[adam_fallon_]

I sort of always knew it was the job of VCs to hype up their portfolio, but i've never seen it as bare faced as when Benedict Evans was shilling Magic Leap saying things along the lines of "Magic Leap was the coolest thing I'd seen since the iPhone. It's now much cooler than that." and "I’ve had the Magic Leap demo. It was worth going to Florida for."

Well that looks a bit silly now doesn't it.

[gonehome]

Supposedly the magic leap demo was actually cool and used different technology than the eventually crappy hardware they ended up sort of shipping.

I think they couldn’t get it to a place where it could be small enough to be useful?

Hopefully when Apple ships AR hardware for real it’ll be what it should be. Magic leap will be kind of like General Magic or the creative nomad jukebox - right idea but too early with hardware and not a great product.

Their constant advertising with no details for years really bothered me though so I probably have an unfairly negative perception of them.

Either build what you’re doing in public like Facebook/Oculus or do it in secret like Apple, but don’t loudly advertise in public when you don’t have anything to show for it.

###

(I played with the magic leap hardware that shipped for an hour or so and found it disappointing, a lot less interesting than when I had played with VR hardware for the first time. I think AR as the next computing platform has huge potential, but the hardware isn’t there yet and it needs a strong platform/ecosystem behind it. I think Apple has been preparing this for years.)

[sillysaurusx]

I saw the magic leap demo in person at their Florida office. It was quite something.

Imagine minecraft, but in real life. They had blocks you could put on walls, dinosaurs roaming around on the ground, knights fighting the dinosaurs, and all of it was controllable.

It was in a small-ish room, roughly ... 15x15 feet? a few meters by a few meters.

It had couches in the room, and pictures on the walls. It didn't look special. But in retrospect the room may have been part of the demo in some way.

(I went through their interview process, and one of the benefits was getting to see the ML in action. Supposedly they also had an "AI assistant" demo or something like that – Cortana? – but it wasn't available on that day.)

If I were an investor, I would probably invest based on the strength of that demo. It was enough to make you question the reason we're all staring at laptop screens. The device was comfortable, and I could imagine myself sitting at a desk typing into thin air (because goggles) rather than typing into a computer screen.

Of course, it looks like I would have lost my money if I were an investor. But how could we know it would play out this way? All they had to do was build a strong developer ecosystem. The lame demo-style apps we see are a direct result of inconvenient APIs and SDKs.

In fact, they were actively hostile to developers. I remember getting a C&D just for publishing their SDK's manual on a personal website. No idea how they even found the link.

The premise is real – in the same way the Vive was in many ways superior to Oculus, I think the next "Magic Leap" will be superior and more affordable than what we see here. If you are looking for an investment opportunity, the AR scene is still a strong bet over the next decade or so.

(If that seems unlikely, think about how many major advances worked out after seeming so unlikely: deep learning in AI; consumer-grade VR; voice controlled devices; the list goes on and on.)

[jnsie]

> creative nomad jukebox

Holy crap, the memories. I had the creative nomad jukebox and for years convinced myself if fit in the pockets of my jeans...it did...but it didn't. The folly of youth!?

[russdill]

When you can control every element: lighting, view angle, distance, background, etc, you can hide a ton of fatal flaws.

[dtnewman]

I got to demo their consumer product and it really is pretty cool. Perfect? Far from it. But it's good enough that you put it on and say "wow" for the next 15 minutes.

In the demo I saw, you get immersed into a coral reef and walk around. It's very cool, but I'm not gonna buy a unit just for that. So you need lots of content before it makes sense to buy one of these things, and then you have a chicken and egg problem. Who is going to spend massive amounts of money to create content when there isn't already a big audience for it?

[simonh]

I think Apple are shipping their AR hardware, mostly anyway. The iPhone and iPad are it, modulo enhancements like LIDAR. I really don’t see Apple bringing out a headset. I’m not even sure it’s a technology problem. People just don’t want to walk around with cameras and LIDAR and goofy goggles on their faces, not at Apple scale anyway, possibly ever. It’s a fundamentally flawed concept. Specialist applications sure. Mainstream, one in every home? I don’t see it.

[leeoniya]

> Supposedly the magic leap demo was actually cool and used different technology than the eventually crappy hardware they ended up sort of shipping.

i think that technology was CGI:

https://hothardware.com/news/magic-leap-admits-outrageous-au...

[bitL]

> than when I had played with VR hardware for the first time

AR is 1-2 orders of magnitude more demanding than VR, so if we get to acceptable screen-door-effect-less VR on 30TFlops hardware, we might need like 1 Petaflop for the same with AR. That won't fit into a pocket anytime soon, but we can build such experiences on beefy demo rigs.

[wpietri]

I don't trust Evans at all, but I'm going to partially defend that here. There's a long history of technology being absolutely amazing the first time you use it and then not mattering at all. E.g., the Segway was going to revolutionize transport.

The 3D space is particularly prone to this. I count at least 5 waves of 3D innovation going back to the Great Exhibition in 1851. 3D movies were going to revolutionize things twice, in the 1950s and a decade ago. Over and over, this stuff is absolutely amazing for a hot minute and then nobody cares.

Of course, Evans is sold as a brilliant pundit and now VC genius, so if anybody should understand that novelty doesn't equal a business model, it's him. But as you suggest, Upton Sinclair's quote applies here: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."

[ahupp]

To be fair to the Segway, there's a remarkable number of self-balancing one wheel scooters on the street in SF these days (well, a few months ago). And I think you can trace all of those back to Segway. Sometimes v1 doesn't quite do it.

