sometimes i get tired of all the fakeness in the world. it seems to corrupt every part of society and makes me sick thinking about it. theranos, magic leap, and a lot more. everything seems to be overhyped bs, while the only successful things are essentially avenues to cram ads down your throat and brainwash you to spend money you don't have.
This is just what marketing looks like in the 21st century. You have to have a wow factor for people to notice you. I would suggest never trusting any announcement/trailer/teaser for anything to be honest; their aim is only to show you an 'experience' which entices you, something that makes you want to come back for more and spend money on it.
I think it's certainly been the case with a lot of kickstarter projects and certain startups. There's so much pressure on people to realise short term success, and so many people willing to believe in it.
While true this is really just a response to what the big companies have been doing for a long time. Some off the top of my head: MS Kinect trailer [1], and Hololens [2], also Ubisoft games with realistic graphics at E3 that were later downgraded [3].
I mean Watch Underscore Dogs was trash anyways, I get what you're saying but I almost don't even blame them for the E3 thing because how else were they going to polish that turd?
...and from the video I see that it's not just Watch Underscore Dogs by a long shot! It's weird to me that they keep pulling this nonsense, when amazing graphics are probably one of the biggest draws for Ubisoft Game. Maybe they're just banking on a steady supply of new gamers not savvy enough to realize that all Ubisoft games are Ubisoft Game.
Underscores qua underscores are not a problem. But the underscore in the name of Watch Underscore Dogs is worth calling out for the way it underscores the absurd degree of edgewank throughout the game.
I'd like to break this down a bit. Firstly, why is this so frustrating.
On a practical level, it's frustrating for engineers because to operate as engineers we have to work for these companies. It's not just the fakeness, it's the bad management that comes with it. They dilute the pool of possible good companies that we could work for.
They also increase the cost of doing something actually worth while. Salaries get higher, cost of living increases.
So that's why these companies are annoying to engineers. It's not just people being bitter exactly...
---
The next question is why does this happen?
Firstly, tech investors are not great at DD of science/basic technology startups. Maybe they hire external consultants to do the DD (due diligence). Maybe they rely on their friends (prior investments/contacts). So they roll the dice, invest in some company that looks safe (founders worked a Google etc. etc.) and their friends like.
Then you get one big investor who throws a bunch of cash in. A large number of other investors throw in as well. They assume that first, big investor did the DD.
This is an easy play for the investors. They don't have to do much work. It's easier than say, doing the DD on a smaller seed stage play.
Once it gets bit enough, I guess they assume that they can crush other players in the same area just because they have a stack of cash.
TL;DR: They don't do the DD, it's easier to make big bets than lots of small ones.
It would probably be better for us, if the cash that was thrown at Magic Leap went to fund 2000 seed stage investments. But investors would find that too hard to do...
That's my take anyway. I'd be interested to better understand what others think.
a16z hasn't been too lucky with DD lately. Not just Magic Leap, I've heard that Improbable was struggling to fulfil its promises, and was being sued as a result.
I guess there's something I don't understand. I couldn't find any information about them being sued. I can't figure out who else would sue them for not meeting their targets aside from shareholders who feel they were deceived.
> to operate as engineers we have to work for these companies
Surely you don't mean software engineers. There's a whole big wide world outside the ongoing bubble, and in entire honesty I've never quite found "move to the Valley, work for a startup" to be the no-brainer it's so often been represented. In particular, the quality of life really doesn't seem to be there, at least not reliably; we hear horror stories all the time from people who've gotten hosed in what seem to be the same relatively small set of ways, at a rate that suggests there's more going on than random chance or sour grapes.
And the cost of living in that part of the country is no joke, too. Remote working would solve that, but very few companies take it at all seriously - many fewer than want to be perceived as doing so. It's understandable why they don't, but the transparent duplicity is a bad look. Without remote? Sure, the pay's probably better than you'll find almost anywhere else, but you either plow three quarters of it into cost of living, or spend four hours a day commuting.
Meanwhile, in the "enterprise" companies at which Valley biens-pensants smirk and sneer, one finds often enough that among the various fiefdoms, there's one or two with a savvy director and a team full of smart, capable people who have everything they need for the asking, and whose job is to solve problems the organization would otherwise find entirely intractable - sort of 18F or USDS, if you like, except in an industry context and with less politics to worry about, and as well or better paid. The trick is knowing where to look and how to bring value.
And unicorn valuation isn't the only startup bubble, either. From where I sit, comfortably outside it, the whole tech entrepreneurship scene has gotten amazingly up itself in the last few years, just like it did in the run-up to the last bust. Buying into the mythos might feel nice, but unless you're a founder it also makes you easier to exploit than you might otherwise be, and even if you are, it ties you to a sector that's itself beholden to more or less every vagary of financial fortune. Sure, engineering is a profit center in a company like that, whereas in the enterprise world it's usually a cost center. But next time the market takes a nosedive, who's in better shape? Someone in a profit center of a company that found its runway suddenly shortened to negligibility and collapsed for want of money? Or someone in a cost center of a company with the cash reserves and ample profitability to get through lean times effectively intact?
>Meanwhile, in the "enterprise" companies at which Valley >biens-pensants smirk and sneer, one finds often enough that >among the various fiefdoms, there's one or two with a savvy >director and a team full of smart, capable people who have >everything they need for the asking, and whose job is to >solve problems the organization would otherwise find >entirely intractable - sort of 18F or USDS, if you like, >except in an industry context and with less politics to >worry about, and as well or better paid. The trick is >knowing where to look and how to bring value.
True. But please tell the second part to the story too. Those innovative teams, can discover cold-fusion, and they will be locked in and ignored- or even worser, there idea would be patented to be held hostage in lawyercabinetscryo until a advancing humanity is willing to pay the ransom.
Those startups have only runway to loose and everything to gain- they will not throw away a discovery this way.
I do what I do because I like solving problems. I do it where I do it because I like to have a strong supply of new problems to solve, and because I want to be well and reliably paid for the value I add in so doing.
Discovering and inventing new things hasn't really been a major part of that, because the problems I solve, the problems very large companies tend to have, rarely require it; the question is less one of coming up with novel tech and more one of applying tools and ideas that already exist in ways that are novel to the organization because the relevant knowledge and expertise is hard to come by without specializing in software as a career.
If you want to discover new algorithms or invent the next React or C#, then working for a large corporation outside the tech industry may not be the best option for you. But there are many more kinds of problems to solve than those.
That these guys are a bunch of snake oil merchants has been obvious from day zero. Sometimes the overwhelming stench of bullshit is a little too difficult to ignore.
