I had a chance to use one of the Meta headsets (Magic’s primary competitor) a few months before they went under. Don’t get me wrong, it was pretty cool to walk around a 3D model wearing a headset, but the UX was nowhere close to practically useable and the picture quality was too faint to do anything serious. There’s undoubtedly some kind of value in the tech and IP, but I can’t see these things being used for much anytime soon. VR is light years ahead in terms of practical potential, and it’s not really getting off the ground either. I can’t see them getting anything remotely close to $10B.
Having tested both the Magic Leap and HoloLens, the biggest problem by a mile is field of view. Everything in this magical holographic world cuts off within a very narrow band of focus. The image is also not very sharp, bright or opaque. Trying to achieve both opaque images and a transparent screen is extremely difficult. As is the processing power to push enough pixels in battery-operated piece of eyeware. It's possible that microLED can bridge that gap, but it's just starting to creep into commercial production. Even with the current limited technology, I have yet to see any remotely plausible mainstream use cases for this kind of device.
The Oculus Quest has pretty much gone mainstream at this point, they even had supply shortages during Xmas that has yet to be recovered from (but mostly thanks to Corona).
Actually it's off the ground and becoming commoditized in those fields where it makes sense - AEC, digital design, training.
The reason they might not be familiar to you is that they are niches. There is no reason for everybody to use VR, but there are very good uses for some professionals.
If phone is a hammer (everybody has use for it) then VR kit is an arc welding tool - extremely practical for some uses, but not for all.
Or, pencil vs. oil paints. Oil paints are an essential product category, yet since the professionals who use them know them already and the market segment isn't that huge the non-artistically inclined consumer is likely not familiar with them due to lack of marketing dollars and hence media exposure.
> VR is light years ahead in terms of practical potential
i agree VR is light years away (it's been just around the corner for years), but i don't even understand its potential. what are the big applications? i just can't get around its usefulness for anything but maybe video games.
Meta was in no way ever a "primary competitor". Meta was a straight-up scam. If that's all the experience with headset-based AR that you've had, that's like trying to make comments about VR if you've only experienced Google Cardboard.
Having tried to use the original Meta, and never quite managing to get my hands on the second version. It was unapproachable for developers as well.
One of the really annoying habits of all of these companies in both VR and AR is they want developers to pay $$$ as early adopters and then also have an expectation around those same developers building all the experiences.
The one exception I've seen to that rule was Valve. Valve sent me multiple HTC Vive headsets, even shipped them to Australia, so we could build against and demo their early VR, from nothing more than a meeting at their office.
And we showed those headsets to thousands of people at our office and tradeshows (Real Estate). I can only hope that it repaid that generosity.
The music has stopped. The $10bn price is nothing to do with the product, it is just a negotiating tactic meant to the hold up the price. If they are lucky, they will sell for $2bn, and whoever buys them will end up writing down to $100m or so. It is over.
Don't write off VR just yet. Qualcomm's Snapdragon XR2 chipset might raise the performance bar enough to matter and headsets start hitting the ground this summer (without a supply chain disruption).
Part of the issue with VR/AR is that smartphones are already ubiquitous. Yes, I could wear your dorky looking headset and look like a complete fucken nerd, or I could just pull my phone out of my pocket like everyone else and get a lot of the same functionality.
Meta was a joke. Magic Leap's technology has always been far better, and their primary competition is Microsoft and Facebook (and maybe Apple if rumors are true).
Unfortunately for Magic Leap, it's just too early for AR headsets to be viable. The technology needs another decade or so to mature before it can be truly mainstream, probably. It can only survive in research labs with funding from some other source, not as a standalone business.
Chase, google, and a ton of others (I think even pichai personally) put big bets a few years back. ML portrayed the aurora of Snapchat, but ultimately their secrecy killed them as well.
Really reminds me of what happened with general magic (In secrecy w/ failed product and huge investor hype)
I also interviewed with this a while back: they were clearly frantic from what I could tell
No, it wasn't secrecy that killed them. It was incompetence. Gross incompetence all throughout the company. Source: I worked there for a little over a year as a techlead/unofficial director -- even relocating to Florida.
