
Magic Leap is real and it’s a janky marvel - allenleein
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/09/magic-leap-is-real-and-its-a-janky-marvel/
======
roymurdock
> its first product is a somewhat janky piece of magic

> Magic Leap is about as impressive a piece of augmented or virtual reality
> hardware as I’ve seen. Other companies may have better fields of view and a
> more compact device, but they lack the variety of content that makes Magic
> Leap’s offerings shine. The early partnerships the company has inked have,
> indeed, paid off.

the author nearly breaking their neck stretching to find some positive way to
frame this train wreck of a company/product

saying the hardware is the most impressive they've seen, but because the
software from partners is good?

HN needs a moratorium on TC paid advertising pieces / TC in general

~~~
Holomakerbot
You’ll actually be hard pressed to find any press anywhere that thinks the
hardware is bad.

~~~
roymurdock
> Other companies may have better fields of view and a more compact device

it's right there in the original review my friend, even the paid-for TC
journalist has to admit the hardware is inferior and "janky"

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jerf
Who on Earth approved this trailer?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45ZHNq9_7eY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45ZHNq9_7eY)

"Ha ha, you'll be such a dork with our product on your face!"

That does not seem a wise marketing line.

~~~
smacktoward
There are two ways a marketing message can deal with a widely held negative
conception about the product: ignore it, or try to convince people it's wrong.
The former is usually the safer course. Trying to convince people they're
wrong is really hard, but if you can pull it off, it can pay off big.

Pepsi's "Pepsi Challenge"
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Challenge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Challenge))
campaign from the 1970s and '80s is the canonical example of how to make an
"actually, you're wrong" campaign work. Pepsi's market research found that the
prevailing opinion of Pepsi was that it tasted too sweet, so people turned to
Coke instead, just assuming that they wouldn't like Pepsi without ever really
trying it. So Pepsi filmed commercials showing people taking a blind taste
test of both Pepsi and Coke, and preferring Pepsi before being told which was
which. The commercials worked -- they convinced people to give Pepsi a try,
and enough of them found they liked it to drive up Pepsi sales for good.

The "you'll look like a dork" fear strikes me as widely enough held to be one
of the biggest challenges VR and AR have to overcome to break into the mass
market, so it's not illogical that at least some marketers would decide they
have to take it on directly.

~~~
jerf
Part of my point is that I don't think they pulled it off, not even close. I
don't think the storyline was "Ha, he looks like a dork, oh, he sure showed
us!" it was "Ha, he looks like a dork... wtf just happened to reality?" The
attempt at a humorous payoff at the end fails to address the dork aspect. "I
guess he wasn't a dork, he really was fighting real robots"?

~~~
exotree
You are right. It was not a good ad. Felt very awkward and forced.

------
nimbius
reminds me of the first cars i'd ever seen with massaging seats at the north
american international auto show.

Less of a massage, more so the sensation of sitting on some large, undulating,
lovecraftian leather mass. There was the accountable whine of a team of
motors, and once every few minutes a sharp audible pop could be heard. God
bless Mercedes for trying to cover this all up by blasting classical through
the car speakers though.

------
moron4hire
In my work with the HoloLens, I found that it's really best when you're
augmenting the real world rather than displaying generic graphics. I know that
sounds kind of like a tautology "use an augmented reality device to augment
the real world?!? What a novel idea!" But if you look closely at the extant
apps on HoloLens, you will realize they are mostly VR applications that happen
to be rendered in your living room. To wit, the content is not connected to
the space in any way other than proximity. You can move the content somewhere
else and it's the same content.

Where I've found AR to really shine is in IoT settings. Take the real world
with smart objects and add relevant data on top of them. That's the easiest
thing to do, as the data is readily available and the UX is much more obvious
than other potential use-cases. The real world becomes an anchor for the
content and makes it much more believable, even when you lose the augmented
graphics in the periphery as you move around.

There may be other ways to augment the real world other than IoT. GIS and
routing might be one, though the tech isn't solid enough yet to put in a fast
moving car, on roads with wide varieties of weather conditions. Medical
assistance (though not training, again, that's VR). Logistics and shipping--
previous experience working in a grocery warehouse, I saw that new pickers
struggle the most with finding things, and the most successful pickers have
memorized the locations of things.

ASIDE: I'm also very interested in augmented _audio_ interfaces, spatialized
audio through bone-conducting headphones, for a much better virtual assistant
experience. I have two small kids and use Google Home _a lot_ while I'm
getting them ready to go somewhere or making them dinner. Having different
reminders and features located in different parts of the house, with proper
fall-off of volume, would be a huge improvement on our daily routine.

What does this have to do with Magic Leap? I would be very happy if all that
Magic Leap had to offer was "slightly better HoloLens". The HoloLens has been
underwhelming for a lot of people, but I think even today at basically 5 years
old, it still has a lot of untapped potential. ML is slightly cheaper than HL,
which is always nice, and it's running an Android-like OS, which might bring
more developers along (though personally I very much enjoy UWP on both desktop
and MR Windows). We are so close on so many different concepts that
incremental improvements can't come fast enough.

