Since the 1st iteration of the design is apparently ready, why can't they just show a small demo?
It's supposed to be shipping in 2018. They could easily have hired a team of top notch creators to showcase some of the capabilities of the device live -even if the device is still not 100% ready- instead of this silly Manhattan project secrecy. I hope they deliver as promised, but something smells fishy.
It's a pity, because unlike VR I think AR has huge potential both for consumer and industrial applications.
I share the concern that there's still nothing too publically accessible, but the device itself isn't completely under wraps. The journalist in the Rolling Stone article[0] viewed a few demos built between the ML team, including one with Sigur Ros that's got a very small clip on youtube[1]. I suspect building a demo of this kind of tech that's remotely as impressive viewed on a website or youtube video is challenging. If I'd built the device as marketed I'd be concerned about giving half-baked first impressions that disrupt the hype machine, even if the device itself isn't half-baked.
The device is supposed to be in the hands of actual paying customers within a year and they don't even have pictures or video of it _doing something_. Sure it might not be perfect, but there's exactly zero evidence that this product isn't just a hollow chassis. If a demo at this point comes off as half baked, isn't that a gigantic red flag that this product isn't able to cash the checks that Magic Leap is writing?
Nintendo announced the Switch about six months before it shipped. Before that they announced titles, showed game demos, and talked about titles in development. Magic Leap has shown us what could be a 3D printed mockup for all we know, and has announced (to my knowledge) exactly one thing for the console (mixed reality comics).
Magic Leap should be marketing the hell out of this. It's a multi-billion dollar product, and yet they have exactly zero actual footage of the actual hardware even working. Their sizzle reels have been nothing but concept art. Something is very wrong with this.
I agree that it is concerning, but I don't see how an entire multi page article of someone's hands-on experience with the device qualifies as "exactly zero evidence this product isn't just a hollow chassis."
The article, remarkably, has scant few details on the author's experience with the product. This quote sums up my skepticism:
>instead they were constructed to give visitors who pass through the facility under non-disclosure agreement, a chance to see the magic in action.
It's a controlled environment with purpose-built demos for folks under NDA.
There's no videos, renderings from actual hardware, or substantive critiques on the fidelity of the device's output. The only negative criticism is that it has a rectangular viewport which doesn't fill your field of view. I can't believe that's the only negative thing that could be said about this. Not a single comment on FPS, glitches, or any other problems.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I could totally see this demo as being fudged. The computations could be happening off-device with video streamed over wifi. We've heard before that Magic Leap has struggled to miniaturize their hardware, with the last version looking like a proton pack...what better way to demo it than to fake the demo?
I want real evidence that the cute hockey puck has a real computer inside, not just anecdotes from an NDAed journalist in a lab environment.
> It's a controlled environment with purpose-built demos for folks under NDA
Magic Leap pulled a similar stunt with The Information around the same time last year [1]. Seems like they found a more pliant journalist in The Rolling Stone.
"In March of last year, it released a video online titled “Just Another Day in the Office at
Magic Leap.” Shot from the perspective of one of its employees working at his desk, all appears normal until robots start falling from the ceiling and converging on the worker, who picks up a toy gun and starts blasting his enemies into tangled lumps of virtual metal. The video, viewed 3.4 million times on YouTube, was meant to demonstrate a game people were playing with Magic Leap’s headset. It had been used for more than a year to recruit employees to South Florida. 'This is a game we’re playing around the office right now,' Magic Leap wrote in the description of the video.
But no such game existed at the time, according to two former employees with direct knowledge. The video was not actually filmed using any Magic Leap technology. It was made by New Zealand-based special effects company Weta Workshop, which has worked on movies like 'Mad Max: Fury Road' and 'The Hobbit,' the employees said. One of them called it an 'aspirational conceptual' video. The employees said some at the company felt the video misled the public.
...
In addition to the bulky demo connected to a computer, Mr. Abovitz showed The Information a prototype of the compact device it intends to build. It looked as if somebody fastened electronics to every inch of a pair of wire-framed glasses. It had a multi-layered, flat lens. He would not turn the
device on, but assured a reporter that it worked just as well as the larger, helmet-like device. Mr. Abovitz would not discuss details of the technology, repeatedly responding to probing questions with the phrase 'Squirrels and Sea Monkeys.'"
