
The Story of Magic Leap - HeyShayBY
http://www.wired.com/?p=1999666
======
brador
I don't think they'll ship.

They either patent the product in which case cheap clones are produced before
they get to market, or they keep it a secret and never release. Since the CEO
is the inventor, I think they'll try to keep it secret.

Slow companies that want to do everything perfect just don't work once they
lose that edge. They fail to compete.

~~~
dmix
Oculus Rift took 4 years to launch (2012->2016) and was acquired for $2
billion. Magic Leap only started working on this in 2014 and raised $1.4
billion. This stuff takes time.

~~~
gumby
They started in 2010 (it's even the first sentence of their history on the
Wikipedia).

They are probably about 5 years from shipping

~~~
dmix
If you actually read their Wikipedia page it said they started working on what
Magic Leap currently is about in 2014. That's when they started hiring
VR/optical people.

They did other projects before 2014 under the same name.

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calgoo
"Virtual reality overlaid on the real world in this manner is called mixed
reality, or MR."

I thought it was called AR, as in augmented reality?

~~~
FLGMwt
There's a graphic midway through the article that makes a distinction. I don't
necessarily agree, but the author (and apparently ML) see AR with additional
overlays, like HUDs, and MR as virtual models and things, such as a whale
flying through your living room.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Luckily they don't get to make up what terms we use. They previously tried to
coin "cinematic reality" as well.

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imbeau
Am I the only one that has less confidence that Magic Leap will actually ship
anything after reading about their CEO? The way they talk about him makes it
sound like he has a million ideas all the time and isn't laser-focused on
getting X, Y, or Z out the door and in the hands of customers.

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thanatosmin
Honest question—how is this hype without any technology details/demo any
different than Theranos?

~~~
Trundle
Was there not a tech demo video right on the linked article?

~~~
thanatosmin
True, though to someone completely outside this area, it doesn't seem to show
any claimed benefits over hololens. To be clear, I absolutely don't think ML
is anything like Theranos, but wonder what signals we, as third parties,
should use during the stealth hype cycle.

------
svig
Will be excited if they ship. The technology (AR, MR whatever you want to call
it) will redefine how people collaborate. Companies that keep things under
wraps showing bits and pieces are hard to trust. Demos are easy. In a
perfectly orchestrated environment, you can show whatever you want. It means
very little in terms of what your final product/experience will be.

------
6stringmerc
Been trying to follow this development specifically for a while now and glad
to have a long-form write-up about it. Behind the scenes is great. I just wish
it didn't read like they'd spent five months guzzling the kool-aid. I mean,
okay I get it, sounds exciting, you got it see it up close, we haven't yet,
etc. Reads a bit much like quotes from a movie poster though..."Unleashes the
potential of the Internet! Immersive! Astounding!"

> _Very soon, perhaps in five years, the bounded worlds within virtual reality
> will begin to be networked together into distributed virtual worlds._

So, just like XBox Live, teenagers can yell obscenities at you! Half-joking
here. Also relevant:

"Lenny! I don't deal black-jack clips! It's policy. I got ethics here."
(Strange Days)

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WhitneyLand
What's the field of vision for Magic Leap?

The Hololens demo videos seem amazing until you find out users are not
actually seeing all that's portrayed in them.

~~~
jvm
To be fair, people who have actually used Hololens tend to be pretty
impressed.

------
pmarreck
Speaking of highly secretive, well-funded startups... Whatever happened to
that super-hyped, super-secretive startup that was going to use sound waves as
a control device? I forgot the details, but it was something like that,
something special done using sound

~~~
Grue3
I remember another one, something about wireless charging at a distance by
focusing energy waves. Sounded physically impossible, but they got funding and
it had a lot of hype. Haven't heard about that one lately.

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iam-TJ
My take-away was that for all the work on the hardware and experience, it will
be the people that solve the interactive tooling challenge that will open the
flood-gates to mass-market MR/VR/AR.

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HeyShayBY
OK, I'm convinced. Magic Leap technology is the next big thing.

~~~
ZenoArrow
I agree that augmented reality tech has promise, but from the article alone, I
don't think we can say much about the quality of the Magic Leap experience, no
way of determining how it compared to HoloLens.

[https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-
us](https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us)

~~~
clifft
i think by the sheer amount of funding that the prototype gear has been able
to raise is a testament to the quality of the experience. the article also
elaborated on why the quality is much better - "an optical system that creates
the illusion of depth in such a way that your eyes focus far for far things,
and near for near, and will converge or diverge at the correct distances.

