* Posts by pravvy

5 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2017

With a warehouse of unsold AR goggles, Magic Leap has a brainwave… let’s rebadge ‘em and sell to business!

pravvy

New Low in Magic Leap Bashing by The Register

At least in past articles, The Register just spinned facts to bash Magic Leap. Now you are outright fabricating facts and need to issue a retraction.

1) Phil Rosedale’s blog article only talks about VR and makes no mention of either AR or Magic Leap.

2) Anyone who has tried Magic Leap knows within 1 second that images are see-though which is one item you think is missing. Begs the question how you can bash Magic Leap so consistently without having actually trying it?

3) If anything, Phil Rosedale would be proud of what Magic Leap is doing with MagicVerse, a direct descendant of Phil’s open-source VRBA project.

Review: Magic Leap and Fantasy Funding Fiasco

pravvy
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Magic Leap Rocks & STOP HATING

How and from whom the money was raised was more spectacular than the $500M headline itself (which is also a big deal of course). The fact that both Alibaba and Google participated rather than sitting out ( or worse, used this D round to sell for their own internal VC fund liquidity event ) shows supreme faith in the company, tech and management.

But the biggest story is that they didn't succumb to grabbing the low hanging fruit of taking a large strategic investor onboard such as AT&T which could have easily pushed this round to $700M or more -- but would have severely hampered future growth prospects of the underlying business since rival telecoms would have refused to partner in the upcoming 5G age when augmented reality will really take off.

The AR industry is structurally setup at this point where heads Magic Leap wins, tails it breaks even. AR glasses will replace or severely dent the smartphone market at some point while Google, Apple and Microsoft have all ceded 95% market share to Magic Leap in the 2018-2019 timeframe by abandoning the market.

Hololens is quickly becoming the next Kinect/Microsoft Phone abandonware boondoggle with Nadella not taking his own advice from his book, Hit Refresh, by pretty much throwing the Hololens developer community under the bus ($3K is a lot of money for indies to have forked out and then canceling the Hololens 2018 version) in favor of its most recent shiny object of Windows Mixed Reality -- seriously I can't even type the words DELL MIXED REALITY without falling asleep--no buzz or excitement at all vs Hololens. Even just today Microsoft announced that Hololens will not be part of the Windows 10 Fall Creators update while Mixed Reality will--pretty shabby stance on top of canceling Hololens 2018; they are going out of their way to signal to developers to abandon all Hololens efforts in favor of the next shiny object which is the most obvious dead end imaginable. Any Indie dev shop is only going to port over Oculus or Vive already in existence rather than waste resources on fresh code for an unreliable Microsoft partner.

Tim Cook has made an epic mistake which will go down in Apple lore as possibly his jumping the shark/ hiring John Scully moment in saying the earliest an Apple Glass Dev kit (not even a 1.0 product) will be available is next decade. With that tepid endorsement of the concept it's likely Apple Glass will be next decade's Apple TV at best, Apple Car at worst. The lack of vision and imagination is mind boggling. Steve Jobs saw the future MAC when visiting Xerox Parc. Cook visited Magic Leap and only could imagine another Google Glass. With 1000 full-time internal developers already currently working on ARKit, Apple could dominate AR Glasses or at least be smart like Facebook and do a buyout and take out a potential competitor. But instead they are IBM giving rise to Microsoft, Yahoo to Google, Oracle to Salesforce--the requisite step for any disruptive force is to treated with disdain by the incumbents so they don't see the threat until it's too late.

Google has finally learned its lessons from blowing $12B on the Motorola acquisition and the ridiculous Google Glass, that they are investing in a competent team building the next big thing rather than making it themselves. Despite having world class technical talent they aren't an organization setup to dominate AR Glasses--kudos to them for realizing that and investing in Magic Leap.

Facebook is going through its own Motorola moment with Oculus. Taking a leading company in the field and finding out that they can't integrate it. Oh well, can't win them all--at least it's only $2B down the drain; plus they were able to learn what not to do in the future (Whatsapp was $19B by comparison).

By 2020, Magic Leap Four should be out, competing with the Apple Dev Kit and whatever new shiny object boondoggle the Microsoft R&D PHd's crank out. With the two year head start in 2018-2019, Magic Leap Four could be the real tipping point to become the defacto IBM PC of the next decade, dominating mindshare if not perhaps marketshare. That will be enough for a healthy IPO in 2021 and a $150B plus market cap by 2025.

Regarding your out of bounds negative commentary on Torch 3D, I just signed up for their Beta and look forward to integrating their APIs into a demo app.

Let's go live now to Magic Leap and... Ah, still making millions from made-up tech

pravvy

Re: Not fake, do your research and stop hating

I'm a filmmaker and techie like you appear to be. I assure you that I don't work for the company. The Register doesn't allow commentary using Facebook login, Twitter login or Discus accounts so I had to create an account just to post.

pravvy
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Re: @pravvy

Nice quote:

"SO yeah.... credibility really means very little in this day and age. Because people get often credited for who they are, not for what they did or have done."

Techcrunch reported that an NBA star loved the Magic Leap demo https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/13/magic-leap-just-had-some-of-its-secrets-spilled-by-andre-iguodala/amp/

and various stars such as British actor Ricky Gervais as well https://www.roadtovr.com/ricky-gervais-says-magic-leap-will-change-world-company-courts-celebs/amp/

It's entirely plausible that non-technical celebrity types can be wowed by a fake demo that they don't understand so view it as more innovative than it really is--but in Magic Leap's case there are technical publications such as Wired and MIT Review whom have seen the demo as well and they would have been able to say if it was fake which they didn't.

Off topic but responding to your comment: Funny coincidence that you mention Solar Roadways, this year, part of our pitch as a finalist for SingularityU was using hybrid roadways, we looked at Solar Roadways which are super efficient but impractical so went with piezoelectric roadways instead; take a look at two pilot projects being funded by the State of California this year https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/infrastructure/good-vibrations-california-to-test-road-vibrations-as-a-power-source

pravvy

Not fake, do your research and stop hating

Many, many credible people have posted publicly about having experienced a working, delightful Magic Leap demo. Yes it remains to be seen if the technology can be miniaturized/commercialized -- but to place them in the same category as companies with no real working demos or patents is a journalistically unfortunate angle for The Register to take.

FYI, I have no affiliation with the company nor have I received a demo but a simple

Twitter search is all it takes to figure out that many people have tried out their product and seemed to like it.

Please print a retraction or update the article with a truthful counterpoint to your opinions.