In case anyone is wondering, this really isn’t that unusual.
For the longest time you couldn’t get most console dev kits without a business address and very strict guidelines on a separate lockable space for the hardware.
I think there’s been some relaxation on that more recently (I know at least with Nintendo there has), but it’s not that odd that a supposedly earth shattering technology have those guidelines.
Yup! I remember getting some console dev kits early on that had a number of restrictions on them, like:
* Devices must be kept in an area with restricted access to those on the NDA; or
* Devices must be kept in a locked office; or
* Device must be chained to the desk; or
* Device must be covered with a cardboard box at all times
Keeping AR glasses in a safe doesn’t seem too outlandish.
Yup, I worked on a hardware project at Google that eventually became Android TV, and when we sent out hardware units they were hand-delivered by Google employees in GPS-tracked, locked Pelican cases. Upon receipt, devs had to keep it in a safe when they weren't working on it, and if I remember correctly, we gave them little decoy cardboard boxes to put over it to hide the case design from passers-by while it wasn't in the safe. Sending out devkits always feels very "briefcase handcuffed to a dude in a suit".
I work in this industry, and every early devkit device we've received from the manufacturer has come with these kinds of constraints for us. I would have been much more shocked if Magic Leap didn't require these kinds of things of its early devkit recipients. And I'm a big ML skeptic.
There were significant restrictions and weird PR "no go" topics with the Hololens as it was being developed. For a long time they didn't even allow photography of the physical hololens (as it was still in flux).
Why can't it be a legitimate concern, where they want to maximize the amount of development time before their competitors get their hands on them and start reverse engineering? This isn't a lightly modified PC meant to run games, this is whole new tech that could spawn a potentially huge new market if it turns out to be good. There's a lot at stake.
We have this amazing pin-drop blood testing device. But no releasing papers for peer review is too risky. It's too revolutionary! No, don't ask us how it works, we don't even reveal it to family it's that amazing.
Theranos was able to fool people by not allowing their system into 3rd party hands and doing all of the tests behind closed doors, mostly using 3rd party existing industry machines.
I don't see how that analogy applies here when the entire device is being given to actual companies and with restrictions merely because Magic Leap wants to control the full PR experience when the product launches.
That PR will come out in some fashion in the near future, and it won't require a whistleblower within the company to leak it and risk losing their jobs.
I've worked with quite a few console dev kits with serious restrictions, including needing to be in windowless rooms with locking doors. Usually that level of security was at the pre official public announcement stage though. It's a little unusual to have that level of security after the company has done a big PR push showing off pictures of the 'secret' hardware.
Exactly. One of the big concerns for me is the extent to which their work-in-isolation approach has baked in untested market and design hypotheses. By the time they test them in the real world, it could be too late to recover.
I think one of the superpowers a startup has is that early on nobody gives a fuck what you're doing, so you're free to iterate quickly and boldly. You find out which of your brilliant ideas are brilliant and which are big mistakes.
Magic Leap's hype/secrecy combo really cuts against that. Apple gets away with that because a) they have more money than God, and b) they mostly enter markets after other people have broken trail for them (e.g., iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch).
It's perfectly plausible that Magic Leap will come out with an interesting but fatally flawed product, like the Amazon Fire Phone or Google Glass. Amazon and Google can shrug and move on, but Magic Leap may not have the cash to recover.
Or, possibly worse, they come out with something like the Segway: really interesting tech that everybody is excited about, but with little practical use once we get past the gee-whiz phase. For a company that has already raised $2.3 billion, that could be fatal.
> like the Segway: really interesting tech that everybody is excited about, but with little practical use once we get past the gee-whiz phase.
I've never heard the Segway described like that. I'd describe it as "incredible hype over something enigmatic that completely evaporated the moment it was revealed".
Dean Kamen is a very sharp inventor, and the origin of the Segway was in a radical wheelchair improvement that he designed. (It was a four-wheel design that would "stand up" on its two back wheels to give the user similar height to a standing person. It could even climb stairs! [1])
A lot of the hype came from luminaries who had seen or tried the Segway and were opining on it themselves. The technology was really neat, and is cool to use. At the time, it was plausible that it might change a lot. In practice, though, it turned out to be mainly a niche product, because we already had pretty good solutions for getting people from place to place.
And that last bit is important. It didn't completely evaporate. I often still see a flock of Segways for guided tours when I'm in Golden Gate Park. Segway still exists, and is still producing a variety of models.