In trying out Magic Leap’s prototype, I found that it worked amazingly well
close up, within arm’s reach, which was not true of many of the other mixed-
and virtual-reality systems I used. I also found that the transition back to
the real world while removing the Magic Leap’s optics was effortless, as
comfortable as slipping off sunglasses, which I also did not experience in
other systems. It felt natural."

I am not sold on hololens since people who have tested it complained about the
effective 'field of vision' which the experience applies to. see
[http://imgur.com/uCmWnis](http://imgur.com/uCmWnis)

~~~
ZenoArrow
Look at it with a critical eye. If they've already solved those issues, why
would they have any reason to restrict who they demo to? I'd suggest they
still have technical issues to overcome, and the Wired piece is at least
partly hyperbole.

------
simonebrunozzi
TL;DR :

Magic Leap is a secretive startup based in Florida.

The author describes his experience interacting with, among other things, an
8-inch robot drone, which seems, but is not real - it's rather a simulation
made visible by a VR kit. VR overlaid on the real world is called mixed
reality (MR).

He saw other things with these magical goggles, and they looked very real.

Magic Leap is not the only company creating MR technology, but it's the most
advanced, as proven by several notable investors, including Google, Andreessen
Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, which poured 1.4 billion dollars into it so far,
while the company has not released a beta version of its product yet.

All major tech players have whole groups dedicated to artificial reality, as
well as 230 other companies, working on hardware and content. The author has
seen most of them.

The expectations of Virtual Reality are very high - the Matrix, the Metaverse,
the Oasis. The author experienced VR first in 1989 with Jaron Lanier in
California, exploring a virtual world with him through a special glove. He
named it Virtual Reality, and all the elements were there: head-mounted
display, glove tracking, multiperson social immersion.

Mass market VR was not imminent, though, mostly because of high costs. Thank
to smartphones, the cost of many components - gyroscopes, screens, CPUs - has
shrunk now. In fact, in 2012, Oculus Rift launched a successful Kickstarter
campaign to fund a VR headset prototype, and was then acquired by Facebook for
2 billion dollars in 2014.

Lanier estimates that you would have needed a million dollar in 1990 to
achieve what you can achieve today with a smartphone.

Virtual reality is creating the next evolution of the Internet, an internet of
experiences - experiences that feel genuine, even if they are simulated,
because of two things: "presence" (objects seem to be real), and (a personal
feeling of living an) "experience".

This will lead to a Wikipedia of experiences, such as traveling, or terror at
the edge of an erupting volcano, or shared experiences. Kent Bye, founder of
the podcast "Voices of VR", says that VR talks to our subconscious mind.

The author mentions a great subconscious experience with "the Void" at the
2016 TED conference. The three co-founders have experiences with stage magic,
a theme park, and a haunted house, and mixed them to create "the Void".

You wear a 12-pound vest, you roam free in a large room, and navigate an
Indiana Jones-like adventure. You have the illusion of a larger space in which
to move around thank to a trick called "redirected walking" and redirected
touching. Stairs, as an example, can be made to feel endless if they drop down
as you walk upward.

Most VR headsets today also include "dynamic binaural" \- 3D audio, which is
more than stereo, which is fixed in space. This also helps prevent motion
sickness.

Good VR also includes touch, as Jason Jerald, author of what people call the
VR book, says. Most VR kit use controllers, as gloves are not sufficiently
advanced yet.

Magic Leap is the most impressive on the visual front.

Founder Rony Abovitz was a misfit enthralled by science fiction and robots,
with a career in biomedical engineering. He is warm, casual, full of ideas.

In 2008 his company, Mako, went public, and sold in 2013 for 1.65 billion
dollars.

He then invented a whole fictional world on another planet, called Hour Blue,
and hired Weta Workshop, a special effects house, to build it, and in 2012 he
did setup a company to develop this immersive world: Magic Leap.

Abovitz saw Artificial Reality as part machine, part flesh, tricking the brain
to created a "chain of persuasion". He then proceeded to build a display to
realize it. Displays put at 1 inch from your eyes don't offer a good illusion
of focus; Magic Leap's solution creates the illusion of depth in a convincing
way.

Still, competition for Magic Leap is formidable, such as Hololens by
Microsoft, or Meta. All three project images onto a semitransparent material;