Funny because I'm still getting probed by their recruiters almost on a monthly basis for several of their positions. Perhaps because I live 5 minutes away from their HQ. ;-)
It's a shame but not a surprise. I have friends and acquaintances that have worked or still work there, and yet I wouldn't vent details of what I know here, everyone knows they have been struggling with their technology, overpromise and growth. Archetype of the "too much money in too little time" syndrome, and a despair to deliver and build a successful company. Be careful with what you wish for.
I don't know Abovitz personally, though I have worked with people who worked with or under him since the early Z-KAT days and he is well regarded. Contrary to what most think about engineers in South Florida (or Florida in general), we have some very capable people here. Companies complain that they can't find good talent. However most of the time they cannot put their money where their mouth is and commit over the local "market price", which is comparatively low, to secure a good hire. It has certainly been an issue in my career, indeed. But guess what? We faced the same difficulties in one of my companies finding the right people when I lived in the Bay area a couple of years ago. The answer is not that simple.
Having worked mostly in startups through my life, from the outside it amazes me how they were trying to spread out so early. When I first heard about them they were pitching movie producers, but after they got their first $50M things started going crazy. I once dated a girl who was a writer producing fancy literary content far before they had shipped anything. This was way before they hired Stephenson. I have experience in medical devices and robotics, and their recruiters have contacted me offering positions for healthcare applications, and also a very pushy one was trying to convince me to move to their Sunnyvale office where they have a robotics team. Think industrial manipulators. Then they go out and sue their once employee Gary Bradski for doing his usual Bradski things and for which he is lauded in the valley... but not here it seems. Certainly they have management problems due to lack of experience.
It would be painful if they fail. They have been the most funded tech company in the state and at least they managed to ship, something many startups are unable to demonstrate.
The company isn’t just magically worth billions because they want it to be and want to exit. That may have worked years ago but those days are over.
They’re worth something relative to the revenues they’ve been able to generate. The IP is also worth something but given the cold shoulder from the FAANGs of the world probably not as much as they’d like.
At some level these sales start to look like a stubborn buyer that’s asking far too much for their house. It will sell but a painful reset of valuation expectations is clearly required if one wants a sale to close.
The thing is - they don't really have much IP worth anything. They have filed a ton of patents for ridiculous stuff like that "wiggling" fiber idea (the fiber would need to reach ultrasonic speeds to get anywhere close to usable display).
They want to exit because their investors don't want to pour more money into that bottomless pit, with no prospects of profitability (not to mention that there are other vendors doing the same thing and better/cheaper).
So hype things up, offload the worthless junk to some sucker and move to the Caribbean to enjoy the "profits" ...
The lofty ask price may be unduly anchored by the hypothetical value it could have represented to Google in the scenario where something like this turned out to be the next big platform. Web and later mobile represented big shifts of economic activity, and the incumbents all know they need to place a big bet on candidates for any next potential shift, hence many of them making similar moves on VR, AR, self driving cars, etc. If they didn’t, and missed the next big step entirely, they would be judged to be incompetent; if they did and it simply didn’t pan out, no big deal since all the other players were making similar bets. In this context ML may see itself as still representing that potential future value, while others have updated their pricing based on limited uptake of VR and AR so far. It’s unclear where they could find a buyer at that price.
They’re worth something relative to the revenues they’ve been able to generate.
A company is worth a value relative to whatever a buyer believes they'll generate in the future. The historic revenue is often a useful indicator of what that might be, but not always, especially if the company is operating in a very new industry or if the company isn't very old.
>> They’re worth something relative to the revenues they’ve been able to generate
The days of "weird" values aren't over.
The new $trillion companies are worth a trillion because they achieved a lock of one sort or another on a market.... ideally a literal market, a platform or an exclusive data source.
That's basically the idea behind most of these valuations, from FB's "outrageous" IPO price to WeWork's shenanigans. Get a "monopoly^" or strengthen an eventual buyer's monopoly.
With Youtube, google was buying dominance in online video, with a lock on creators. With Android, they bought a running start to mobile dominance... market locks.
Magic Leap's problem is not revenue, it's strategic value.
When FB bought oculus for or $2bn They got to be a major competitor in the market immediately.... the assumption being that one or two of the early products will become the dominant platform.
What do you get if you buy magic leap? How do you get from here to a product that dominates its market?
VR is still not an important market, but it is interesting. Companies will buy into it, but they need to be buying into it. Magic Leap isn't really in the market, nevermind dominant.