But you're right that the hype got out of control, and the vast difference between expectation and reality harmed Segway's brand. That could definitely happen here.
ps. It makes perfect sense nowadays. With the vast majority of all wealth concentrated in the investment portfolios/hedge funds etc. of a very small elite. If you can build enough hype to convince them to invest even a minuscule fraction, you are set.
...as long as you are paying yourself a hefty salary. Your equity dilutes quickly when you raise a lot of money, and liquidation preferences can leave you with nothing unless you actually make a wildly profitable company.
That's always the case nowadays, huh? I think the days of startups CEO earning engineer level salaries and flying coach are long gone - at least for VC funded companies.
Founders are no longer forced to wait for IPO before selling shares. And after you get an X0 million dollar check who cares if you own 1% of what's left.
Further, it's often encouraged as founders that take out enough money not to have significant financial concerns are more willing to aim for the fences.
The ICO era has pretty much passed in the US. Once everyone started limiting it to accredited investors it lost any advantage over traditional fundraising.
Given how incredibly intuitive Apple products are, I find it hard to believe that they develop products without market testing. It might be a secret to the public but I am almost certain you can't nail UI so perfectly without undergoing some user testing. All the users/testers/vendors have all probably signed an NDA and value the partnership with Apple enough to not disclose anything.
You're confusing two different things. They do a ton of prototyping and user testing, which allows them to make a very polished product. But they don't just throw things out into the market and see what happens.
User testing has clear limits. The context of a user test is usually something like, "Assume that you have bought one of these, and assume that you're trying to do X. See if you can do X with this." If you're assuming those things, you can't test them.
This is in contrast with what startups do, which is just launching something to see if the market gives a shit. Apple is a good example of that, too. Look at their first product:
This computer didn't have a keyboard, a monitor, a case, or a power supply. But it was a clear minimum viable product: people bought it and used it, while making it clear they wanted more. A year later, they launched the Apple II:
These days Apple would never launch something so rough and experimental as the Apple I. Instead, as with MP3 players, smartphones, and smart watches, they were content to let other people pioneer the space and then swoop in once the market was proven.
Magic Leap is trying to be as slick as 2010s Apple, but that cuts them off from acting like 1970s Apple. That could work if they're correct on all their key design and market hypotheses. But it's a giant gamble, and unlike 2010s Apple, a failure could kill them.
Apples UI is only 'intuitive' if you're used to it. People have the same problems when first using Apple products they have with every other product. It's a myth that Apple products are better in that regard that Apple loves to tell, nothing more.
> Given how incredibly intuitive Apple products are
This used to be the case and might still be compared to most other products, but that value keeps diminishing more and more.
I would certainly welcome an increased focus on "it just works" again as opposed to "it looks flashy". I enjoy using Apple products a lot for various reasons but it became hard to overlook some issues, especially when it comes to software.
As a sibling comment pointed out, Apple UIs being 'intuitive' is pretty subjective. As an android user whenever I do something on an iOS phone I have trouble going 'back' because there's no consistent back button.
I'd say Segways are practical, although I've never had the opportunity to try one. They still are produced. They are likely the best way I've seen to increase a human's range of travel in human-scale environments, both indoor and outdoor. I have seen them used by park rangers and tourists, mostly. The main barrier to adoption seems to be the high price.
It's still a niche market. Tourists use them because they are rare (so Segways are marketed as a tourist experience). This puts them in the realm of donkey rides and pedal boats as far as the tourist market is concerned.
Their practical use is limited to places where cheaper, simpler alternatives can't be used — this basically means places you wouldn't use a bicycle or electric scooter because of the collision risk or space constraints, like shopping malls. Even in large data centres and huge warehouses people would choose bicycles over Segways — a dedicated indoor bicycle is cheap and quite low maintenance.
In a way, Segways are really common nowadays – since the chinese "hoverboards" (which are basically just slight modifications of the segway concept) made them affordable, I’m seeing them everywhere
Yes, that's why I said "little practical use", rather than "no practical use".
I'm suspicious of your thesis that Segway price is the main problem. Electric bikes and Vespa scooters cost about the same, and I see far more of those around San Francisco than Segways. The only Segways I see outdoors in SF are people on a group Segway tour, which suggests that they are more valued for novelty than practical benefits.