I think Magic Leap is another Theranos. A second, independently-developed HoloLens makes for a respectable incremental business. But that nugget of truth has been leveraged to a $6 billion hallucination. Maintaining that hallucination could have forced management to lie to investors, to the public and to their employees.
So are you explicitly saying that the Rolling Stones journalist is lying?
And the only supposed "proof" you bring is an article over an year old written when the miniaturised prototype didn't even exist?
"This is a game we’re playing around the office right now,' Magic Leap wrote in the description of the video."
"In addition to the bulky demo connected to a computer, Mr. Abovitz showed The Information a prototype of the compact device it intends to build. It looked as if somebody fastened electronics to every inch of a pair of wire-framed glasses. It had a multi-layered, flat lens. He would not turn the device on, but assured a reporter that it worked just as well as the larger, helmet-like device."
Your post agrees that one year ago, Magic Leap was lying about the technology they had. JumpCrisscross only asserts that given all publicly available information, Magic Leap is probably still lying.
The article begins with the author describing several demos, only after which he is guided to a different room where he has, in his own words, "My first close look at the full Magic Leap hardware."
Rony Abovitz calls the chips supposedly powering his tech "Sea Monkeys."
"I noticed that when I moved or looked around, her eyes tracked mine. The cameras inside the Lightwear was feeding her data so she could maintain eye contact."
Yes. The machines used to render that demo were, in the author's own words, not the full Magic Leap hardware.
edit: Also, even if that demo was the advertised Magic Leap hardware, it still only responded to camera movement, and Miller said the demo had capabilities that he refused to actually display.
"The level of detail was impressive. I wouldn't mistake her for a real person"
"I noticed that when I moved or looked around, her eyes tracked mine. The cameras inside the Lightwear were feeding her data so she could maintain eye contact." Yes it is possible that the demo changes behavior based on eye movement alone but that's not what the author said.
Lightwear is the headset component. It is not functional without another, separate computer. The author says he only clearly saw the full, multi-piece ensemble of the advertised prototype Magic Leap hardware later, in a different room from the demos. My information comes from the literal words in and structure of the article. To make the point you are trying to make, one must add words and meaning that are not in the article. Continue insulting my literacy.
edit: You are right about one thing; my assertion that the demo in question was reliant on -camera motion- may not be correct. Eye-tracking on commodity hardware using a single camera has been a solved problem for years.
And if you're choosing who to trust between The Information and The Rolling Stone... well that's like choosing between a Bugatti Veyron and a Ford Pinto.
I pick you: you people are insane. they have raised based off of demos. vcs come in, get the demo, sign a check (because it's that fucking good). I know at least 4 people personally that have gotten demos and it's very real.
What is known, empirically true - it is possible for one group of people to scam other people and groups for many millions of dollars each. Given what is known about the mechanisms of high end confidence tricks, what is different about the operation of Magic Leap that indicates that it is not a confidence trick? Remember, the most detailed article written by a journalist who experienced the demo describes a literal scam.
I think they're probably fudging their demos, but my hope is that they've just decided on a marketing basis to not show people on a flat screen the images. With VR headsets I think the best "selling point" is the experience - VR graphics aren't great - but once you put it on you get it (if its good).
This is the reason why I hate conspiracy theorist.
You can't argue with them because they think to know everything despite the evidence of the contrary.
You're on a bit of a roll across this thread [1] without anything more than the Rolling Stone article. People are expressing healthy skepticism towards a company that has been publicly caught in a material lie, has raised a lot of VC with little to show for it, and made an announcement with lots of CGI and a vague "2018" release date. Given whom this announcement is targeting, I think it's fair for people to have a balanced view before they commit their time or energy to this company.
Because I hate people that lie and spread misinformation.
You are not expressing healthy skepticisim, you are outrightly affirming that the Rolling Stones journalist is lying and you are misinforming everyone with your false statements.
I'm not asserting that I know anything to be true. I'm pointing out that until Magic Leap shows actual reasonable proof that their product works outside of a lab, I have no reason to believe that it works. I sincerely hope it does, because this is cool as heck. But for a company to be rapidly approaching their target ship date and have released nothing of substance showing the damn thing working, that's incredibly suspicious.
