" when they insist on spelling it "Magic Leap", "Google Glass", "Oculus Rift".
with a rubber hose.