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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.
[...] 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.
In today's times, hard work is replaced by fast talk. Valid for most new products, TBH.
Magic Leap isn't magic, or leap.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
That''s the magic part!
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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")
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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 see what you are saying and (and kind of agree based on things like that whale in the gym marketing), but these days I guess over-hyped marketing is so expected that you kind of discount that from the start?
That is to say, I personally was not all that surprised at what they delivered vs. what the marketing said they would have. Frankly I was actually more surprised they delivered anything at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So, when the market will realise the king is naked and finally adjust?
The ML1 isn't cheap, but its price really isn't out of line with what you'd spend if you bought an Oculus Rift and a gaming laptop comparable to what's inside the ML1's LightPack controller.
If anything, the single biggest problem with mixed/augmented/virtual reality today is that it really needs way more horsepower than any mainstream (let alone cheap) consumer device currently has. Current hardware is kind of like a NeXT back when it was the computer to die for... lots of promise & future-looking software, running on hardware that just wasn't quite fast enough to satisfy people's expectations.
In all honesty, XR (my favorite umbrella term for mixed/augmented/virtual reality) is what the currently-moribund PC industry NEEDS... an excuse to RADICALLY increase computing power. We haven't had an excuse like that for 10 years. The same beefed-up hardware that will enable realtime XR applications with low latency and fluid animation will finally give us things like "Aero Diamond" (Aero-like Windows graphics, but with realtime-raytraced eyecandy and translucency effects) once even a mid-range laptop has the equivalent of today's most expensive hardware.
NVidia has taken the next step towards realtime hardware-accelerated raytracing, and Intel & AMD have started moving into 8+ core 5+GHz territory. Pair the display hardware of a ML1 or Hololens with a 16-core i9 running at 4.5-5GHz with 64gb of RAM, a 2TB SSD, and a top of the line dual-slot NVidia GPU (call it "personal cloud"), and watch the real magic happen. Pair the same display tech with the equivalent of a high-end Android phone, and prepare to be kind of underwhelmed, just like we were 25 years ago with NeXTSTEP. The fundamental idea is good, it just needs radically more-powerful computer hardware driving it to make it truly awesome.
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.
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.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."