In their defense, it looks like some sort of dev kit is supposed to be in the hands of paying developers ("creators"). That might be a pretty raw product.
I guess you didn't follow it at all.
Magic leap showed the demo to a lot of people and the Rolling Stones journalist extensively tested it.
How can you suggest that it is just a plastic mockup?
As for the content there are hundreds of people working on it both in house and in selected partners like Weta.
It would be trivial to fake the demo. You can buy the parts to stream HD video wirelessly for a few hundred bucks. If they're using a small server farm to render the output, isn't that cheating?
If they can show it to a journalist in a lab, why not make a marketing demo in a park? Like I said, I'll believe it when I see it.
Interesting that this came out in Rolling Stone and not another tech site. I obviously couldn't say for sure, but I don't see why it isn't implausible to think that they found a publication that was happy to roll over a few details in exchange for an exclusive dig.
> “We went on this really crazy sprint from basically October 2014 to December 2017,”
This is the part that startles me the most. 3 years of a "crazy sprint" with no revenues is extremely hard for companies to pull off. It leads to all sorts of problems internally and hiring decisions are usually rushed and lack direction. It's surprisingly much easier to do when you have paying customers, because you make decisions based on the market and not just your gut (Slack being a good example of this).
This is very impressive if what it says is true. They've basically reinvented the concept of a digital computer display by projecting a sort of artificial light field into the eye. The amount of capital they've raised makes sense now, this sounds like a ridiculously big undertaking. What remains to be seen is whether all this work will be worth it as opposed to just better displays, but color me intrigued.
It's just talking about a VRD, which is used by HoloLens as well. I imagine "light field" is just jargon to impress investors (it's not an impressive concept in itself - projecting a 'light field' on a 2D plane (retina) amounts to simply projecting light).
Building a demo for this would be challenging, but come on. They have been at this for what... five years now, and had $2 billion to work with?
Besides, hype can be very dangerous. Look at what happened with No Man's Sky. They rode the hype train to the Moon and came crashing down hard because the product utterly failed to meet expectations. That's why it's important to temper hype with regularly administered doses of realism.
I feel like this is also an answer to the top comment in this thread - gamers are a target market for stuff like this because they are more likely to take risks based on hype without waiting for a technology to prove itself.
The journalist in the Rolling Stone article[0] viewed a few demos built between the ML team, including one with Sigur Ros that's got a very small clip on youtube[1]. I suspect building a demo of this kind of tech that's remotely as impressive viewed on a website or youtube video is challenging. If I'd built the device as marketed I'd be concerned about giving half-baked first impressions that disrupt the hype machine, even if the device itself isn't half-baked.
I hadn't read the article in rolling stone to be honest, but after reading it I get the impression that it would be even easier to prepare a more public demonstration (in a controlled environment) instead of this NDA shackled article. It wouldn't be that hard for example to show a video of the journalist in the room wearing the device and side-by-side a cloned view of what the journalist is visually experiencing. Something like what Steve Jobs did in the first iphone unveiling, but not live - an edited version would be more than fine, conveying both the visual experience and the journalists reactions.
This is a ground breaking technology with so many non-gimmicky applications that it's mind boggling. I was thinking earlier this morning how it can be used for driving assistance: wear the headset in your car and get an overlaid "google maps" experience without ever having to get your eyes off the road, pair it with the car's sensors and get collision distance information, coloured lanes in dark roads, etc.
How about (paired with sensors) measuring dimensions, inspecting components, counting objects, etc. in professional/industrial environments?
I don;t know, maybe I'm wrong but I feel this obsession with secrecy is hurting both their product and the technology
If the concern is interrupting the hype machine, why not use reaction videos? That worked for Enchroma glasses, which is in a very similar position: both are about doing something with your vision by wearing glasses, making it hard (impossible in Enchroma's case) to capture on video.
This is what I was thinking. That conversation probably went something like this:
“We need more money.”
“We gave you $2 billion. You’re going to have to ship something before we give you more.”
“Hmmm...we aren’t ready to ship and may not be for some time...what if instead of shipping, we can show you that 50K people are interested in buying it? Will you give us some more money then?”