But one wonders why there has yet to be an exodus of talent from Magic Leap.
I suspect the work is interesting for the engineers but nobody has the heart to tell the C level execs that what they are trying to sell the public is bullshit.
There has already been an exodus of talent. I know one personally, and know of a lot more. They lock them down with non-disclosure settlements. Bad management, internecine politics, the whole caboodle. A pity, because it could have been very good, but they went with exactly the wrong team, and insisted people move from the Bay to Florida, which didn't help with retention.
Are they at least paying you a Bay Area dev salary? Curious if they used retention bonuses with a big cliff? I for one will never take a job with a vesting cliff if I can help it.
>But one wonders why there has yet to be an exodus of talent from Magic Leap.
Was there ever an ingress of talent in the first place? I haven't seen a single technical blog, white paper, conference talk, or anything else of any substance from their engineering department. Every time I see them at a trade show it is nothing but marketing folks with zero technical information. Who is even really working on this?
They don't toot their technical horn, they go for more of the Hollywood flair (they work closely with weta workshop, the guys behind props and CG in Lord of the Rings/District 9 for example). I know some excellent technical people working there, but that side of things is very hush hush.
"And there's another factor involved, which is that you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company. Netscape's early success and rapid growth caused us to stop getting the former and start getting the latter." -JWZ Resignation and Postmortem: https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
For those of you who don't want to waste 6 minutes of your life: Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz trying to play rockstar by starting his talk with 4 minute silly buildup music, then he comes in wearing a space suit trying to look cool and staying silent for another 1 minute trying to buildup to something even more, then just repeats the word "fudge" 15 times accompanied by shitty punk music. Essentially it's just a very long "fuck you everybody".
Ringling College who is sharing the video with us, of course is an institution founded philanthropically in early Sarasota arising from earnings made by the Ringling Bros. Circus.
Long associated with Barnum & Bailey, this is the legendary traveling spectacle whose touring will soon be permanently cancelled for the first time in over 100 years.
Anyway, when it comes to Magic Leap, I don't see any way that PTBarnum would be disappointed in their profitability so far.
Without even touring or entertaining very many people at all, they've brought in enough money to start a number of colleges.
The first video was known to be fake back in 2015, when they released another video that explicitly stated no visual effects were used. And my guess is the second video isn't fake, but it's using their non-miniaturized technology. This is not news.
Unlike Theranos (where people's health was also at stake), if/when Magic Leap fails, their investors will lose their money and capitalism will go on - this is how things are supposed to work.
The problem is that this kind of "learning" experience propagates from CEO talk to CEO talk. Making a whole branch of technology a No-Go-Zone, even if the problems that stopped it, get solved.
"We could do that, and end up like Magic-Leap.." will be the Standard slogan at every pitch.
Fortunately Microsoft is not only working on the same thing but already has a shipping product, so even if Magic Leap goes under I don't think it's going to take AR with it.
The Hololens was pretty crappy, though. The Oculus is a much more refined experience, and even there it's not clear that it's good enough to step out of novelty into mass market. I'd say Oculus is close, and Hololens has a very long way to go.
Are you suggesting that the drone would project into your eye? What would be the advantage of that over wearing a mounted headset? Not saying it's a bad idea, I just don't really get the advantage, and it seems like there'd be some disadvantages (especially the annoying noise).
Yes, I have used the Hololens. It's technically impressive, and the structured light-based environment mapping seems to work well. It's easily the best of the AR bunch that I've played with, but it's still got far too many problems to get past the interesting tech demo stage, and it's nowhere near ready for mainstream adoption. The display quality is somewhere just north of flaming garbage, and it's certainly nowhere near the type of quality they've shown in those CG heavy videos.
I understand that AR and VR are very different challenges, I was simply comparing them as two nascent techs that are frequently talked about together as being upcoming. VR is much closer to being ready for primetime, despite Hololens' release. Even the Oculus DK1 was closer to ready for mass adoption.
And most of /r/oculus would vigorously debate your last sentence since Touch came out, which makes that sentence completely false. I say this as a Vive owner, Touch has taken away the Vive's main advantage.
No - the information from ML boils down to falsehoods - this is not how 'capitalism' should work :)
Granted, it does sometimes happen this way.
More limited investment, with reasonable hype, a longer time frame might have worked better - as a lot of the $$$ spent on ML today will be on marketing, overhead, unecessary staff.
Granted, even if they do go bust, they'll have made some tangible progress that will be leveraged elsewhere.
Google is a big investor - it could be that if ML goes bust, the Google can take hold of the IP, and probably end up hiring a bunch of people and carrying it on. That said, since Alphabet they operate differently.
I believe that will be a lot of frustation when they finally launch something. But I dont believe that Microsoft Hololens has "fallen short" as they say. I believe the Hololens demo was great and transparent on how the tech is, how it shows, what it takes to produce. Not a "magical" new sci-fi world made real, but definitely more close to reality than flying cara.
It's easy to fool those who want to be fooled. The likelyhood that these people developed electronics 10x smaller with 10x performance is roughly the same as my cold fusion reactor in my garage delivers free energy for all. If someone pulled that off they wouldn't need to fleece investors for their money.
Some of these are valid, but some are inevitable for any tech that is actually revolutionary. Magic Leap's actions seem so far to be consistent with both theories. It's kind of unfortunately true that it's impossible to distinguish between the exaggerated-for-media-coverage-sake case and the actually-world-changing-but-really-technically-difficult case.
"In general, signal theory says if you have a good way of proving something and a noisy way of proving something and you choose the noisy way chances are it's because you couldn't do the good way in the first place."
> If you were investing millions into something, would you not request a personal demo where you actually see the demo for yourself, in your own time, and see how it works?
Hololens was always somehow the thing that made me suspicious of Magic Leap. Because Hololens has the smell of "amazing things we can actually do." It is indeed amazing, and at the same time dorky looking and quite imperfect, much like VR is today.
Hololens is where our state of the art is - and I'm quite happy with that, it's imperfect magic! So when someone comes along and essentially says "we're doing all the magical stuff we can do today but somehow removing ALL the really hard limitations, and no we won't tell you how!" it just smells like wish-fulfillment hucksterism. I can just point a finger at Hololens and say "hey, this is what today's reality ACTUALLY looks like."
HoloLens is being pushed with much of the same rigged demos. As a review from a few days ago mentioned-
"Maybe Microsoft is saving all the wow factor for its keynotes, but my demo was a less refined and less capable version of what we've seen in on-stage demos. My experience, while impressive, felt like child's play AR compared to what's been in Microsoft's keynotes."
