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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.
well yeah, kinda understandable given the amount that went to ML for the overhyped crap they have produced. I would be kinda pissed too if I was in that industry and fighting for investment with a real product and watched it all go to them.
That.. And a lot of people I know bought occulus for the cross platform support. Then they dropped Linux.
Really hope HTC vive beats the crap out of them long term.
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.
So actually what he says is it's not bad as a first iteration of a hardware/software system.
Well aside from the fact that you cut off the most relevant parts of the quote (sentences stop with a full stop not a comma), even if they did put out a solid product that wouldn't change anything. They didn't promise a solid product, they promised to change the world and blow minds, sucking up investment capital that could have better spent elsewhere.
What are some of the niches where VR is incredibly useful? Not mocking, I'm curious and it sounds interesting. I can't think of any, but I have virtually (ha ha ) no knowledge of the current state of the technology. Surgery maybe?
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