Yes I was wondering if it is normal for companies to just declare a sale price like this. I don't pay much attention but I can't remember hearing much about that (apart from implied valuations like Snapchat saying 'no').
The more bad news like this is coming out, makes me wonder what did they show to the initial investors - it MUST have been something incredible, that was probably too bulky to wear and that they didn't manage to miniaturise.
I really hope someone talks about that after they either go broke or get acquired.
I'm thinking early investors have largely written this off in their mind. They would probably be happy to take small fraction of $2 billion they put in at this point. Realistically, would they even get $200 million?
Why is everyone talking about the still vaporware Apple goggles when Microsoft is actually selling Hololens (a direct competitor to Magic Leap) for longer than ML is even on the market.
Yeah, I do get it, Apple and all, but this is ignoring the elephant in the room.
This probably is going to come off the wrong way, but there has not been an "innovative" product to come out of Apple that truly impresses me since Steve Jobs died. It feels like the company has learned how to optimize what they already have, and its innovations are fueled by fumes.
This was the outcome for a long time now. They had a lot of infighting to begin with. They couldn’t agree on who leads and where the development needs to happen. I predicted that they will sell back to google for a discount a while ago and it still might happen.
I am going to do a reality check that will probably be unpopular, but it doesn’t matter...
While MS had products like hololens out, Magic Leap was still “in stealth”. This is the same company that was “worth billions” before they even released a product or before they had made public whatever product they wanted to sell. The marketing videos they produced early on (which were impressive) look nothing like the technology that was released years later. Look up the expectation vs reality videos of if you want a laugh.
Now they want out at a crazy valuation.
When the economy is “good” and there is plenty of dumb cash lying around (think these past years of bubble build up), an expert sweet talker is able to command money away from the vision fund type of folks. However, then the situation is like we are right now, we go back to the basics... things like market-fit, income, revenue, growth, sustainability... the healthy business.
We need the bubbles of the Magic Leaps, WeWorks and all the other unsustainable unicorn startups to burst. This is what will bring us back to industry sanity. The first dotcom bubble burst made our industry better. I hope this one does, too.
I've sold some AR projects to customers. Just product visualizations for trade fairs etc. nothing too fancy. It's cool and fun to work with but my takeaway was that for many practical applications it's pretty cost/time intensive to work on the non-technical parts of the projects (tuning the models and scenes so they look photorealistic). The devil is in the details. For example our typical projects involved getting CAD data from customers and turning it into a fairly simple AR-App. Most of the time was spent on fixing the models in various ways (and that's fairly hard to automate imo).
UX is also really tricky.
Reminds me a bit of the cost of working with data vs. the actual models in ML. The models and tuning them and playing with them is the cool stuff but most of the competitive advantages (imo) come from mastering the data part.
I learned a lot from my ventures into AR and it was fun and I've kept a mindset of pretending there was an AR device in contact-lense form to brainstorm what one could do with this breakthrough every now and then. But there's really not much beyond "novelty effect" and gaming I see as interesting products today. Even in areas where AR solutions are deployed in industry (warehousing and logistics), I feel that less glamorous solutions would provide similar benefits.
All that being said, long term I'm quite optimistic that the technology will bring very interesting changes and things I cannot imagine right now.
Chase, google, and a ton of others (I think even pichai personally) put big bets a few years back. ML portrayed the aurora of Snapchat, but ultimately their secrecy killed them as well.
Really reminds me of what happened with general magic (In secrecy w/ failed product and huge investor hype)
I also interviewed with this a while back: they were clearly frantic from what I could trll
This is just going to a We Work in headset category. Along with the end of bull market today, many startups burning cash will go kaput. Their tech is not worth more than a few hundred million $. It would have been it worth a lot had it succeeded, unfortunately didn't. Maybe hololens/quest have a shot.
I have both a Magic Leap One and a HoloLens 1. I've done work on both. I also have every major VR headset, which I have also written software for each. I've been working in AR for about 10 years, and VR for almost 6.
And honestly, with the latest OS updates, the HoloLens 1, even today, is still the better device. You can compare specs on a sheet of paper all day long, but there are fundamental flaws in the Magic Leap hardware and software that prevent it from being a good user experience. The HoloLens, on the other hand, is just old.
Magic Leap's battery/compute pack turned out to not give it an appreciably longer battery life, while also making the device uncomfortable, as the cable constantly tugs on the back of your head. The HoloLens isn't comfortable, either, but that's mostly because the vast majority of people completely ignored the little, rubber strap that came in the case that you attach across your to take the bulk of the weight of the device.