Microsoft unveiled it well over a year ago, and still when people can actually try the device the demos are a fraction of the myth presented in their keynote. And of course these things always rely upon the development of technology, but we often get 80% and think the last 20% is the easy part when really it's the extraordinarily difficult barrier between realistically credible and a toy.
The projection technology (the field refraction grid) is very interesting, and the environment mapping is fantastic, but the resolution of the device makes the demos farce out of the gate -- the total overlay resolution is 1268x720 max (in most realistic scenes much less), so when you see someone demo something like a web browser in their AR display, if you ever see the demo it's just entirely unusable (far too low of a resolution) unless you move directly in front of the projection occupying the majority of your FOV, at which point what is the point.
The technology will improve, obviously, but right now it definitely falls in the category of gimmick to me, with several generations before it's remotely as usable as being pitched.
It is used by NASA and they are stupid as per your post.
Where did you see the "rigged demos"? It works as shown in the demos if you even understand what it can do and do not. Your 20 minutes on hand demo never shows/teaches you any thing.
It is hardly "used" by NASA. As a conceptual study for the whole premise of AR they have tried it out in concert with Microsoft, but the project has gone entirely silent. And no, it doesn't work as shown in the demos -- it's very low resolution and has movement and 3D mapping issues. It will obviously improve, but I wouldn't be dropping thousands on a first generation unit, as it is certainly money down the toilet.
You are the first one to say it has "3D mapping issues". I can send you links with experts saying Hololens is the holy grail of 3D mapping and tracking.
Sounds like Magic Leap developed schpilkaz in their genektagazoink. The demo was like buttah. Like a big stick of buttah. I love Rony Abovitz, but he's a little ibaboodled in the kebbie. Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping. Discuss.
You see, this is the type of comment that tears me on HN. On one hand I actually lold, on the other, it added nothing but some humor to the discussion. What is the guideline here? We sure don't want to become 'insert failed or failing aggregator here'. Or the race to the bottom, who gets the 1st clever chuckleluck comment in, contest of internet points and paid marketing. So I made this comment instead.
Good meta-discussion. I assumed the article's title was a reference to the SNL skit, but there weren't any more references or allusions to it in the article, so I though other people who didn't recognize the skit might appreciate a reference. I hope my other post linking to their TEDx talk balanced out my frivolity! ;)
I assumed it was Coffee Talk (which once discussed Voltaire's comment [1]), because Dania Beach is near Boca Ratan:
"OK now, this show used to be hosted by my friend Paul Baldwin, but he developed shpilkis in his genechtagazoink. So now he's in Boca Raton, Florida, recovering nicely, thank you very much." -Linda Richman [2]
It doesn't matter if their tech doesn't yet work. Augmented reality is inevitable and someone will make it happen. Now, the logic is that whoever pours the most money into it will win the race and with patents be in a monopoly position. It's a gamble, but they have a likelihood of succeeding with money and hard work. That's what they've sold to their investors.
It seems that putting all your eggs in one tech basket counters that strategy, which is what it appears they did. In an ideal 'throw money at it until it works' situation, you would need to fund multiple new technologies to have a non trivial chance at success.
"Augmented reality is inevitable and someone will make it happen."
True.
"Now, the logic is that whoever pours the most money into it will win the race and with patents be in a monopoly position."
This is not quite true :).
My bet is that the quality of AR that we see in their hype videos will not be possible on a consumer scale until after the core patents have run out :).
This is a 'disruptive' technology but it's still way behind practical applicability.
We see this in every industry - and sometimes it takes quite a long time for products to come to fruition :)
Pokemon Go isn't real AR though, it's just a phone app that uses the device's camera. You need dedicated hardware to do real AR. I'm withholding judgment until I see that.
It mixes a virtual world with the real world; thus augmenting the real world. I would argue that a fine grain occlusion (individual pixels) vs coarse grain (movable display) isn't that big of a difference with immersion. Consider that we are immersed with our phones quite a bit already.
In addition the lack of 3D isn't that big of a deal given the brain fills in the details with other cues. E.g. People that go blind in one eye can adjust quite well to the lack of 3D.
I personally would love a HUD for my sporting activities; e.g. Skully. But my phone is perfectly fine as a daily driver.
Perhaps for gaming, but I see augmented reality's main use in replacing TVs, projectors, monitors, displays, phones. I think VR is for gaming, I think AR will be one of the biggest productivity tools ever created.
The problem is honesty isn't rewarded anymore. Someone working hard will be beaten by someone who tells all the fancy stuff...I know a lot of startups that raised millions, but their tech and growth is totally non-existent. I did some research and a lot of companies have little to no social media presence, yet are "growing" crazy. How do people find them?
Add network effect and you get overly hyped stuff that don't deliver. I wish startup accelerators relied more on experienced, reputed judges in the startup's field instead of growth gimmicks. Online contests/challenges seem to be the way to find really good tech startups.
I see the same phenomenon and think it's the opposite.
Raising millions is not a reward. I understand why you think that way since I used to think that way too. But I learned the hard way that raising money is nothing more than the price you have to pay to get to somewhere you want.
So what IS reward? Obviously, if your business does well and "growing" crazy, that's your reward. That way you didn't even have to give up your control over the company and still managed to outsmart others who wasted tons of money and didn't even get anything done.
That's the reward you get for working hard honestly. I also used to think that honest people never get rewarded, and that was a couple of years ago when I was looking at all the pointless apps getting funded. Now if you look back, none of them are alive. Even the ones that were growing like crazy all die off, because most of the ones that grew like crazy were designed to grow like crazy in a synthetic manner instead of organically growing based on the value they provide to users.
So the lesson is, just look at your customers. If you see that more and more people are using and buying your product, that means you are doing something right. You don't need validation from investors and the press.
p.s. You can buy press anyway. Once you have enough money and traction just hire a PR agency and pitch a story for a guaranteed spot on relevant publications. This is much better than these VC funded startups wasting money doing the PR piece when they have no substance.
They get paid for the X years it takes their startup to crash, probably quite well.
Afterwards, they are considered an "Experienced entrepreneur" and thus more likely to get their foot in the door to more negotiations, given press time etc.
In most cases the companies that fail after X years have been failing for at least X-1 years. This means these guys were under total stress for X-1 years.
One has no idea what that feels like if they haven't gone through the process.
Another thing is, you're pretty much locked into that company for X years. Even if you realize on year 1 that it's not what you started out to build, you still need to go with it, otherwise you're seen as an irresponsible prick, and people won't see you as "experienced entrepreneur". Most of the times what happens is you either trick yourself into thinking that it will work, or compromise your initial vision into building something mediocre that generates money (For example you may start out thinking you will build the next generation social network that will change everything, and end up with a behavioral targeting ad network)
Imagine wasting X-1 years of your life working on something you no longer "truly" believe in. That part is failing.