Nobody believes me, but the real market test of MagicLeap, Hololens, and Oculus isn't coming until they release a device that's competing with smartphones.
Zuck didn't spend 2Billion on VR to play games, it was a bet that they could move from VR->AR->Thing that replaces smartphones.
Google didn't put 500million into ML because they seriously think that next year people are going to be walking around looking like Shaq here:
The first iPhone was released just 10 years ago and it's now the dominant form factor for computing on the planet, but like every other technology it will come to an end.
Something more capable, more integrated into our lives, etc. will replace smartphones (just as every other technical innovation since the history of time has been improved upon and then replaced).
The right frame of reference to look at AR systems today is as very early prototypes for what that smartphone replacement tech might look like.
They exist solely because their product (if there is any) is not field tested. As soon as you give consumers a taste all of your hyper marketing clashes with reality and valuation evaporates.
I surely hope for them that we don't see a repeat of Segway. Millions and millions in funding to eventually end up being only used by Segway tours for tourists and the odd policeman.
Segway actually produced what they initially set out to produce. ML is a mass of bullshit patents and claims that eventually led to a Lite version of Holocens.
It does sound very much like good old waterfall, doesn’t it. So you would assume that the product must fail without proper market testing. But then again, Apple is never testing before releasing a product, so I don’t know. It could still if they have some product geniuses working for them
"Magic Leap Inc. has quietly begun sending its mysterious augmented reality headsets into the wild. A small group of software developers recently received devices at their offices, according to people familiar with the matter. But access to the gadget comes with an unusual caveat: They must commit to keeping them in locked safes."
Let me explain how this works as a marketing person. You create hype for your new thing any way you can, for example if you ask developers getting the device to put it in a safe, all of a sudden you keep yourself in the news, because its stupid. and the news media loves stupid and strange things, they get people to click on it and promote it on HN.
I am not saying this wont be a great device and im excited for this product honestly, but artificial hype like this needs to be seen for what it is. Let them prove their product through its actual technology, SDK's and consumer love, then we'll see.
Was the part about a developer turning it down because of the NDA part of the marketing too? Most likely this story came out because the press will print anything about magic leap if it fits the narrative of ML being in trouble. Highly unlikely this was a marketing stunt.
All these people crying, "marketing stunt," obviously have no idea the complex processes and efforts that go into writing business contracts. As if lawyers at Magic Leap have the heads of marketing on speed dial or something.
If anything it's the marketing dept who most want these controls. Controlling when information gets released is a big part of doing PR and marketing big ticket items like this.
Magic Leap has all the power in this situation, the press are nipping at their heels and will eat out of their hand. Magic Leap can control what gets released and when, and build it up to maximize output in big "exciting" blasts. Instead of raw information trickling out of 3rd party companies which they have no control over.
Choosing to take advantage of that power (which few companies have) is just basic common business sense.
And the arguments against it are as silly as "if you've got nothing to hide, than you have nothing to worry about", as if there are no inherent risks of not being in control of your own information, even when you're doing nothing wrong.
Are we going to get a version 2.0 of the hololens or oculus anytime soon to see what the next-generation lineup is going to be like? Is there already information out on them?
The Vive Pro is coming out quite soon with ~70% increased resolution over the original Vive/Oculus. Then there's the two Pimax iterations coming later which have even more.
Haven't heard anything specifically about the Hololens or Oculus, but there are a good number of Hololens-derived headsets (ie using the same inside-out tracking tech) in the wild under the Windows Mixed Reality marque, eg the Samsung Odyssey. The Odyssey has the same resolution as the upcoming Vive Pro (1440 x 1600 per eye).
The last rumor I saw was that Microsoft shelved Hololens v2 to spend more time working on v3 because no one (e.g. Magic Leap) was even close to releasing a competing product.
Depends on how you pronounce beginning of "usual". If "y" sound then use "a" but if "oo" then "an". Just like words like "history" can be pronounced differently and thus can be "a" or "an" depending on location/accent of writer.
2. Every time I have heard "an historic", that person pronounced the "h". It might have been downplayed slightly, but it has always been there. They are using "an" because it's an (historical) idiom, even though it's grammatically incorrect.