“Sure, you show us that 50k people want to buy it and we will write you another check”.
So they created an email opt-in page, photoshopped some 3D renders of a product that doesn’t exist yet onto a person’s head, and did a press release calling this page an “unveiling”. That’s really all this is - a “coming soon” page for something that may or
may not be vaporware. Investors are getting antsy and want some sense of what the actual market is for this thing.
To be fair, if all I have to do is give them my email address for them to get a bunch more money to make something that could either completely fail or revolutionise human computer interaction, sure, please have my email address.
They seem to be trying to bring a new thing into the world, I'm inclined to support it.
Have you seen the page? It’s literally nothing more than an email opt-in with some clearly photoshopped images of a device that doesn’t exist yet, even in mock-up form (otherwise they would have used the mock-up in the photos).
Creating good demos for wearable technology is hard. You certainly can make fancy simulations like Microsoft for their Hololens, but the devil is in the details. It's mainly about how it feels and you need to experience the technology to figure it out.
I don't see much to be gained from demoing prototypes to general public. If it's main blowing - great, but does not really make a difference if you can't buy it. If it's less than mind blowing, then you will just ruin everything. Even if you then later improve the product to the mind blowing level, most have already made their minds.
invest in their known publicly-traded investors (google. others?). figure out who manufactures the more expensive pieces of silicon (or optics?) in the device, invest in them.
Considering the scope what they are developing (silicon that requires new fab technology), secrecy isn't the priority it would be if the problem was one that others could steal a march on by throwing money and bodies at it.
If they do ship, I predict that the product might very well meet all their technical claims, but will be a miss on their claims for utility and usability.
I know a couple people that got hired specifically to work on content for it. I don't know anything about what they're working on because of the secrecy of everything around Magic Leap.
I imagine the reason they haven't shown anything is because they can only showcase the tech on the hardware itself, which isn't far enough along or in enough quantities to demo. I always thought the ads trying to show off some new 4k thing playing on my non-4k tv was silly.
I find it even way worse when there is a demo for VR or AR.
If I look at the first demo of Micrososft's Hololens, it is all CGI.
By itself it is fair, you just can't make a good demo from first person capture of what the headset displays.
However, the demo was showing a room littered with augmented objects and minecraft blocks and people naturally interacting with them.
The reality of the very tiny cone of vision of Hololens make it feel extremely misleading.
In the end, it is hard to show something else that the vision of what you want to achieve and in Microsoft's case at least, there was a big gap between that and the limitations of the actual product.
I agree. I figured the SD/HD analogy would be easy to explain and relatable.
For awhile I was demoing VR projects to non-techies (VPs, CEOs, and others). The most interesting response was when they took the headset off and they had forgotten what room they were in. Everyone's favorite demo was Tilt Brush because it showed off interactivity the most--not the ones with fancy graphics. It's hard to express those ideas without demoing it. As an aside; the demoing experience for VR is miserable. There's a very long line, people are required to set up and explain the demo and clean the equipment, and there's a learning curve and short time allotted for each demo. You can't just set up 5 unattended kiosks and let people figure it out.
Read the story again. He experienced the demos with some sort of surrogate hardware, not the goggles pictured. You'll note that he goes through all the demos, and then later gets his first close look at the goggles hardware. The story provides no indication that the goggle hardware is yet functional.
I'd wager they have something which is just enough to get people with deep pockets to give them a pile of cash on the premise of "imagine what it could be with only another billion dollars!" but is utterly underwhelming for a mass-market consumer product.
There is absolute hard evidence that they have faked videos that do not represent the reality of their product. They have a video where they show 100 people watching the Magic Leap effects without wearing any googles. With today's announcement that video is a very clear fake without any attempt to make it resemble a final or even in-development product.
Their videos are fake and do not show what they are building. The product might be neat, I don't know. We do know that they lie in their videos to get attention.
I have been an avid Magic Leap supporter for years. I told everyone I know about them and showed all my friends their videos. I've been gushing about them for years. All based on a lie. All my love and attention for them has been because they told us they were building a system for you to have AR without goggles. LIES. ALL LIES.
It's difficult to do marketing for things that aren't yet in productized form without them being aspirational to some extent or another.