If you still don't agree, try raising money and starting a company, and work on it for X years. You will understand.
> In most cases the companies that fail after X years have been failing for at least X-1 years. This means these guys were under total stress for X-1 years.
> One has no idea what that feels like if they haven't gone through the process.
> Imagine wasting X-1 years of your life working on something you no longer "truly" believe in. That part is failing.
> If you still don't agree, try raising money and starting a company, and work on it for X years. You will understand.
please, enlighten us with the hardships of being paid lots of funny money, and spending even more funny money, on something you know is going to fail for X-1 years, but you keep doing it anyways because ???
Enlightment is not that easy man, i already mentioned how to get "englightened" if you're so willing to learn: Go ahead and do it yourself and find out.
I have better things to do than trying to enlighten some random guy online.
Have you ever worked hard on something for many years and faced the prospect of it still failing? It's painful to think about your baby dying. Startup founders generally don't do it for the (usually below market) salary.
That definitely reduces the risk vs. funding it yourself, sure, but founders are still investing a large chunk of their life into it, and that's not something people usually breezily write off. Having other people funding it can actually increase the amount of guilt and stress you feel about failing - you let down the people that believed in you. For most people, that hurts.
It's easy to sit on the sidelines and make snide remarks about founders who you think are wasting others' money paying themselves cushy salaries (most pay themselves far below what they'd make at Google), but I don't think you're really in any position to until you've put yourself out there in some similar fashion.
Benedict Evans doesn't seem like the kind of guy to fall for BS though, let alone defend it. And surely at least one of their investors had the technical due diligence capability to investigate how much computing power is in the demo "rigs" and be able to know if such power can be "miniaturized" into a consumer product by year X, perhaps allowing for a little software optimization on the way too.
I think what's missing from this discussion is the demo is apparently really, really good. Google didn't put ~$500m, and Alibaba something like $800m, just on a whim, or some investment thesis. And everyone I've spoken to who's gotten the demo is a believer.
I think this article suffers from an overly binary view of technology -- if it isn't market ready, it's vaporware. No, there's probably some real tech there (aforementioned demo), but miniaturizing / productizing is still a risk. I think the blowback has something to do with the marketing itself, and Abovitz's amazing idiosyncracies. Neither of those indicate anything about the tech, but (absent any public information) it helps fuel the hate.
And from what I understand about their likely approach, it's definitely more aggressive than the HoloLens. I don't personally think that nearfield focus in a headset is that valuable, but that's just a guess. If light field displays are the tech that takes AR over the top -- from curiosity to a new computing platform -- then Magic Leap is really well positioned, vis a vis a large lead and big IP portfolio.
Also, with ~$1.4 bn raised, they're too big to fail.
You know... this thesis that they've raised 1.1BUSD so it /must/ be good just doesn't hold water for me.
It's almost an argument from authority, and it's not very useful. In particular, investors have made large investments in the past which it turns out did not have a strong technical foundation. So there's track record here.
Yes, there's obviously something. There's obviously a team of people doing something. That's not the argument, the argument is that a 1.1B USD investment isn't really a reasonable thing to do (and that it harms the engineering environment as I noted below).
While I think the money raised is a vote of confidence from the investors -- and it's only a vote -- my point about "too big to fail" is actually more a sunk-cost argument. With that much funding, the worst-case glide path for Magic Leap might be to stumble along, sucking in continuation funding until it gets a product to market. (It's no Theranos.)
To be clear, I'm not making predictions about ML specifically. I don't have a clue about what they're doing. My general point is that huge sums of money have both momentum and gravity of their own. (I'm not saying this is rational, good, or just -- just that it seems to be true.)
How often do institutional investors fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy? If you don't meet your milestones, you're probably not getting more money from the same investors. VC's make a lot of mistakes, but throwing good money after bad seems pretty rare to me.
When developing a new basic technology the milestones are often vague, and they're generally not open to DD. So hitting milestones in taken on trust and open to interpretation quite often.
Sink cost doesn't work quite the same way. It's more that they evaluate the investment as good because someone else put in a bunch of money (and they expect know what they're doing/did good DD).
I can agree that many investors will assume that because other firms invested, that is a "signal" that they use to invest themselves, and in that sense raising money can give you momentum. But I disagree that that is the same thing as the sunk cost fallacy. What I am claiming is that investors are not likely to reinvest once they realize the company is not performing as expected. It's only if they've spent their own money, and then put more money in a subsequent round that they are prey to the sunk cost fallacy.
Right, my comment wasn't on the last statement in your comment ("they're too big to fail"), but the bulk of it motivated by "Google didn't put ~$500m, and Alibaba something like $800m, just on a whim".
Yea, they might well use the money for /something/ useful. The might use it to acquire a bunch of other companies.
The question is, is this 1.4B USD more or less useful than 500K USD put toward the right idea.
Right. I thought it was significant that the two lead investors are strategic (the first big tranche came from Google, not GV), so there's even less signaling there.
As for $1.4B vs $500K... they're different species of investment animal. The people making the hundred-million dollar decisions aren't prepared to make hundred-thousand dollar decisions. So I don't think those huge investments are actually replacing or crowding out seed funding (especially if a highly-funded company like ML can then buy a bunch of seed-funded companies, returning liquidity to the seed market).
The only thing that's weird about it is money is fungible, so the two are truly equivalent... just not commutable. Could those billions have been a shower of seed investments instead? I dunno; this is one of those things that makes me scratch my head and shrug. I don't know enough about the history of finance, and venture finance in particular, to weigh in on the logic (or forces of nature, or chance) that led to this structure, but it seems to make sense except when it doesn't. (/hedge)
Well, perhaps think of it another way. Those billions are mostly going toward staffing costs (I would guess? If not direct employees then via semiconductor fabs etc).
Would that engineer time be better spent proving out a bunch of smaller speculative ideas rather than throwing it all behind one speculative idea.
That's the crux of it really. We could be spending our engineering time better. Maybe not funding 1000 smaller projects, but even 100 might be better.
I understand that the current investment structure probably wont support that, but it seems unfortunate.
Particularly when the large projects that engineering time gets thrown at are large, very speculative projects with likely poor DD like Magic Leap (or whoever else).
Interesting because this is the same thing I've seen having worked for my first startup. They don't want much money, and want to keep it lean, yet that for some reason turns investors away because they're used to putting in millions and millions.
