The Magic Leap Con (gizmodo.com)

Reader merbs shares a report about Magic Leap, a US-based startup valued at north of $6 billion and which counts Google, Alibaba, Warner Bros, AT&T, and several top Silicon Valley venture capital firms as its investors. The company, which held its first developer conference this week, announced that it is making its $2,295 AR headset available in more states in the United States. Journalist Brian Merchant attended the conference and shares the other part of the story. From a story: After spending two days at LEAPcon, I feel it is my duty -- in the name of instilling a modicum of sanity into an age where a company that has never actually sold a product to a consumer can be worth a billion dollars more than the entire GDP of Fiji -- to inform you that it is not. Magic Leap clearly wants its public launch to appear huge -- who wouldn't? In decidedly Magic Leapian fashion, the company covered an entire side of LA Mart, the 12-story building in downtown Los Angeles where the conference was to be held, with a psychedelic image of an astronaut and the tagline 'Free Your Mind'. In similarly Leapian fashion, the actual demos and keynote took place in the basement, where a wrong turn could land you in shipping and receiving and cell reception was nil.

[...] You know that weird sensation when it feels like everyone around you is participating in some mild mass hallucination, and you missed the dosing? The old 'what am I possibly missing here' phenomenon? That's how I felt at LEAP a lot of the time, amidst crowds of people dropping buzzwords and acronym soup at light speed, and then again while I was reading reviews of the device afterwards -- somehow, despite years of failing to deliver anything of substance, lots of the press is still in Leap's thrall. Demo after demo, I felt like, sure, that was kind of neat. The games were charming, if often glitchy and simplistic, and yes, it might be helpful for architects to be able to blow up and walk around their designs. I liked the developers, who were smart and funny. Some of the graphics and interactions were very nicely rendered. But there wasn't anything -- besides a single demo, which I'll get to in a second -- that I'd feel compelled to ever do again. It felt genuinely crazy to me that people could get too excited about this, especially after years of decent VR and the Hololens, without having a distinct monetary incentive to do so.

As many have noted, the hardware is still extremely limiting. The technology underpinning these experiences seems genuinely advanced, and if it were not for a multi-year blitzkrieg marketing campaign insisting a reality where pixels blend seamlessly with IRL physics was imminent, it might have felt truly impressive. (Whether or not it's advanced enough to eventually give rise to Leap's prior promises is an entirely open question at this point.) For now, the field of vision is fairly small and unwieldy, so images are constantly vanishing from view as you look around. If you get too close to them, objects will get chopped up or move awkwardly. And if you do get a good view, some objects appear low res and transparent; some looked like cheap holograms from an old sci-fi film. Text was bleary and often doubled up in layers that made it hard to read, and white screens looked harsh -- I loaded Google on the Helio browser and immediately had to shut my eyes. Further reading: Magic Leap is Pushing To Land a Contract With US Army To Build AR Devices For Soldiers To Use On Combat Missions, Documents Reveal.

Comments

Well of course

[war4peace]

In today's times, hard work is replaced by fast talk. Valid for most new products, TBH.
Magic Leap isn't magic, or leap.

Hard to claim Magic Leap is that much a con

[SuperKendall]

The thing about Magic Leap is, they actually built what they said they would. Maybe it's expensive, maybe it's still shipping in limited numbers, maybe the technical capabilities are less than what some expected. But they still have delivered real hardware. So to me, I do not feel like it's a con. I feel like it's a perfectly valid attempt to move augmented reality forward - and whoever does it, the first steps are going to be clunky and take an enormous about of money.

The question of why so many people are at that conference is interesting. I was thinking about going myself, as off and on I try some experimental programming with various VR and AR hardware.

Just from what I have seen from various AR and VR headsets, the AR approach is far more obviously the future of headsets. There are just so many more practical uses for AR than VR (which Microsoft I think has demonstrated better than Magic Leap). So AR developers attending this conference, or working on any platform KNOW the current devices kind of suck and have some bad limitations (the field of view thing especially). But they are there trying to learn how to build things that make sense for AR, even if the hardware is limited now you know in ten years it will be pretty amazing and the devs working on real software today will be incredibly well positioned to take advantage of what they have learned now when the devices are so much more limited...

So personally I would cut Magic Leap some slack, it's more on the press I would say that they are perhaps a little too rosy about what AR can do today.

Re:Hard to claim Magic Leap is that much a con

[alvinrod]

All of what you say is true, but if you point out a tech company that most people have never heard of still has a long way to go to deliver hardware at a level and price customers expect, you don't get nearly as many clicks as you do if you say that the company is a con. Hopefully the sensationalist writing will get someone at the company to lash out at you on social media so you can get even more attention by starting a bogus internet feud so you can write even more clickbait articles because internet drama stories are far easier to crap out than anything that may require actual journalism.

And this is exactly the product that a good number of people want and vote for with their attention, so it's difficult to fault anyone for giving the good people what they desire. And this is hardly some recent event lest anyone think the world has gone to hell recently. I don't recall a time when the checkout lines at the grocery stores didn't have the National Enquirer or similar tabloids for sale. There's always been a market for sensationalist crap.

It is not... what?

[wonkey_monkey]

After spending two days at LEAPcon, I feel it is my duty -- in the name of instilling a modicum of sanity into an age where a company that has never actually sold a product to a consumer can be worth a billion dollars more than the entire GDP of Fiji -- to inform you that it is not.

It is not what?