Case in point, the public unveilings for the Kinect and original Mac were combinations of stuff that worked at the time of the demo and stuff they hoped to finish by the time they sold. The former didn't deliver, the latter did.
It's clearly bad to overhype a product, but you have to try and reach for what you think you can do even if you're not done yet. And for new product categories you're even more dependent on marketing than for established ones.
You mean "confirm". This website does not do anything to make the product seem not vapourware, and within the context of their entire activity, it can be taken as an evidence for the product being vapourware - after all, if it actually existed, they could've shown someone something.
Nope, not 'confirm' — my 'stunt' in that context was referring to the parent comment's insider source saying they're actively working on a proper demo... Obviously, the webpage in of itself currently could be vaporware, for all we know...
I have heard people say "AR has the huge potential" thing many times, yet VR seems to actually have converted from potential into something interesting -- such as gaming, viewing movies, virtual presence, etc.. while AR by definition is saying that the majority of your experience is reality and that AR is simply some overlay of information into your world and provide less content and be less immersive, but always with you.. that thing already exists and is called a smartphone.. so its unclear how AR breaks away from "just becoming an app on your phone" problem..
What we've seen so far is more toy like. But imagine an AR tutorial app that guides you through replacing the brake pads on your car.
It could point the the exact spot for the next step, instruct you which tool and size to use and all sorts of things assuming you can recognize the objects well enough and a specific tutorial was built for your car. You could even build tutorials by having it observe what you do.
That sort of application is probably pretty far off but having it as a HUD instead of having to pull out your phone every 30 seconds would be super useful.
In the industrial setting some workers are already using Google Glass type devices to have some information readable without pulling out a phone but those don't have any real AR features yet.
I've got a HTC Vive and my expectations were really high due to all these great looking demos. In reality though, there is still today very few engaging content which leads to a lot disappointment. VR overpromised and maybe Magic Leap, while being bold in their initial vision, learned from this and is careful to increase hype before having actual good content. I mean, this doesn't seem to address end users yet.
> In reality though, there is still today very few engaging content which leads to a lot disappointment.
I keep hearing this from some sections of the VR community but I my personal feelings are entirely opposite. I simply don't have enough time for all the good VR content I've got access to. My backlog is growing.
Do you have incredible amounts of free time or do you have very specific tastes? Tilt Brush and Google Earth alone should be enough to keep a normal person entertained for most of their natural life!
Probably a mix of specific taste and the abundance of alternatives to do. Tilt Brush and Google Earth is super fun, but it it wears off. And when it comes to games, there are only so many games I'm interested in. Most Vive games feel more like browser/mobile games to me than the epic PC games I love.
That being said, I just realized that Fallout VR and LA Noire just got released. This is the kind of content I was waiting for and in the case of Magic Leap, it will also take time until somebody invests into building good content for it.
I see we differ then. I'm not interested in VR as another medium for AAA titles. I want to see software that could only ever be in realised in VR.
And I'm quite happy for that software to be shorter and quirkier and less polished for the foreseeable future. Let a thousand flowers bloom. VR should also be bigger than gaming. Gaming would be just one application of VR - not it's raison d'etre.
Anything is better than it becoming a vehicle for annual releases of Call of Duty and FIFA.
My personal experience with the Vive is that there is only a content problem. The tech is really good, even though the screen could be better. It just feels like nobody managed to figure out yet what to do with it.
I keep telling myself that I won't take them seriously as long as there's no public demo, but big serious company who have seen behind closed doors demos keep giving huge chunks of money... They've gotten $2B in funding... with so many companies out there trying to do what Magic Leap is doing, I don't see any reason why VCs would give them so much money over the others. The only plausible explanation is that their secret demo must've been really good.
There is an over-abundance of capital in the economy right now (a big part of the reason why the stock market has gone up so much) so VCs are basically begging* to invest in startups that look even remotely promising.
It's supposed to be shipping in 2018. They could easily have hired a team of top notch creators to showcase some of the capabilities of the device live -even if the device is still not 100% ready- instead of this silly Manhattan project secrecy. I hope they deliver as promised, but something smells fishy.
It's a pity, because unlike VR I think AR has huge potential both for consumer and industrial applications.