How do you keep the size small, yet still get the funding you desperately need?
Your faith in Google and Alibaba's judgment is weird to me. Google squandered a lot more than $500 million on terrible projects in the past (Glass and Plus for example.) I see no reason to think Alibaba is run by infallible geniuses either.
They may indeed have had a very slick demo. That doesn't mean the tech is anything special. That story has happened many times.
There's also no such thing as too big to fail.
People made all the same points you're making about Theranos.
You're right that I'm assuming there's a thorough DD process associated with those investments. It's possible ML just showed them smoke and mirrors, too. But I don't think so (partially because I've spoken with people who've seen the demo -- they're under airtight NDA, but they're clearly not skeptical of the company).
After some introspection about why I think this way, perhaps it's the sum of money that makes it seem less risky... and but it could be an artifact of scale: most investments of that size are growth capital or PE. Instead, we're seeing risk capital assigned to a potentially enormous market, so it's scaled up, too. Almost like the world's biggest seed funding? (Take that, Clinkle!)
Friendly pedantic usage note: you mean by means of or some synonym (via perhaps?), not vis-à-vis. The latter literally means “face to face”, but can more broadly be used to mean something like “compared to” or “in relation to”. Your use here is unidiomatic/ungrammatical.
You're right, thanks! I'm usually the one with the grammar pedantries, but I have a lot of blind spots. I'll leave it uncorrected as a warning to the masses...
It sounds like Magic Leap has already given up on marketing whatever it is that they have been demoing. The Information reporter who managed to see the demo without signing the NDA said...
"The demos that I tried had some good attributes and some bad. The good - they were high resolution and they were able to focus the images at any depth - but only one focal depth at a time - so that they appeared very clear even when they were very close up. That said, the demos used a completely different type of technology from what Magic Leap ultimately wants to build. "
"Oh, and as I mentioned in the article, the bad was that the objects didn't stick very well. They were blurry and jittery when I moved my head, despite the fact that the device was connected to a desktop computer. That was one of the most difficult parts of building the HoloLens, but Magic Leap said it would figure that out on its final device. "
Facebook bought Oculus for 2 billion, and what were they buying there? Oculus had a prototype cobbled together using off the shelf parts by a teenager in his garage, a successful kickstarter campaign, and John Carmack jumped on board.
And that made Oculus worth two thousand million dollars to Zuckerberg.
The acquisition sent a strong signal, though. Shortly afterwards a bevy of competitors, big and small, started throwing out offerings.
Maybe signalling is the only reason to make these outrageous investments. Google thinks AR is important, a massive bid on an early frontrunner can kickstart an arms race which generates talent and knowledge, and even if ML fails, so long as AR in general succeeds, a consumer tech company such as Google will be able to benefit from it.
And then I got to try it two days ago. And it was decidedly the worst AR experience I've ever had.
I have a laser-cut box of acrylic from a Kickstarter here called the Seebright Ripple that was basically "Google Cardboard for AR" that I'm about to throw away and even that was a better experience.
You can't trust first-time user reactions to mixed-reality technologies. They get lost in the concept that they are seeing any image at all. They don't know the competitor devices on the market, and don't have any comparison to be made to properly evaluate the object.
In the Meta 2's case, the only thing they had over the Hololens was wider FOV. In every other aspect, it was worse: heavier, tethered to a computer, not adjustable enough to make the image comfortably visible, extremely bad tracking, extremely bad hand gesture input. And yet, Robert Scoble thinks this is the most important product demo he's ever seen. They could have gone out onto the conference floor at where we were and found better tracking running on an iPad [0]. It was embarrassingly bad.
So what is the Magic Leap? We won't know until they actually show us. There hasn't been any real evidence on it yet.
[0] And at this point, if you're going to be tethered to a PC, you might as well just use Vive's Lighthouse tracking. Save yourself the time, money, and bad customer reactions.
I agree that Google and Alibaba pouring on hundreds of millions adds credibility. But my skepticism is more banal: I've never seen a successful technology startup built this way.
Startups need to be nimble. When you raise 1.4 billion from the outset and hire hundreds of employees, you quickly build an internal bureaucracy. That's a hard ship to steer.
Most startups need to make course corrections, both big and small, before they find product/market fit. The political & psychological difficulty of those corrections becomes quite high when you have 100's of employees.
Investment dollars are like gasoline. Too much too early and you can actually drown out the flame.
> Also, with ~$1.4 bn raised, they're too big to fail.
So many companies have raised hundreds of millions/billions of dollars and then either completely blew up or became a shell of their former selves. Nothing is too big to fail, and that mentality is toxic.
Sounds like Magic Leap is making the same prelaunch communication errors than Hello Games did with No Man's Sky : creating high expectations without showing much, which causes expectation to build up when people imagination feels the gaps, and cause backslash in the shape of frustrations.
But to be fair, author does the exact same thing than he is accusing Magic Leap of : making claims without displaying anything to back them up. He states that Magic Leap won't happen, just like flying cars. Based on what, except his frustration of not seeing the product? Same there : "The truth is that Magic Leap cannot get its huge prototype working in a much, much smaller version". Starting a sentence with "The truth is" doesn't make it true by itself, we need evidences.
As far as I know, maybe author is stating exactly what will happen, but I can't agree with him given so few evidences.
It's unlikely that 500m or 800m investment is 1.) all in cash or 2.) given out on day 1. If there are proper investor controls in place, cash is likely staged in and noncash vests over time as milestones are hit. At least, I hope that is the way it is setup...
They have some interesting, cool tech. It may not be miniaturizable (or it may be, dunno). But the hype about them is way too big. They have essentially put themselves in very tough spot.
But why do people think it can project dark?! I understand the dimly lit room demo video, where the ML graphics are all brighter than the environment, but how can you make dark whaleskin over light timber flooring by adding light?
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] thread[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2qlHoxPioM
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aThCr0PsyuA
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNter0oEYxc
...and from the video I see that it's not just Watch Underscore Dogs by a long shot! It's weird to me that they keep pulling this nonsense, when amazing graphics are probably one of the biggest draws for Ubisoft Game. Maybe they're just banking on a steady supply of new gamers not savvy enough to realize that all Ubisoft games are Ubisoft Game.
On a practical level, it's frustrating for engineers because to operate as engineers we have to work for these companies. It's not just the fakeness, it's the bad management that comes with it. They dilute the pool of possible good companies that we could work for.
They also increase the cost of doing something actually worth while. Salaries get higher, cost of living increases.
So that's why these companies are annoying to engineers. It's not just people being bitter exactly...