The WiFi and Bluetooth an my ML are constantly failing. I've used three different units and have had the same experience on all of them.
The controller constantly loses tracking. It uses magnetic tracking and it just doesn't do well. Also, the sensor is on the right side of the headset, and it is legitimately worse to use the controller in your left hand. It's also way too complicated for just-a-pointer, while not being complicated enough for a bespoke user input device. HoloLens has a clicker instead. It's superfluous, but it does the job and doesn't fail.
The hand tracking is too broken to actually use. HoloLens' hand tracking isn't anything to write home about, but I've never encountered it doing something blatantly wrong. It's just slow. Magic Leap's is similarly slow and often wrong.
This goes hand-in-hand with the ML SDK being poorly documented and rather incomplete. One way HoloLens gets around its rather limited user input capability is by giving you voice recognition out of the box. And in writing software, it's incredibly easy to setup. It's also relatively easy (though takes some thoughful design) to create a speech-based UI that works reliably. Magic Leap, on the other hand, talks about how great it would be to have speech-recognition, but offers nothing in their 1st-party demos to demonstrate it and nothing in their SDK to implement it.
The operating system on ML is a hacked-up Android system. I'm sooooo over trying to do 3D graphics on Android systems. All the standalone VR headsets are also a gigantic pain for developing software. If you've ever developed software for the HoloLens, it's a joy in comparison.
And Microsoft did a lot to make 2D applications an integral, usable, and useful part of Windows Holographic. While Magic Leap has its own version of that feature, they bury the documentation and don't provide any good samples. Whereas, on HoloLens, you can basically run any pure UWP app, whether it was made for the HoloLens or not.
I've got news for Magic Leap. Nobody is spending $10B on anything as speculative as AR/VR right now, with the macro environment being what it is. Maybe $1B.
[+] [-] thrav|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsloth|6 years ago|reply
Actually it's off the ground and becoming commoditized in those fields where it makes sense - AEC, digital design, training.
The reason they might not be familiar to you is that they are niches. There is no reason for everybody to use VR, but there are very good uses for some professionals.
If phone is a hammer (everybody has use for it) then VR kit is an arc welding tool - extremely practical for some uses, but not for all.
Or, pencil vs. oil paints. Oil paints are an essential product category, yet since the professionals who use them know them already and the market segment isn't that huge the non-artistically inclined consumer is likely not familiar with them due to lack of marketing dollars and hence media exposure.
[+] [-] nikofeyn|6 years ago|reply
i agree VR is light years away (it's been just around the corner for years), but i don't even understand its potential. what are the big applications? i just can't get around its usefulness for anything but maybe video games.
[+] [-] moron4hire|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vertis|6 years ago|reply
One of the really annoying habits of all of these companies in both VR and AR is they want developers to pay $$$ as early adopters and then also have an expectation around those same developers building all the experiences.
The one exception I've seen to that rule was Valve. Valve sent me multiple HTC Vive headsets, even shipped them to Australia, so we could build against and demo their early VR, from nothing more than a meeting at their office.
And we showed those headsets to thousands of people at our office and tradeshows (Real Estate). I can only hope that it repaid that generosity.
[+] [-] hogFeast|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmySixDOF|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gautamcgoel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] modeless|6 years ago|reply
Unfortunately for Magic Leap, it's just too early for AR headsets to be viable. The technology needs another decade or so to mature before it can be truly mainstream, probably. It can only survive in research labs with funding from some other source, not as a standalone business.
Timing is everything for startups and Magic Leap was too early. I've been saying it for years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17829798
[+] [-] sdan|6 years ago|reply
Really reminds me of what happened with general magic (In secrecy w/ failed product and huge investor hype)
I also interviewed with this a while back: they were clearly frantic from what I could tell
[+] [-] mondoshawan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjbk|6 years ago|reply
It's a shame but not a surprise. I have friends and acquaintances that have worked or still work there, and yet I wouldn't vent details of what I know here, everyone knows they have been struggling with their technology, overpromise and growth. Archetype of the "too much money in too little time" syndrome, and a despair to deliver and build a successful company. Be careful with what you wish for.
