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Magic Leap CEO Defends His AR Company After Leaked Photo (mashable.com) 62

Saturday Business Insider claimed that augmented reality company Magic Leap was "scrambling to finish a working prototype before an important board meeting next week," publishing a photo described by their source as an early January prototype. An anonymous reader quotes Mashable: The image depicts a man with a kit on his back that looks as if it's in the early stages of development, but [CEO Rony] Abovitz's tweet suggested it was not intended as consumer technology. "The photo you are all excited about is NOT what you think it is," he wrote. "The photo shows an @magicleap R&D test rig where we collect room/space data for our machine vision/machine learning work. We do this in order to understand lighting, texture, various surfaces." As Mashable noted earlier, the leaked photo has done little to assuage fears the company's technology has been overhyped... A December report in The Information raised questions about whether Magic Leap was ready for primetime amid concerns that much of its work could not be commercialised or miniaturised. Two former employees also reportedly told the outlet a promotional video showing the technology in action was in fact created by the special effects company, Weta Workshop.
Magic Leap raised $1.39 billion from investors (including Google), and Abovitz's last tweet Saturday reassured fans that "We will not let you down." Mashable even suggested that "this might just be a bit of clever marketing spin by Magic Leap to greatly lower expectations before unveiling a polished product in the coming months... The worst case scenario is that this does represent the latest version of the company's prototype meant for consumers, in which case there's very little chance we will see a Magic Leap device available to consumers any time in 2017."
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Magic Leap CEO Defends His AR Company After Leaked Photo

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  • Said no investor, ever, when given news the likes of "Abovitz's last tweet Saturday reassured fans that 'We will not let you down.'"

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday February 12, 2017 @10:06AM (#53850825)

    I think it's kinda ironic that the article complains about a product being vaporware but doesn't even talk about WHAT it is supposed to be. I'm used to TFS not even mentioning it, pretty much assuming everyone has heard about some arcane project that is maybe interesting to 5 percent of the audience, but that the articles linked to don't explain it, that's new.

    5 links deep in, we finally learn that it's yet another augmented reality gadget. At least that's what it looks like. Whether it is, I still don't know: All I really got was a YouTube video that had no sound (except some silly elevator music).

    • The second sentence in the first link from the summary says "Here is the first public photo of a working prototype of Magic Leapâ(TM)s portable augmented reality device."

      It's not the author's fault that you skimmed the first article and went click happy until you were "5 links deep in" before you slowed down enough to actually read what was in front of you.

      • First working phrase of that link: "... building technology that "augments" human vision with digital imagery,..." (emph mine)

    • by Tx ( 96709 )

      The whole issue about Magic Leap is that they've been incredibly secretive about what they're actually developing. So the reason the articles don't explain that is because they simply don't know. Many have speculated that it's some kind of light field display [ieee.org], which would be a big deal, because it could solve the issues associated with all current VR headsets caused by the fact that your eyes are focussed on a fixed position screen close to your face, regardless of where in virtual space the VR object you a

      • by FalcDot ( 1224920 ) on Sunday February 12, 2017 @11:26AM (#53851115)

        So there is a non-zero chance that they are building a gizmo that can detect gullible investors?

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Exactly. I read about them a while back... they got their start by marketing to key celebrity 'artists' to build hype. They basically got some rich person's favorite artist to say the guy is a genius, then it snowballed into a 'round of investing'... he did this a couple times.

    • 100% with you. I only entered the comment section to say the same thing, I have no idea what this thing is, I still don't know, for a moment I thought it had to do with Leap Motion device but it is not it. I hope whoever it is that submitted this story is not involved in software development, analysis, architecture and project management.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      This guy has expertly explained not only the Magic Leap product, but more importantly, exactly how it is assumed to work based on some really deep investigation. He's brilliant.

      In 3 easy to view Youtube videos:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBa-668ByAk&t=6s
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0b6IeX_x48&t=33s
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4mq3G6iBks

      The TLDR version... Based on my watching of these videos there's some cool tech in that not so impressive photo. The cables connecting to the headset loo

  • Leak a photo of the current prototype.