for Magic Leap, pixels disappear - for example when watching a movie in it.
You can have browsers flouting around as well: Hololens, in fact, wants to
replace the various screens in a typical office. At Magic Leap, instead, they
will soon abandon desktop screens altogether in favor of virtual displays,
even at the company itself, within a year. Famoous movie director Peter
Jackson agrees: VR can be a virgin territory to tell stories, and he finds
Mixed Reality more exciting than VR.

It could be a form of education, entertainment, and tourism, and in ten years
MR devices can be used more than smartphones.

Blockbuster MR and VR worlds will require the highest level of world-building.
Weta is working with Magic Leap to develop a small virtual world called Dr.
Grordbort’s, based on sculpted ray guns, an effort led by Richard Taylor.

Artificial Reality will need world builders like Taylor and Jackson to invent
the grammar of VR and MR. In tests with volunteers, Microsoft's Minecraft
developers discovered that performing the same role in VR - the so-called
"you-person view" \- feels far more intimate than it does in first-person on a
flatscreen, and emotionally taxing. A break is often needed within an hour.

The best experiences for the author had a strong social element.

The "bat-flinch" test tells you the quality of VR: If you stood next to
someone who was holding a virtual baseball bat and they swung the bat at you,
would you duck?

But a better test for VR is the poker game test: do you feel sufficient subtle
eye contact, body language, and social presence that you can tell if they’re
bluffing?

The author visited an Oculus demo at Facebook’s campus, and Palmer Luckey,
Oculus’ creator, joined in, and his avatar had the same body language in a
demo called Toybox.

Very soon, perhaps in five years, the bounded worlds within virtual reality
will begin to be networked together into distributed virtual worlds. Magic
Leap (among others) is working on protocols that save a mapped "real" place in
the cloud so it doesn’t have to be remapped for each encounter.

The computing needs for this should not be underestimated.

Every virtual world is potentially a total surveillance state.

This comprehensive tracking of your behavior inside these worlds could be used
to sell you things, to redirect your attention, to track your interests.

The familiar puzzles of this data collection will occupy us as a society in
the near future.

The creation of a global artificial reality is an enormous project, and its
adoption will start slowly.

Chris Dixon, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz who led his company’s early
investment in Magic Leap, thinks VR will follow the flywheel effect: sluggish
to start, then nearly unstoppable.

There’s no getting around the fact that everyone looks like a dork wearing a
head-mounted display - same problem that Google Glass and the Segway had.

Physical safety for VR headsets is also a concern, while MR can mitigate the
problem.

The VR industry is waiting for its Doug Engelbart to invent the equivalent of
the mouse.

Nearly all of the non-movie VR experiences uploaded to date were created using
a computer-game engine from either Unity or Unreal - both of which have demoed
a VR version that permits users to make VR in VR.

The author had a lot of fun in VR using an app called Tilt Brush, purchased by
Google, with which you can paint in 3D and view it with your headset.

His aha was that at its root, VR is as much a creation tool as a consumption
tool.

Fame awaits the genius who figures out the elegant VR interface for VR
creation.

Right now the field of view in mixed-reality devices is too narrow.

All mixed-reality systems labor under a second challenge that VR systems
don’t: lighting should keep the illusion that a given object is real - a weak
link in the chain of persuasion.

It’s hard to overstate the benefit of wearing a lightweight device that is not
tethered to a fixed location.

Most engineers working on VR mention one of two books: Snow Crash or Ready
Player One.

At Magic Leap, Abovitz hired Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, as chief
futurist because “he has an engineer’s mind fused with that of a great
writer.”

Stephenson compared the challenge of VR to crossing a treacherous valley to
reach new heights. He admires Abovitz because he is willing to “slog through
that valley.”

It’s too early to know what virtual reality is or what it will be. The real
way to the future might be biology.

Not immediately, but within 15 years, the bulk of our work and play time will
touch the virtual to some degree.

Only a few companies will dominate the VR networks because, as is so common in
networks, success is self-reinforcing.

After a long gestation, VR is good enough to improve quickly. It’s real.

end of TL;DR.

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