---
The next question is why does this happen?
Firstly, tech investors are not great at DD of science/basic technology startups. Maybe they hire external consultants to do the DD (due diligence). Maybe they rely on their friends (prior investments/contacts). So they roll the dice, invest in some company that looks safe (founders worked a Google etc. etc.) and their friends like.
Then you get one big investor who throws a bunch of cash in. A large number of other investors throw in as well. They assume that first, big investor did the DD.
This is an easy play for the investors. They don't have to do much work. It's easier than say, doing the DD on a smaller seed stage play.
Once it gets bit enough, I guess they assume that they can crush other players in the same area just because they have a stack of cash.
TL;DR: They don't do the DD, it's easier to make big bets than lots of small ones.
It would probably be better for us, if the cash that was thrown at Magic Leap went to fund 2000 seed stage investments. But investors would find that too hard to do...
That's my take anyway. I'd be interested to better understand what others think.
Suing them seem like an odd thing to do.
Surely you don't mean software engineers. There's a whole big wide world outside the ongoing bubble, and in entire honesty I've never quite found "move to the Valley, work for a startup" to be the no-brainer it's so often been represented. In particular, the quality of life really doesn't seem to be there, at least not reliably; we hear horror stories all the time from people who've gotten hosed in what seem to be the same relatively small set of ways, at a rate that suggests there's more going on than random chance or sour grapes.
And the cost of living in that part of the country is no joke, too. Remote working would solve that, but very few companies take it at all seriously - many fewer than want to be perceived as doing so. It's understandable why they don't, but the transparent duplicity is a bad look. Without remote? Sure, the pay's probably better than you'll find almost anywhere else, but you either plow three quarters of it into cost of living, or spend four hours a day commuting.
Meanwhile, in the "enterprise" companies at which Valley biens-pensants smirk and sneer, one finds often enough that among the various fiefdoms, there's one or two with a savvy director and a team full of smart, capable people who have everything they need for the asking, and whose job is to solve problems the organization would otherwise find entirely intractable - sort of 18F or USDS, if you like, except in an industry context and with less politics to worry about, and as well or better paid. The trick is knowing where to look and how to bring value.
And unicorn valuation isn't the only startup bubble, either. From where I sit, comfortably outside it, the whole tech entrepreneurship scene has gotten amazingly up itself in the last few years, just like it did in the run-up to the last bust. Buying into the mythos might feel nice, but unless you're a founder it also makes you easier to exploit than you might otherwise be, and even if you are, it ties you to a sector that's itself beholden to more or less every vagary of financial fortune. Sure, engineering is a profit center in a company like that, whereas in the enterprise world it's usually a cost center. But next time the market takes a nosedive, who's in better shape? Someone in a profit center of a company that found its runway suddenly shortened to negligibility and collapsed for want of money? Or someone in a cost center of a company with the cash reserves and ample profitability to get through lean times effectively intact?
True. But please tell the second part to the story too. Those innovative teams, can discover cold-fusion, and they will be locked in and ignored- or even worser, there idea would be patented to be held hostage in lawyercabinetscryo until a advancing humanity is willing to pay the ransom.
Those startups have only runway to loose and everything to gain- they will not throw away a discovery this way.
Discovering and inventing new things hasn't really been a major part of that, because the problems I solve, the problems very large companies tend to have, rarely require it; the question is less one of coming up with novel tech and more one of applying tools and ideas that already exist in ways that are novel to the organization because the relevant knowledge and expertise is hard to come by without specializing in software as a career.
If you want to discover new algorithms or invent the next React or C#, then working for a large corporation outside the tech industry may not be the best option for you. But there are many more kinds of problems to solve than those.
I suspect the work is interesting for the engineers but nobody has the heart to tell the C level execs that what they are trying to sell the public is bullshit.
People get locked in, family commitments etc. etc.
Lower employment risk due to more high paying jobs and increased job liquidity.
Living somewhere cheap, where you can get occasional well paid work and save money can also work.
Looking for an out in FL now -- finding it very hard to maintain salary. May move back to west coast, but not quite ready for that yet.
Was there ever an ingress of talent in the first place? I haven't seen a single technical blog, white paper, conference talk, or anything else of any substance from their engineering department. Every time I see them at a trade show it is nothing but marketing folks with zero technical information. Who is even really working on this?
Mostly because they are getting paid :).
And it's not entirely implausible that they get 'something' to work, and are able to sell that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...
Long associated with Barnum & Bailey, this is the legendary traveling spectacle whose touring will soon be permanently cancelled for the first time in over 100 years.
Anyway, when it comes to Magic Leap, I don't see any way that PTBarnum would be disappointed in their profitability so far.
Without even touring or entertaining very many people at all, they've brought in enough money to start a number of colleges.
TEDxSarasota [1] => Saratosa, Florida [2] => Ringling College of Art & Design [3] => Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus [4] => P T Barnum [5] => Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College [6] => Magic Leap [7]
[1] http://www.tedxsarasota.com/surprises-abound-in-this-multime...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarasota,_Florida
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringling_College_of_Art_and_De...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringling_Bros._and_Barnum_%26_...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringling_Bros._and_Barnum_%26_...
[7] https://www.magicleap.com
though at least the latter has a proper, released product...
[1] https://johnrockefeller.net/leap-motion-2/
Unlike Theranos (where people's health was also at stake), if/when Magic Leap fails, their investors will lose their money and capitalism will go on - this is how things are supposed to work.
"We could do that, and end up like Magic-Leap.." will be the Standard slogan at every pitch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_retinal_display
Comparing AR device with VR device itself is not correct. Every one in VR world knows HTC Vive has far superior experience than Rift.
I understand that AR and VR are very different challenges, I was simply comparing them as two nascent techs that are frequently talked about together as being upcoming. VR is much closer to being ready for primetime, despite Hololens' release. Even the Oculus DK1 was closer to ready for mass adoption.
And most of /r/oculus would vigorously debate your last sentence since Touch came out, which makes that sentence completely false. I say this as a Vive owner, Touch has taken away the Vive's main advantage.
No - the information from ML boils down to falsehoods - this is not how 'capitalism' should work :)
Granted, it does sometimes happen this way.
More limited investment, with reasonable hype, a longer time frame might have worked better - as a lot of the $$$ spent on ML today will be on marketing, overhead, unecessary staff.
Granted, even if they do go bust, they'll have made some tangible progress that will be leveraged elsewhere.
Google is a big investor - it could be that if ML goes bust, the Google can take hold of the IP, and probably end up hiring a bunch of people and carrying it on. That said, since Alphabet they operate differently.