  • All I want is an eyetap already. Prism, camera, display... no parallax.

  • Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by XSportSeeker ( 4641865 ) on Sunday February 12, 2017 @12:04PM (#53851311)

    I don't know why people are still reporting on this scam.
    It's simple people: this company scammed people out of their money to pay big bucks for a famous special effects company to produce a fake ad for a product that doesn't exist, because they wanted to scam even more people out of their money. It's also why they keep this stupid "secrecy" thing around the whole deal: because they both want the press to keep talking about it, and because they don't have anything to show.
    The gullible tech press ate the whole shit as if it was some imported chocolate mousse and spit it all over.
    It's not a whole lot different from lots of Kickstarter campaigns. I don't even know why this one is getting so much special treatment.

    Just open the Kickstarter page and search for some ridiculously miraculous products. Or go watch the original Pokemon Go teaser campaign. Magic Leap cannot deliver what they promised because what they promised is impossible. In the most optimal scenario it'll be something like Hololens. But it'll more likely be comparable to lower end AR/VR devices.

    • Yep. This was noticeable since there were no live demos showing the gear itself, just what the user was supposed to see.

      And that was just fx, something anyone can do nowadays just with the right motivation and equipment.

      On this, the only "real deal" AR technology with positional awareness and overlaying virtual 3D images over the real world out there is Microsoft's, and a few upcoming others soon to be released. Which are not as impressive as the Magic Leap "demos", but way more real and existing.
  • by Miamicanes ( 730264 ) on Sunday February 12, 2017 @01:27PM (#53851695)

    This story is insane. Prototypes of things involving emerging technology are NEVER, EVER, **EVER** tiny & compact.

    In the early 1980s, pre-Commodore Amiga showed off their new computer's prototype at Comdex. It was a rack the size of a small refrigerator stuffed with handmade (wire-wrapped) logic boards. Two years later, it was an attractive-looking desktop computer with nifty open space underneath that was big enough to tuck the keyboard into.

    The first version of Android was developed for a device that was a "phone" only in the sense that it could be used to make and receive phone calls, but was REALLY several cubic feet of prototype boards connected with ribbon cables and LITERAL duct tape.

    It would be a HUGE mistake for MagicLeap to prematurely commit to a controller design just for the sake of early miniaturization. I'd rather see them implement the controller as an 802.11ad-connected semi-dumb remote frame buffer, and offload the back-end heavy lifting to a desktop PC that's as big as it needs to be to do its job and impress everyone.

    The fact is, landfills around the world are littered with the corpses of prematurely-optimized hardware that ended up being inadequate for their intended purpose. That's why first-gen routers usually have more ram, faster processors, and better chipsets than second-gen routers... the first-gen ones are slightly over-engineered to give them headroom to handle more advanced capabilities, while the second-gen ones are pruned back to the bare minimum specs capable of running the first-gen model's firmware 9-15 months after release.

    • Prototypes should be designed based on the goals they're supposed to achieve: performance and functionality that approaches the final manufactured unit, but with the flexibility to easily troubleshoot, modify, and reproduce the prototype without requiring several lengthy and expensive manufacturing cycles.

      Believe me, once the finalized design undergoes its first manufacturing cycle, there will be several kinks that need to be debugged and resolved. It's really best to not conjoin those manufacturing issues

  • by golgotha007 ( 62687 ) on Sunday February 12, 2017 @04:30PM (#53852527)

    that puts our arms constantly in the air, swiping at things and moving things around. If you've ever actually done this, you will quickly learn that after 5-10 minutes, your arms become uncomfortably tired.

    Eye candy and practicality seldom go together.

    • I want to do what Keanu Reeves did in Johnny Mnemonic, and there's no amount of facts and reality taking me away from that dream!

      Of courrse it's /s

Factorials were someone's attempt to make math LOOK exciting.

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