I’m guessing the people buying them are surgeons who cough up that much for lunch ($3300). From the photos.

It’s targeted for enterprise and not normal consumers if that helps explain the marketing.

Reading the marketing spiel my impression is that they've upgraded the hardware and the SDK but still haven't figured out what it will be useful for. So they sell it as a platform and tell industries to figure it out themselves. When I worked in digital agency we used to get sent a lot of experimental devices like these and asked to partner with brands to make cool demos. Gadgets that did really impressive stuff (haptics, holograms, AR, gaze tracking, wearables). We came up with cool novelties but I don't think any of them ever had mainstream success.

They don’t have enough mindshare, which is why they had to pivot to enterprise. Imo it’s a death knell. Their product is just too expensive for the little that it does. It will continue to do little compared to competing products because there’s no developers because no one paying $3300 for a device to experiment on. It’s easy to justify spending that much for Apple Reality, but not for a low visual fidelity device that does less than a Quest 2 at a much higher price point. Even if it was closer to Quest 2’s price point, it’s still hard to justify

For $350 this would be pretty easy to justify. That’s about an afternoon of SWE labor.

No one buying this is giving a SWE an afternoon. The pitch is consulting companies will probably buy a handful of dev units, pitch projects to industry partners, then sell them 7-figure custom software projects and the client also buys a few dozen headsets. The addressable market is very small, but they'd expect small number of lucrative deals from customers that have R&D budgets. Engineering isn't even the bottleneck to any of this, it's design.

Surely you're correct, but I never understood this. This kind of marketing-speak comes across as low quality, tacky, and weasely. Why would such qualities appeal to enterprise purchasers? Can't they see through it just like everyone else?

Enterprise sales often involve a lot of communication where there’s ample opportunity for the sales team to send less polished but more practically useful demo videos and such.

My initial thoughts exactly. I have never heard of it before, and after scrolling down the page I still have no idea what it is.

You’ve never heard of Magic Leap?

They're not well known outside of the valley, certainly not outside of tech.

Sure, but it is well known among HN commenters.

No, I have not. I work in tech in the mid-western US and am a frequent and long-time HN user.

I guess this is possible if you’re completely uninterested in anything AR/VR related, because Magic Leap stories have been posted literally hundreds of times in the last 5 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Magic%20leap

But if that’s the case, what made you comment on this submission?

My comment was, relatedly enough, made in reply to someone discussing how poorly it is marketed. Specifically, how terrible this landing page is at being a landing page.

It's like Duke Nukem Forever, except not shipping.

I found a real life demo of this item, I don't know why it's so hard to find actual footage of it at this point of the company's lifecycle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1-miutMA60

Have you considered that it’s because they’re trying to hide what little it does?

Videos are hard because they're either entirely synthetic or some kind of video through the glasses. The glasses themselves are fairly neat as far as hardware goes. There's no killer app to show, though.

If they cannot figure out how to convey a single value add use case over the internet then they are toast.

It sounds like they aren't ready to mass produce these for the masses yet, in which case it's kind of a waste to advertise to you at all

If you want to know what they're like, imagine wearing a motorcycle helmet and seeing phone/computer-style windows popping up in the real world. So far as I know, nobody has made anything super useful out of this tech yet, but it theoretically could be awesome

I think the most practical use in consumer cases would be a portable replacement for desktop and mobile displays. Using everyday apps for desktop and mobile that are already established, as well as interesting AR apps for entertainment and productivity.

As with a lot of cutting-edge tech, it seems the most immediately useful application is beyond consumer tech in the world of military tech. Being able to send critical information to soldiers in the field and integrate with weapons technology has been a major focus of AR since its early inception. Early HUDs have their roots in fighter jets.

If you think about it, a lot of things we credit to the high tech industry had their beginnings in low-key and often confidential military research, from the internet to computers themselves. Although, an app for motorcyclists that displays speed, engine, and navigation data in your field of view would be seriously bad*ss and successful if it worked in a clean and functional way.

As with a lot of emerging tech, its usefulness often depends on the ingenuity of early pioneers. People thought the internet was a useless, passing trend as late as the 1990s.

Imagine silently controlling a fully-featured AR displayed system with a brain-to-computer interface and zero peripherals like some Ghost in the Shell futuristic tech. That would be pretty awesome and legitimately useful.