~~~
zip1234
I would love an app that would render a 3d model in the real world. Imagine
looking at the site of your new house with the latest plans from the architect
and able to visualize exactly how it would look in it's surroundings.

~~~
sp332
The Ikea app can do this for furniture. I know hololens can do this for larger
objects but I don't know enough about its "app store" to know if there's one
for architecture. [http://elevr.com/experimental-still-lifes-and-landscape-
inte...](http://elevr.com/experimental-still-lifes-and-landscape-
interventions/#ali)

------
creeble
Reminds me a lot of the introduction of the Iridium phone.

"Worldwide coverage! No more dead zones! This will change communications
globally!"

Then they saw the phone. And its antenna. And learned it only worked outdoors.
And cost $2,000.

~$6B in satellite costs.

It wasn't a failure (I still use mine once in a while), but it sure wasn't
what people were expecting.

~~~
walrus01
The second corporate incarnation of Iridium, which bought the whole network
out of bankruptcy, has been extremely successful, however. It's the only truly
global network that will function equally well in mountainous regions of
northern Afghanistan, on the Antarctic polar ice cap plateau, in the middle of
the south Indian Ocean, or elsewhere. The architecture and technology was
_way_ ahead of its time, with Ka-band satellite-to-satellite trunk links
between satellites following each other in polar orbits. And voice codecs
built with 1996-1997 technology that can fit intelligible voice into about
3000 bps.

I agree that the late 1990s marketing which was trying to sell Iridium phones
to international business travelers was ridiculous, however. Once the new
Iridium corporation settled on the actually useful market of government,
military, disaster response, maritime, expeditions and M2M data they've been
wildly successful.

The second and third generation handsets (9555 and Extreme) are much more
reasonably sized and closer in user interface to a modern cellphone.

~~~
forapurpose
> It's the only truly global network that will function equally well in
> mountainous regions of northern Afghanistan, on the Antarctic polar ice cap
> plateau, in the middle of the south Indian Ocean, or elsewhere.

Interesting. I only know a little about the market and products and always
have been curious (and on the occasions I needed it, good info was hard to
find): What about names like Intelsat, Inmarsat, Globalstar ...?

~~~
walrus01
Globalstar is an epic turd, network architecture wise.

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electricityUser
But is Techcrunch real anymore? 5 comments on their article and 4 of them are
spam?

~~~
techntoke
Not really, they are just another PR company at this point.

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criddell
Are journalists that were given early previews released from their NDA
obligations? I'd be really curious to hear some of them explain if the
released product is indeed what they were shown.

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platz
so, it's a more compact HoloLens, with better content/games?

~~~
alasdair_
>so, it's a more compact HoloLens, with better content/games?

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

~~~
kipchak
Looking back I wonder if iTunes might have been the secret sauce for the iPad
to work, rather than the iPod itself.