I don't know Abovitz personally, though I have worked with people who worked with or under him since the early Z-KAT days and he is well regarded. Contrary to what most think about engineers in South Florida (or Florida in general), we have some very capable people here. Companies complain that they can't find good talent. However most of the time they cannot put their money where their mouth is and commit over the local "market price", which is comparatively low, to secure a good hire. It has certainly been an issue in my career, indeed. But guess what? We faced the same difficulties in one of my companies finding the right people when I lived in the Bay area a couple of years ago. The answer is not that simple.
Having worked mostly in startups through my life, from the outside it amazes me how they were trying to spread out so early. When I first heard about them they were pitching movie producers, but after they got their first $50M things started going crazy. I once dated a girl who was a writer producing fancy literary content far before they had shipped anything. This was way before they hired Stephenson. I have experience in medical devices and robotics, and their recruiters have contacted me offering positions for healthcare applications, and also a very pushy one was trying to convince me to move to their Sunnyvale office where they have a robotics team. Think industrial manipulators. Then they go out and sue their once employee Gary Bradski for doing his usual Bradski things and for which he is lauded in the valley... but not here it seems. Certainly they have management problems due to lack of experience.
It would be painful if they fail. They have been the most funded tech company in the state and at least they managed to ship, something many startups are unable to demonstrate.
[+] [-] nikhizzle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code4tee|6 years ago|reply
They’re worth something relative to the revenues they’ve been able to generate. The IP is also worth something but given the cold shoulder from the FAANGs of the world probably not as much as they’d like.
At some level these sales start to look like a stubborn buyer that’s asking far too much for their house. It will sell but a painful reset of valuation expectations is clearly required if one wants a sale to close.
[+] [-] janoc|6 years ago|reply
Also, according to this, all their patents are assigned to JP Chase as collateral: https://www.kguttag.com/2019/11/10/all-magic-leap-patents-ha...
They want to exit because their investors don't want to pour more money into that bottomless pit, with no prospects of profitability (not to mention that there are other vendors doing the same thing and better/cheaper).
So hype things up, offload the worthless junk to some sucker and move to the Caribbean to enjoy the "profits" ...
[+] [-] blevin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|6 years ago|reply
A company is worth a value relative to whatever a buyer believes they'll generate in the future. The historic revenue is often a useful indicator of what that might be, but not always, especially if the company is operating in a very new industry or if the company isn't very old.
[+] [-] netcan|6 years ago|reply
The days of "weird" values aren't over.
The new $trillion companies are worth a trillion because they achieved a lock of one sort or another on a market.... ideally a literal market, a platform or an exclusive data source.
That's basically the idea behind most of these valuations, from FB's "outrageous" IPO price to WeWork's shenanigans. Get a "monopoly^" or strengthen an eventual buyer's monopoly.
With Youtube, google was buying dominance in online video, with a lock on creators. With Android, they bought a running start to mobile dominance... market locks.
Magic Leap's problem is not revenue, it's strategic value.
When FB bought oculus for or $2bn They got to be a major competitor in the market immediately.... the assumption being that one or two of the early products will become the dominant platform.
What do you get if you buy magic leap? How do you get from here to a product that dominates its market?
VR is still not an important market, but it is interesting. Companies will buy into it, but they need to be buying into it. Magic Leap isn't really in the market, nevermind dominant.
The technology itself doesn't matter.
^ In the Thiel sense.
[+] [-] hnick|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikanj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] echelon|6 years ago|reply
Forever? Or is this cyclical?
[+] [-] sdan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seppin|6 years ago|reply
I think they all know it's bunk.
[+] [-] terryf|6 years ago|reply
I really hope someone talks about that after they either go broke or get acquired.
[+] [-] DonHopkins|6 years ago|reply
Cocaine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY
[+] [-] duxup|6 years ago|reply
I don't want to know why it failed, honestly for most of these you can look at their product and see how there's just not demand and etc.
What I want to know is what investors and everyone THOUGHT would change about the product, use case, how the world would react to this new thing ...
[+] [-] wyxuan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcurve|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|6 years ago|reply
For example, they made an entire new semiconductor unit just to make microled displays for it.
They also been hiring, and buying companies in light field imaging field for years now, and they may add a light field imaging/display into the mix.
I think Magicleap knows now that Apple is miles ahead of them, and tries to sell while they still can
[+] [-] janoc|6 years ago|reply
Yeah, I do get it, Apple and all, but this is ignoring the elephant in the room.