Yes, that's how capitalism works (technically, America's mixed market).
Now, if Magic Leap were a public company that lied to the public, yes I would be totally in favor of regulatory/civil, maybe criminal, investigations.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aThCr0PsyuA
> - Refusing to give a launch date
> ...
> - Confusing working hard with making progress
Some of these are valid, but some are inevitable for any tech that is actually revolutionary. Magic Leap's actions seem so far to be consistent with both theories. It's kind of unfortunately true that it's impossible to distinguish between the exaggerated-for-media-coverage-sake case and the actually-world-changing-but-really-technically-difficult case.
> If you were investing millions into something, would you not request a personal demo where you actually see the demo for yourself, in your own time, and see how it works?
I know I would.
https://twitter.com/rabovitz/status/807077358624772098?ref_s...
There are drawings of something more helmet like in their patents, like this one: http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?Docid=D0758367&homeurl=http%3A%...
http://gizmodo.com/magic-leap-ripped-off-those-awesome-ui-co...
Hololens is where our state of the art is - and I'm quite happy with that, it's imperfect magic! So when someone comes along and essentially says "we're doing all the magical stuff we can do today but somehow removing ALL the really hard limitations, and no we won't tell you how!" it just smells like wish-fulfillment hucksterism. I can just point a finger at Hololens and say "hey, this is what today's reality ACTUALLY looks like."
"Maybe Microsoft is saving all the wow factor for its keynotes, but my demo was a less refined and less capable version of what we've seen in on-stage demos. My experience, while impressive, felt like child's play AR compared to what's been in Microsoft's keynotes."
Microsoft unveiled it well over a year ago, and still when people can actually try the device the demos are a fraction of the myth presented in their keynote. And of course these things always rely upon the development of technology, but we often get 80% and think the last 20% is the easy part when really it's the extraordinarily difficult barrier between realistically credible and a toy.
The projection technology (the field refraction grid) is very interesting, and the environment mapping is fantastic, but the resolution of the device makes the demos farce out of the gate -- the total overlay resolution is 1268x720 max (in most realistic scenes much less), so when you see someone demo something like a web browser in their AR display, if you ever see the demo it's just entirely unusable (far too low of a resolution) unless you move directly in front of the projection occupying the majority of your FOV, at which point what is the point.
The technology will improve, obviously, but right now it definitely falls in the category of gimmick to me, with several generations before it's remotely as usable as being pitched.
Where did you see the "rigged demos"? It works as shown in the demos if you even understand what it can do and do not. Your 20 minutes on hand demo never shows/teaches you any thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJkANps0Qw
"OK now, this show used to be hosted by my friend Paul Baldwin, but he developed shpilkis in his genechtagazoink. So now he's in Boca Raton, Florida, recovering nicely, thank you very much." -Linda Richman [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_Talk#Discussion_topics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_Talk#Mannerisms
True.
"Now, the logic is that whoever pours the most money into it will win the race and with patents be in a monopoly position."
This is not quite true :).
My bet is that the quality of AR that we see in their hype videos will not be possible on a consumer scale until after the core patents have run out :).
This is a 'disruptive' technology but it's still way behind practical applicability.
We see this in every industry - and sometimes it takes quite a long time for products to come to fruition :)
In addition the lack of 3D isn't that big of a deal given the brain fills in the details with other cues. E.g. People that go blind in one eye can adjust quite well to the lack of 3D.
I personally would love a HUD for my sporting activities; e.g. Skully. But my phone is perfectly fine as a daily driver.
Add network effect and you get overly hyped stuff that don't deliver. I wish startup accelerators relied more on experienced, reputed judges in the startup's field instead of growth gimmicks. Online contests/challenges seem to be the way to find really good tech startups.
Raising millions is not a reward. I understand why you think that way since I used to think that way too. But I learned the hard way that raising money is nothing more than the price you have to pay to get to somewhere you want.
So what IS reward? Obviously, if your business does well and "growing" crazy, that's your reward. That way you didn't even have to give up your control over the company and still managed to outsmart others who wasted tons of money and didn't even get anything done.
That's the reward you get for working hard honestly. I also used to think that honest people never get rewarded, and that was a couple of years ago when I was looking at all the pointless apps getting funded. Now if you look back, none of them are alive. Even the ones that were growing like crazy all die off, because most of the ones that grew like crazy were designed to grow like crazy in a synthetic manner instead of organically growing based on the value they provide to users.
So the lesson is, just look at your customers. If you see that more and more people are using and buying your product, that means you are doing something right. You don't need validation from investors and the press.
p.s. You can buy press anyway. Once you have enough money and traction just hire a PR agency and pitch a story for a guaranteed spot on relevant publications. This is much better than these VC funded startups wasting money doing the PR piece when they have no substance.
They get paid for the X years it takes their startup to crash, probably quite well.
Afterwards, they are considered an "Experienced entrepreneur" and thus more likely to get their foot in the door to more negotiations, given press time etc.
What part of this is failing?
One has no idea what that feels like if they haven't gone through the process.
Another thing is, you're pretty much locked into that company for X years. Even if you realize on year 1 that it's not what you started out to build, you still need to go with it, otherwise you're seen as an irresponsible prick, and people won't see you as "experienced entrepreneur". Most of the times what happens is you either trick yourself into thinking that it will work, or compromise your initial vision into building something mediocre that generates money (For example you may start out thinking you will build the next generation social network that will change everything, and end up with a behavioral targeting ad network)
Imagine wasting X-1 years of your life working on something you no longer "truly" believe in. That part is failing.
If you still don't agree, try raising money and starting a company, and work on it for X years. You will understand.
> One has no idea what that feels like if they haven't gone through the process.
> Imagine wasting X-1 years of your life working on something you no longer "truly" believe in. That part is failing.
> If you still don't agree, try raising money and starting a company, and work on it for X years. You will understand.
please, enlighten us with the hardships of being paid lots of funny money, and spending even more funny money, on something you know is going to fail for X-1 years, but you keep doing it anyways because ???
I have better things to do than trying to enlighten some random guy online.
Not with someone else paying for it, and knowing I'll still be well-regarded even if it fails.
It's easy to sit on the sidelines and make snide remarks about founders who you think are wasting others' money paying themselves cushy salaries (most pay themselves far below what they'd make at Google), but I don't think you're really in any position to until you've put yourself out there in some similar fashion.
Wait. Are you talking about politics now? :)
I think this article suffers from an overly binary view of technology -- if it isn't market ready, it's vaporware. No, there's probably some real tech there (aforementioned demo), but miniaturizing / productizing is still a risk. I think the blowback has something to do with the marketing itself, and Abovitz's amazing idiosyncracies. Neither of those indicate anything about the tech, but (absent any public information) it helps fuel the hate.