~~~
robterrell
For sure. I had a Rio player and an iPod. iTunes + iPod = music search,
discovery, purchase, download, and transfer to device, all at once. For the
Rio player I had to do all those steps manually.

------
snickerbockers
3DS did this in 2011 and it was better, too.

~~~
kipchak
Faceraiders was great! It's a shame it didn't seem to go much of anywhere
though for later games, it's a shame it and the Vita's more odd features
didn't get more use.

------
just_myles
That demo did look janky. Still promising in my opinion.

------
nakedrobot2
Paid PR piece, anyone? And still the writer is reaching so far they're going
all the way around the world back into their own ass trying to praise this
thing.

<rant> I'm so fucking done with MagicLeap. Their head conman CEO, who is,
absolutely and by all accounts, an absolutely fantastic showman and salesman,
has taken so much money and so much hype that it's not going to end well.

Pretty much EVERYONE who has tried the magic leap headset has basically said
'meh'. It blocks around 85% of the incoming light [1], for fuck's sake. That's
the first of a very long list of 'meh'.

Why am I so pissed off about this? Because it's going to crash the AR industry
(already on its knees because of an overhyped VR industry) and set it back
years. Already, and for years now, no one wants to invest in an AR hardware
startup because "how could you possibly beat Magic Leap?

Fuck those guys. And the dumb investors who let themselves be fondled into
throwing billions? Shame on you! </rant>

The same thing happened to lightfield imaging with Lytro (who took "only" a
few hundred million in comparison). Lightfield imaging has been stagnant ever
since they took too much money and sucked all the oxygen out of an entire
industry.

[1] [https://www.kguttag.com/2018/09/26/magic-leap-review-
part-1-...](https://www.kguttag.com/2018/09/26/magic-leap-review-part-1-the-
terrible-view-through-diffraction-gratings/)

~~~
ChicagoBoy11
I completely get your rant, but I don't see it the same way with the VR stuff.
There's REALLY good VR out there... I have an HTC Vive Pro and one of my
primary uses of it is for training as I'm currently in flight training, and
the immersion that I get using flight simulators in 3D is just stunning. When
I'm not doing that, from exercise games, to social games, to first person
shooters, I can't think of playing video games not in VR.

But between the headset, computer, and everything that goes along with it,
I've spend > $4k on this setup. So I get it that this is not the typical VR
experience for everyone, but the issue in this space is one of price. I can't
believe that if that experience could be had for, say, $500, that we wouldn't
be inundated in VR stuff. Contrary to what I've seen in AR; even the top of
the line stuff is still just kinda "meh"

~~~
Filligree
What flight simulator would you recommend I use it with?

~~~
ChicagoBoy11
Depends on what you are looking for. For me, systems fidelity and ability to
custom design scenarios is most important, so for that I recommend Prepar3D
(Lockheed Martin bought FSX and kept developing it).

Even multi-million dollar level D simulators don't quite do a good job at
recreating the flight control feels, so I've given up on that altogether. But
some features of the flight model --- things like P-factor, adverse yaw -- are
better modeled in X-plane, and visually (at least out of the box), it beats
the competition.

But the most immersive experience has got to be Prepar3D coupled with payware
aircraft from PMDG. I know real Boeing airline pilots who actually have used
it for training, and vouch for how well the systems are modeled.

------
memebox3f
This cost 2.3B? 2.3B?! Its projectors and a couple of wave guides glued
together. You could go to the moon with that cash.

Capitalism needs a reboot.

~~~
sp332
No, it costs $2,300. They have developed the tech to do multiple stacked
waveguides (12 I think?) but this device only does 2, probably for price
reasons. Anyway the company is valued at $4.5 billion which has nothing to do
with how much it will cost, only the amount of profit they think they can make
from devices and patent licensing.

~~~
paulvorobyev
I think you misunderstood what he was saying. Magic Leap, as of now, has
received $2.3B in the comments[1]. This is mentioned in the article's
subtitle.

[1]: [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-
leap](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-leap)

~~~
sp332
Yes but what they're buying is a share of the company and its profits. No one
is paying $2.3B to develop the tech.