[servercobra]

I have a feeling Magic Leap will be to AR what Segway is to Bird/Jump/etc: right idea, wrong implementation (time/form factor/business model/etc).

[jjeaff]

While I agree with your point, did anyone except the inventor and the marketing team think Segway was going to revolutionize anything? I seem to remember all the revolution talk coming from Segway people before they had even unveiled the thing. It was just a big hyped secret that would "revolutionize" the world.

I remember being extremely underwhelmed when they unveiled it. It seemed like one of those things that had never been invented before, because why would you invent that.

[catalogia]

The segway at least found a niche with cops and tourists.

[Nition]

> There's a long history of technology being absolutely amazing the first time you use it and then not mattering at all.

Most of these, certainly including Segway and Magic Leap, fall apart as soon as you ask ten random non-tech people if they'd actually buy one though.

[mbesto]

> I don't trust Evans at all

Anyone that follows him closely on Twitter Should know this. He's the type of person that just throws predictions everywhere so he can say "I told you so", but never owns up the ones that don't crystallize.

[valuearb]

The main reaction to the Segway unveiling was “huh? This is what you were prattling about?”

No one except their PR interns thought it was going to revolutionize anything.

[tozeur]

I’ve had that exact opinion of him for years.

[cmelbye]

Magic Leap is really cool to use. That doesn't mean it's a feasible product for the mainstream.

[mumblemumble]

It seems a bit like the home console version of the Neo Geo to me. Once upon a time, I'd gladly shove large numbers of quarters into Neo Geo arcade cabinets. But when they stuck the hardware into a consumer model, with its huge price tag, my thought was, "If a rich friend bought one, I would enjoy playing with it at their house."

I suspect that the big difference here is, this being 1990, SNK didn't have nearly as much access to investment money from rich people who don't understand the what entertainment budgets look like for the other 99.99% of people. So it was never hyped as anything but a luxury product.

[vernie]

Not with its playing-card-sized FOV it isn't

[three_seagrass]

It's the segway solution. Cool tech that solves a problem which doesn't really exist.

[benedictevans]

Sometimes frontier technology doesn't turn out as planned. Welcome to the tech industry - you will encounter more of this as your career continues ;)

So:

Magic Leap built a technology demonstrator, on a rig that was bolted to a table (as everyone has said). That demo was great. It was also, yes, bolted to a table. They have not turned that into a shipping mass-market consumer product.

Somehow, a bunch of people on the internets decided that because they, personally, hadn't seen the demo, anyone who had must be lying (or on acid?). This was, well, 'a bit silly', for lots of reasons, and it also missed the real challenges. The question was never 'does the tech demo exist?' Rather: Can they turn the optics on the table into something you can wear (that also has even better optics, with acceptable FOV, occlusion etc)? Can they go from a display technology to an actual platform?

Presume for the sake of argument that they solved all the optics etc questions - then they would be in the position of a company that had invented multitouch. That doesn't give you an iPhone. You still have to make an actual smartphone, work out the software and the UI, build an ecosystem, create an app store, get to scaled mass production, and that's really expensive. Or, someone had to - you could licence it out in some way (which is what Qualcomm did with CDMA - Qualcomm doesn't make phones or build cellular networks)

So: imagine back in 2006, you'd seen Jeff Han's multitouch demo. It was three feet across, came in several packing cases, and it was very very cool. But it wasn't an iPhone.

[Reedx]

I don't know, those could be genuine feelings. Like the first time using VR.

Now their TEDx talk on the other hand... speaking of silly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY

To me that was the moment both Magic Leap and TED (sadly) jumped the shark.

[dbmikus]

It is worth saying that TedX is a collaboration and the actual talks are not as directly tied to the TED organization.

But I do think TED Talks have jumped the shark, probably before that talk.

[BossingAround]

What the hell did I just watch...

[godzillabrennus]

Might turn out to be about as silly as believing in and investing in General Magic.

They may have failed but their impact is felt everywhere.

[tomcam]

Hey, Florida is a pretty interesting place!

[notJim]

Yeah, Florida is nice! Good weather, nice beaches. They even have bioluminescent organisms there!

[baxtr]

His newsletter has “.. 135,000 subscribers, with a wide and senior audience in technology, media and finance.”

[chrisseaton]

> Well that looks a bit silly now doesn't it.

It's not silly to try some promising technology that ultimately doesn't work out for business. It's easy to be nasty in hindsight, from the comfort of your home, isn't it? Not so easy to try making it work in the first place.

[adam_fallon_]

What a vacuous comment. Granted in the early days you could give the benefit of the doubt that sure Magic Leap are trying to build some revolutionary AR - you could construe my comment as ill-natured.

But go to Magic Leaps website now. Look at the promotional video that is being shown there. Now go and look at actual footage of the Magic Leap unit in action.

The company are being entirely misrepresentative of what their product actually is. They are using that amazing video footage to sell a product TODAY that is nothing close to the quality shown there. Look at what the unit is capable of and compare it to that.

Now sure, you can be given creative freedom to express the ideas of things that the Magic Leap lets you do. But then you remember the Whale video. They've been misrepresenting their product and trying to sell it using that misrepresentation for years at this point.

When TechCrunch first released video of the little floating robot game I remember people being astounded at how asinine it was. This is what VCs have been raving about and pouring money into?

So what are they trying to make work? Their promotional videos, ability to dupe VCs and probably their rock solid sales team - how long can should you give that benefit of the doubt for? They are 9 years old at this point!