The cool / terrible thing about English (and other "international" languages) is that if there is a way to pronounce something someway, someone will pronounce it that way. Once we then define grammatical rules based on pronunciation of surrounding words, we then have to deal with the fallout of those rules. I have my opinions of pronunciation, but if the majority start pronouncing "usual" as "oosual" then I'll just shake my head and grumble a bit while accepting that the language has moved on. After all, Americans say "Aluminum" and there's nothing I can do about it!
I'm afraid it is. I had to relinquish my copies of Butcher's Copy Editing and the New Hart's Rules when I left my editorial job, but I've found the rule of indefinite articles preceding vowels referenced on the Chicago Manual of Style site[0].
Typo -- the author thought this caveat is unusual. Amusingly, it's not, so they're grammatically incorrect but factually accurate when they intended to reverse those.
The Rolling Stone writer who tried it in December was impressed (of course that’s not to say he thought it was perfect either) and people at GDC who demoed it were also impressed. It’s looking less and less like this is the next theranos as everyone loves to say.
Do we know what the likely price of the consumer models are? I can easily imagine dev kits staying around $2000 for a while, but that might be different to the consumer versions.
i.e. If you imagine writing an SDK for a bag of hot air, it seems like it would turn out very different from what you see there.
It's also small and tasteful. That caught me too. I didn't expect a big company to put out something elegant, but they seem to know what they're doing.
You're right though -- it all comes down to the hardware. We'll found out later this year.
The SDK looks good, but I don’t see any big surprises: it looks quite similar to the Oculus and Microsoft Hololens frameworks. It seems like the kind of SDK a highly competent software team might develop just by extrapolating from competitors’ shipping hardware.
Hey Shawn, I just made my YC account thought I'd say Hi. and yes, it's a legitimate SDK nothing could be more real. I can't wait for the runtime. I wonder if it's anything like the framework you and Adrian have cooked up btw since I'm brand new to YC do you think you could maybe teach me how to mention someone on YC, or is it not something you can do? I'll see you in the morning on slack. :)
My first thought is that this business about keeping the unit in a locked safe is just another way to generate press around the early release of development units, something that most people might not find that exciting. Other hardware companies have had similar requirements but I don't remember that warranting an article on Bloomberg.
If other companies do it then why would they be doing it for press? I think it's more likely that this is getting an article because there's been such obscene amounts of hype around Magic Leap.
So, years after the Microsoft HoloLens, they come out with a clunkier version with roughly equivalent performance. So?
The HoloLens is quite good as a wearable device. I've tried one. It's much lighter than an HTC Vibe or Oculus Rift, despite being self-contained and wireless.
It's quite obvious what the hype is about. Manhattan project style projects with massive funding and talent will always be interesting.
And just because Nokia had a smartphone before iPhone doesn't mean you could dismiss it just as a "touch screen phone with an operating system and apps".
Which mobile app? I don't think HN have an official app, and I'd like to know if one of the 3rd party apps needs a hand with any issues. Not sure if I could help, but I do like hunting down random bugs :-)
I don't recall exactly how it happend but I think I was reading an article, then went back to the home screen and selected add comment from the dropdown of that article row. It may have also been user error.
If it is similar to the Hololens in capability and half the price I would think about it, but it is far in line behind "upgrade my stereo system" or "go skiing in Japan".
I think augmented reality is going to come from a very different direction, the medical-eyesight-healthcare world making products for old folks that can't see properly or remember stuff.
Not trendy companies making games for young people who can see perfectly and don't want to be seen with clumsy gadgets bolted to their heads.
The 'apps' could be quite simple, imagine any product barcode gets read and you can just look down to read the ingredients and what-not, using a few physical buttons on a watch to skip sections.
The payment for such a device could be on healthcare, glasses that magically make reading possible despite needing reading glasses. Maybe they tell you when to take your pills and keep track of your toilet visits too. Perhaps it is too obvious a product for the games crowd, a 'basic' set of AR glasses that just let people read stuff and get directions. That 'stuff' being real world, e.g. product in supermarket, or messages, e.g. that picture of the grandchild just posted to the family channel.
Yep, they're betting that there is a hope of that. They're not investing in blue chips here. I think it's a bit much to jump to the conclusion that ML knows they're on a fools errand and are defrauding investors, just because they're secretive and they pump out hype.
For the longest time you couldn’t get most console dev kits without a business address and very strict guidelines on a separate lockable space for the hardware.
I think there’s been some relaxation on that more recently (I know at least with Nintendo there has), but it’s not that odd that a supposedly earth shattering technology have those guidelines.