And from what I understand about their likely approach, it's definitely more aggressive than the HoloLens. I don't personally think that nearfield focus in a headset is that valuable, but that's just a guess. If light field displays are the tech that takes AR over the top -- from curiosity to a new computing platform -- then Magic Leap is really well positioned, vis a vis a large lead and big IP portfolio.
Also, with ~$1.4 bn raised, they're too big to fail.
It's almost an argument from authority, and it's not very useful. In particular, investors have made large investments in the past which it turns out did not have a strong technical foundation. So there's track record here.
Yes, there's obviously something. There's obviously a team of people doing something. That's not the argument, the argument is that a 1.1B USD investment isn't really a reasonable thing to do (and that it harms the engineering environment as I noted below).
To be clear, I'm not making predictions about ML specifically. I don't have a clue about what they're doing. My general point is that huge sums of money have both momentum and gravity of their own. (I'm not saying this is rational, good, or just -- just that it seems to be true.)
Sink cost doesn't work quite the same way. It's more that they evaluate the investment as good because someone else put in a bunch of money (and they expect know what they're doing/did good DD).
Yea, they might well use the money for /something/ useful. The might use it to acquire a bunch of other companies.
The question is, is this 1.4B USD more or less useful than 500K USD put toward the right idea.
As for $1.4B vs $500K... they're different species of investment animal. The people making the hundred-million dollar decisions aren't prepared to make hundred-thousand dollar decisions. So I don't think those huge investments are actually replacing or crowding out seed funding (especially if a highly-funded company like ML can then buy a bunch of seed-funded companies, returning liquidity to the seed market).
The only thing that's weird about it is money is fungible, so the two are truly equivalent... just not commutable. Could those billions have been a shower of seed investments instead? I dunno; this is one of those things that makes me scratch my head and shrug. I don't know enough about the history of finance, and venture finance in particular, to weigh in on the logic (or forces of nature, or chance) that led to this structure, but it seems to make sense except when it doesn't. (/hedge)
Would that engineer time be better spent proving out a bunch of smaller speculative ideas rather than throwing it all behind one speculative idea.
That's the crux of it really. We could be spending our engineering time better. Maybe not funding 1000 smaller projects, but even 100 might be better.
I understand that the current investment structure probably wont support that, but it seems unfortunate.
Particularly when the large projects that engineering time gets thrown at are large, very speculative projects with likely poor DD like Magic Leap (or whoever else).
How do you keep the size small, yet still get the funding you desperately need?
They may indeed have had a very slick demo. That doesn't mean the tech is anything special. That story has happened many times.
There's also no such thing as too big to fail.
People made all the same points you're making about Theranos.
After some introspection about why I think this way, perhaps it's the sum of money that makes it seem less risky... and but it could be an artifact of scale: most investments of that size are growth capital or PE. Instead, we're seeing risk capital assigned to a potentially enormous market, so it's scaled up, too. Almost like the world's biggest seed funding? (Take that, Clinkle!)
"The demos that I tried had some good attributes and some bad. The good - they were high resolution and they were able to focus the images at any depth - but only one focal depth at a time - so that they appeared very clear even when they were very close up. That said, the demos used a completely different type of technology from what Magic Leap ultimately wants to build. "
"Oh, and as I mentioned in the article, the bad was that the objects didn't stick very well. They were blurry and jittery when I moved my head, despite the fact that the device was connected to a desktop computer. That was one of the most difficult parts of building the HoloLens, but Magic Leap said it would figure that out on its final device. "
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicleap/comments/5hgtll/im_reed_a...
And that made Oculus worth two thousand million dollars to Zuckerberg.
The acquisition sent a strong signal, though. Shortly afterwards a bevy of competitors, big and small, started throwing out offerings.
Maybe signalling is the only reason to make these outrageous investments. Google thinks AR is important, a massive bid on an early frontrunner can kickstart an arms race which generates talent and knowledge, and even if ML fails, so long as AR in general succeeds, a consumer tech company such as Google will be able to benefit from it.
In the case of the HTC Vive, given the timings of product development cycles and marketing campaigns, that was just a coincidence.
I've been hearing the same things about the Meta 2 (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/meta-view#/entity) for months now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxwrXacMe6Y
And then I got to try it two days ago. And it was decidedly the worst AR experience I've ever had.
I have a laser-cut box of acrylic from a Kickstarter here called the Seebright Ripple that was basically "Google Cardboard for AR" that I'm about to throw away and even that was a better experience.
You can't trust first-time user reactions to mixed-reality technologies. They get lost in the concept that they are seeing any image at all. They don't know the competitor devices on the market, and don't have any comparison to be made to properly evaluate the object.
In the Meta 2's case, the only thing they had over the Hololens was wider FOV. In every other aspect, it was worse: heavier, tethered to a computer, not adjustable enough to make the image comfortably visible, extremely bad tracking, extremely bad hand gesture input. And yet, Robert Scoble thinks this is the most important product demo he's ever seen. They could have gone out onto the conference floor at where we were and found better tracking running on an iPad [0]. It was embarrassingly bad.
So what is the Magic Leap? We won't know until they actually show us. There hasn't been any real evidence on it yet.
[0] And at this point, if you're going to be tethered to a PC, you might as well just use Vive's Lighthouse tracking. Save yourself the time, money, and bad customer reactions.
Startups need to be nimble. When you raise 1.4 billion from the outset and hire hundreds of employees, you quickly build an internal bureaucracy. That's a hard ship to steer.
Most startups need to make course corrections, both big and small, before they find product/market fit. The political & psychological difficulty of those corrections becomes quite high when you have 100's of employees.
Investment dollars are like gasoline. Too much too early and you can actually drown out the flame.
So many companies have raised hundreds of millions/billions of dollars and then either completely blew up or became a shell of their former selves. Nothing is too big to fail, and that mentality is toxic.
Rony Abovitz must be a great salesman.
But to be fair, author does the exact same thing than he is accusing Magic Leap of : making claims without displaying anything to back them up. He states that Magic Leap won't happen, just like flying cars. Based on what, except his frustration of not seeing the product? Same there : "The truth is that Magic Leap cannot get its huge prototype working in a much, much smaller version". Starting a sentence with "The truth is" doesn't make it true by itself, we need evidences.
As far as I know, maybe author is stating exactly what will happen, but I can't agree with him given so few evidences.
Based on this cheap setup I'm confident we'll see something mind blowing in the near future.