from Hacker News

My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead

by 74d-fe6-2c6 on 10/12/21, 10:29 AM with 162 comments

• by leetrout on 10/12/21, 11:40 AM

  If you have not experienced the magic leap videos do not do it justice.

  Heres my video flying inside my house:

  https://youtu.be/Grlk03MdScQ

  The jaw dropping aspects:

  - it correctly knows when to mask for the column

  - it does lighting effects from the planes headlights

  - it does particle collisions with my furniture when it crashes

  - it crashes by detecting i hit the wall

  It really is amazing tech but it is very unpolished. But I am very hopeful they keep pushing and it gets cheaper and more people can experience it and develop for it.

  This is like the amiga. We are at the infancy of AR.

• by ChuckMcM on 10/12/21, 7:36 PM

  I am impressed they aren't defunct. After all they raised $3B[1] and their valuation is $2B so they are a long way away from making their investors whole. They did replace their entire top line management team it seems so maybe that helps?

  A friend of mine who was approaching AR from a more theoretical point rather than a product point shared some of the physics of how many nits of brightness the display needs to produce to occlude the actual background and it is a lot. ML worked around some of that problem by shading the background think sunglasses with a 50% light reduction, which helps but then you're trying to match shading. Basically it is a really hard problem and had they not been so "out there" in their original claims I really don't think they would be so challenged in their marketing now.

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

• by Animats on 10/12/21, 6:53 PM

  "We have accelerated the organization’s pivot to enterprise."

  Or, "we can't make this affordable".

• by thathndude on 10/12/21, 11:11 AM

  Here we go again . . .

  But in all seriousness, even if they could ship something meaningful, one wonders if the brand is tarnished such that it makes sense to re-launch with fresh branding.

  “Magic Leap” does not conjure up positive images in my mind. Why swim against the current unnecessarily?

• by raesene9 on 10/12/21, 11:24 AM

  I must admit I'd forgotten about Magic Leap, amazed to see they're still going and raising even more money.

  In my head, I always put them in a bucket with Theranos and uBeam, Startups who made product claims which experts in their fields said were not possible.

  I guess slick marketing wins over those doubts in some VC circles but you wonder if anyone at the early stage Magic Leap investors is getting asked tough questions about why they approved it, or if they've all just moved on to other roles.

• by tmcw on 10/12/21, 12:32 PM

  At least in earlier stages, Magic Leap's marketing and communications were fun and accessible. This blog post is pure corporate jargon - "engaged a number of strategic partners to further bolster our support," "accelerated the organization’s pivot to enterprise, brought our industry-leading capabilities to new customers," "our core business objectives remain focused on enterprise solutions, there continues to be intense interest in the application of Magic Leap’s technology in the consumer space"

• by dabeeeenster on 10/12/21, 12:19 PM

  I never quite figured out these tweets:

  https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/656667346837200896?...

  I’ve had the Magic Leap demo. It was worth going to Florida for.

  https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/842399282485460992?...

  So, a while ago I said that seeing Magic Leap was the coolest thing I'd seen since the iPhone.

  It's now much cooler than that.

  Any suggestions?

• by stanlarroque on 10/12/21, 11:14 AM

  I can't believe VCs put another 500M$ in this (even at the same last valuation).

  If only we could have that money for our Lynx[0] headset...

  [0] https://lynx-r.com

• by captn3m0 on 10/12/21, 11:13 AM

  > Our recent round of funding (500M) and new valuation of roughly $2 billion

  Crunchbase says total money raised is $3B. Is it common for companies to reach a negative valuation compared to money raised?

• by idontwantthis on 10/12/21, 11:51 AM

  Does anyone here work with super expensive "enterprise" VR/AR? My gut instinct is that they try to make something good, realize the tech to fulfill their dream is incredibly expensive, then pivot to "enterprise" to get more funding. Am I being cynical?

• by simias on 10/12/21, 11:39 AM

  I didn't know Magic Leap was still a thing, I'm somewhat impressed. I definitely understand the negativity in the comments but at the same time with their experience with the v1 maybe they'll manage to deliver something useful this time?

  Some skepticism is definitely warranted, but I'm looking forward to actual demonstrations of this hardware. Assuming of course that this time they'll actually share proper demo footage instead of obviously bullshit marketing videos.

• by throw_m239339 on 10/12/21, 11:08 AM

  I think HN is pretty set on the fact that Magic Leap is vaporware, isn't it? do they even have a product?

• by gilrain on 10/12/21, 12:05 PM

  They’re pivoting to enterprise, eh. So.

  Industrial Leap and Magic?

• by wongarsu on 10/12/21, 11:22 AM

  Is it just me, or is that announcement full of weirdly specific statements. Like "Magic Leap 2 will be the industry’s smallest and lightest device built for enterprise adoption", implying that smaller/lighter devices exist, just not ones specifically built for enterprise adoption.

• by supermatt on 10/12/21, 11:22 AM

  Are the any AR headsets that will give me a good multi-monitor setup where I can still see everything going on around me? Id happily pay $1500 for something like that.

• by beambot on 10/12/21, 7:55 PM

  > According to IDC, the AR/VR market is expected to grow to nearly $140 billion by the end of 2024.

  That number seems wildly exaggerated... unless I'm missing something?

• by PaulHoule on 10/12/21, 12:00 PM

  ‘Enterprise’ is the right market. You can afford what this costs if it saves you the consequences of doing a concrete pour wrong.

• by JohnJamesRambo on 10/12/21, 11:49 AM

  The very name is an oxymoron. Magic Leap 2? Because the first leap wasn’t magical or a leap enough.

• by pavlov on 10/12/21, 1:19 PM

  The post mentions that Magic Leap recently raised money at a valuation of $2B.

  Seems like a significant downround, considering they’d already raised at least $2.4B in the past. I’d guess their pre-launch valuation must have been closer to $10B.

• by throwaway123x2 on 10/12/21, 1:46 PM

  I want a good consumer AR headset. VR gives me a headache and I really think AR will be more fun / integrated with our lives.

  It's sad that MSFT made the HoloLens enterprise only, otherwise I'd be next in line for that.

• by camillomiller on 10/12/21, 11:30 AM

  The real news is that they still have capital to invest in development. I honestly thought they were already dead. They might need a rebranding.

• by rsynnott on 10/12/21, 6:49 PM

  ... Huh. I had no idea they still existed; I was expecting this to be a historical artifact.

• by KaiserPro on 10/12/21, 12:01 PM

  its interesting that they appear to only have two SLAM cameras (that I can see)

  I can see at the front they have two extra cameras, that look like they are a near/far pair.

  It'll be interesting to see what the tracking performance is

• by OneTimePetes on 10/12/21, 11:16 AM

  ".. thus we pivoted to projecting directly into the eye, while able to darken the background, away from purely additive drawing, making ML2 useful for outdoor and light-strong environments."

  Okay

• by emsy on 10/12/21, 1:17 PM

  Possible Edison 2 announcement from Theranos soon?

• by dmitriid on 10/12/21, 11:06 AM

  Narrator: "It was the same subpar meh product they pretended to have already released after years of fleecing investors with pretty CGI"

• by 6nf on 10/12/21, 11:50 AM

  Raising more money are they?

• by the-dude on 10/12/21, 11:08 AM

  If the projected delivery window is the entirety of 2022, it can easily slip into 2023 just as well.

  TL;DR : Magic Leap 2 will be released somewhere before 2025.

• by kevinwang on 10/12/21, 1:25 PM

  Wow, I completely missed that magic leap 1 actually came out