See, this is what happens when you don't have anyone actually editing what gets submitted...

(For anyone who cares the answer is: it is not going to be "huge")

Re:It is not... what?

[DontBeAMoran]

First of all, "--" should be a long dash.

Secondly, the sentence is supposed to still make sense when you remove everything between the two dashes.

"After spending two days at LEAPcon, I feel it is my duty [...] to inform you that it is not."

That's how the sentence is written and wonkey_monkey is right to complain.

The problem is impatient people

[presidenteloco]

The new generation, who get pissed off when a click takes longer than half a second, can't be bothered to wait for new technology that might take 10 or more years to develop to some kind of semi-maturity. So they throw a tantrum when version 1 isn't all that and a bag of chips.

Some technology problems are just harder. I'm still optimistic about various fusion reactor companies that have been working for 15 or more years on it.

The issue is whether significant progress is being made or not. It is, so shut up and take your meds.

Re:The problem is impatient people

[Anonymous Coward]

can't be bothered to wait for new technology that might take 10 or more years to develop... The issue is whether significant progress is being made or not

I think the OP point is that companies with primary business in those areas, such as the fusion rector companies you mention, typically aren't worth six billion. Also there's a missing citation for "significant progress".

Re:The problem is impatient people

[WaffleMonster]

The new generation, who get pissed off when a click takes longer than half a second, can't be bothered to wait for new technology that might take 10 or more years to develop to some kind of semi-maturity. So they throw a tantrum when version 1 isn't all that and a bag of chips.

I see it as a three step process.

Step 1: Hype something beyond all recognition.

Step 2: Fail to live up to hype

Step 3: Complain about an impatient "new generation" to cover for failure to have sufficient integrity to be honest with people from the beginning.

The issue is whether significant progress is being made or not. It is, so shut up and take your meds.

This isn't the authors issue. It's something you just made up.

Re:The problem is impatient people

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the thing. When a real problem is being solved, the tech that addresses it is used DESPITE its issues. Like Word Perfect embedded formatting characters you had to manage yourself because WYSIWYG tech didn't actually quite work yet. But office secretaries everywhere were forced to learn that crap because the value of editing a doc and reprinting it was too valuable to pass up.

VR is not like this. No one really uses it to solve a real problem, in any form. And so instead of the tech naturally moving forward by necessity and use, it moves forward by marketing and for research purposes. When it does finally work, it will be used in a few places, but it will never really go mainstream because it isn't solving a mainstream problem. If it were, we'd already be using it and tolerating its issues instead of saying they have to be fixed first.

Re:The problem is impatient people

[fafalone]

The thing here is that Magic Leap basically told us to expect something 10 years ahead of the general state of the technology now. They promised the revolutionary, not the incremental. It's entirely reasonable for people to be very disappointed in Magic Leap even if it still represents incremental progress of a promising technology, and it's their own fault.

Re:The problem is impatient people

[presidenteloco]

No one really uses it to solve a real problem, in any form. Except for this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuT9uhbXZKg.

The reason Google etc are investing in AR is because they see it as the next user interface for ubiquitous computing, after the smart phone screen.
An Android smart phone (and the Google AI cloud behind it) are already incredibly context-aware and offering you suggestions and ads based on where you are and what it knows you're doing.

AR done right gives the world a new hi-res google maps type overlay, with info on what you're looking at, and of course, better targeted, directionally valid, ads.

Maybe this isn't a real problem to be solved. But a person with an F-35 helmet (and attached F-35) can kill you faster. And a person augmented with AR backed by Google-ish AI is just going to be generally more informed and capable, when interacting with the world around them.

At last, they will be able to walk directly toward and into the best Asian restaurant within 3 blocks, and get the last seat before the bumbling fool desperately finger-fumbling their smartphone of yesteryear. That's the vision anyway. Oh, and of course you can do your own plumbing.

Maybe it's just me

[jon3k]

Maybe it's just me, but this feels like reading a review my Grandmother might write if I put her in front of a ZX Spectrum in the early 80s. I don't think as much about what's available now as what is possible.

I hope you didn't chose one company and invest muc

[raymorris]

It's entirely possible that *someone* will *eventually* come out with an economically feasible fusion reactor.

The odds that any particular company will do so in the next few years, before I retire, is very small. I wouldn't invest in any particular company that is based on trying to build a fusion reactor. Heck, even if they successfully build one, the company will fail if someone else builds a better one, or builds a similar one sooner.

So it is with Magic Leap. Sure maybe someday some company will have success with something like this. If it's any other company other than Magic Leap, investors in Magic Leap lose. If Magic Leap does it, then someone else quickly copies them and comes out with a better version, Magic Leap loses. If Magic Leap does it, does it first, and nobody follows up with a better version, Magic Leap investors still lose if it takes too long. There about many ways this can go, and almost all of the possibilities would be bad news for people who invested in Magic Leap.

It's similar to another stock. The largest, most successful auto company in the entire world is worth about $50 billion. Another company with less than 1% of their sales is also valued at about $50 billion at their current stock price. Sure Tesla might eventually grow by 50000% and become the world's largest car company, but there are hundreds of ways for that to end up not happening, and the stock assumes it already has happened.

Presbyopia

[grumling]

All these AR glasses and related systems are being developed by the kids, who have no issues with focusing on near and far objects at the same time. Anyone over 50 is going to have problems with presbyopia destroying the illusion. Either you can correct for near or far, but not both.