[+] [-] swalsh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elvinyung|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkmurakami|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jack000|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yalogin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rburhum|6 years ago|reply
While MS had products like hololens out, Magic Leap was still “in stealth”. This is the same company that was “worth billions” before they even released a product or before they had made public whatever product they wanted to sell. The marketing videos they produced early on (which were impressive) look nothing like the technology that was released years later. Look up the expectation vs reality videos of if you want a laugh.
Now they want out at a crazy valuation.
When the economy is “good” and there is plenty of dumb cash lying around (think these past years of bubble build up), an expert sweet talker is able to command money away from the vision fund type of folks. However, then the situation is like we are right now, we go back to the basics... things like market-fit, income, revenue, growth, sustainability... the healthy business.
We need the bubbles of the Magic Leaps, WeWorks and all the other unsustainable unicorn startups to burst. This is what will bring us back to industry sanity. The first dotcom bubble burst made our industry better. I hope this one does, too.
[+] [-] kriro|6 years ago|reply
Reminds me a bit of the cost of working with data vs. the actual models in ML. The models and tuning them and playing with them is the cool stuff but most of the competitive advantages (imo) come from mastering the data part.
I learned a lot from my ventures into AR and it was fun and I've kept a mindset of pretending there was an AR device in contact-lense form to brainstorm what one could do with this breakthrough every now and then. But there's really not much beyond "novelty effect" and gaming I see as interesting products today. Even in areas where AR solutions are deployed in industry (warehousing and logistics), I feel that less glamorous solutions would provide similar benefits.
All that being said, long term I'm quite optimistic that the technology will bring very interesting changes and things I cannot imagine right now.
[+] [-] sdan|6 years ago|reply
Really reminds me of what happened with general magic (In secrecy w/ failed product and huge investor hype)
I also interviewed with this a while back: they were clearly frantic from what I could trll
[+] [-] mohankumar246|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IntemerateApe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moron4hire|6 years ago|reply
And honestly, with the latest OS updates, the HoloLens 1, even today, is still the better device. You can compare specs on a sheet of paper all day long, but there are fundamental flaws in the Magic Leap hardware and software that prevent it from being a good user experience. The HoloLens, on the other hand, is just old.
Magic Leap's battery/compute pack turned out to not give it an appreciably longer battery life, while also making the device uncomfortable, as the cable constantly tugs on the back of your head. The HoloLens isn't comfortable, either, but that's mostly because the vast majority of people completely ignored the little, rubber strap that came in the case that you attach across your to take the bulk of the weight of the device.
The WiFi and Bluetooth an my ML are constantly failing. I've used three different units and have had the same experience on all of them.
The controller constantly loses tracking. It uses magnetic tracking and it just doesn't do well. Also, the sensor is on the right side of the headset, and it is legitimately worse to use the controller in your left hand. It's also way too complicated for just-a-pointer, while not being complicated enough for a bespoke user input device. HoloLens has a clicker instead. It's superfluous, but it does the job and doesn't fail.
The hand tracking is too broken to actually use. HoloLens' hand tracking isn't anything to write home about, but I've never encountered it doing something blatantly wrong. It's just slow. Magic Leap's is similarly slow and often wrong.
This goes hand-in-hand with the ML SDK being poorly documented and rather incomplete. One way HoloLens gets around its rather limited user input capability is by giving you voice recognition out of the box. And in writing software, it's incredibly easy to setup. It's also relatively easy (though takes some thoughful design) to create a speech-based UI that works reliably. Magic Leap, on the other hand, talks about how great it would be to have speech-recognition, but offers nothing in their 1st-party demos to demonstrate it and nothing in their SDK to implement it.
The operating system on ML is a hacked-up Android system. I'm sooooo over trying to do 3D graphics on Android systems. All the standalone VR headsets are also a gigantic pain for developing software. If you've ever developed software for the HoloLens, it's a joy in comparison.
And Microsoft did a lot to make 2D applications an integral, usable, and useful part of Windows Holographic. While Magic Leap has its own version of that feature, they bury the documentation and don't provide any good samples. Whereas, on HoloLens, you can basically run any pure UWP app, whether it was made for the HoloLens or not.
[+] [-] ausjke|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tepix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] floatinglotus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheMagicHorsey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|6 years ago|reply