It makes me wonder what got mobile phones to gain critical mass when they were still whale phones. I guess it was a case of a device further reducing the friction of an existing killer feature (voice calls).

Sometimes I think the killer app of AR will not be a fancy high end headset, but rather a more fashion friendly device than Google Glass was (which I'll bet Apple will attempt), but with the similar limited functionality that reduced friction around existing smart phone killer apps (text, calling, photos, maps).

The killer use case of smartphones was the integrated camera, combined with a large screen and touch controls to zoom in and scroll through galleries.

People LOVE taking pictures - mostly of themselves.

Snake

There was already a market for mobile phones—car phones, suitcase phones, etc preceded the pocket sized mobile. So it was a natural progression to just making them smaller. Even phones themselves were improvements on other prior forms of communication.

Every new invention builds upon what came before it in some way, right? Like, perhaps when Daguerre was developing his earliest cameras, people wondered why we would want to capture pictures like that. I think not, though, because there was already analogs in the form of paintings and things.

This is completely new territory, and it feels a bit like a solution looking for a problem. There really isn’t a prior analog that I can think of! But maybe there is, and I just am missing it. But I could imagine it being transformational, if it is eventually found.

It's not new territory.

Plenty of prior art.

An obvious one is, "bring your TV / computer screen with you". A video of me watching TV, I turn my head, the TV turns out to be just a VR projection.

More fantastic, we need to be inspired by Sci-Fi. Holograms/holoprojections become possible with good-enough AR. The Expanse series is full of them.

Or some form of "structure projection" onto reality. Where does this road go? What's behind this building? Where is the patient's bone broken? What does the full puzzle look like?

Bottom line is, this is either a very amateur team, or a Theranos-level product.

I’ve tried the Magic Leap before. It’s super cool. In the demo I saw, the software scans the room and gets the shape of the area. It then sets up a coral reef in the middle of the room and you see a giant coral structure with fish swimming around in the air. The field of vision is a little bit limited but overall It’s pretty clear to me that anyone who tries this on will say “wow!”.

The problem is that while it’s a cool toy there’s nothing available that’s im aware it that would make me want to spend much money on it. Right now, it’s more of a cool toy to show off at parties.

So the issue with a video on the website is:

a) it would be hard to have a video that doesn’t oversell or undersell it. Imagine advertising a TV in a magazine to an audience who has never seen a TV before.

b) more importantly, if the goal is to sell enterprise then you are now a sales company, not a marketing company. For b2b businesses a website just needs to look professional enough… No one is actually going to look at it. The sales process is higher touch and will be done either offline or via email brochures.

I saw a short video the other day where someone was showing off some VR glasses that appeared to be Magic Leap. They were using it in an aircraft repair bay, where the magic leap would overlay 3D schematics of the internals of the aircraft over the entire aircraft itself. It looked like some kind of x-ray vision.

So basically it sounds like this is starting to roll out for use in niche professions.

If we're thinking of the same video, that was an OG Hololens I think.

I’ve tried it at a friend’s place. It felt like an amusement park ride. You’ll say “wow!”, but there’s no reason to go back again.

I think they are marketing to dentists. Dentists can afford it. They are already quite technical, most of them. Most of them want to be "real" doctors and surgeons, like the ones shown in the marketing. And the stakes in dental operations are relatively low, so trying out new tech is relatively low stakes too. So they are thinking: at best, this will help my practice, at worst it's a fancy device my kids can inherit to play games.

Against this hypothesis is the fact that dentists already use analog optical headgear, and this would prevent that. Also, it's not clear what software they would use to make their work better/easier.

Anyway, a 1000 person company puts out an announcement like this for a reason - maybe to measure public interest to secure a new round of funding? Presumably they feel it's worth misleading people about availability in order to do that.

> Most of them want to be "real" doctors and surgeons, like the ones shown in the marketing.

The missing link between real doctors and barbers: behold the dentist.

> "Most of them want to be "real" doctors and surgeons"

I'm a doctor. No. They don't. Dentists make more money and work less. Their training is rigorous, but generally shorter. They don't take call, don't work weekends and don't have any emergencies.

Given the memes around dentists and expensive cycling gear, perhaps they should tap into that market too. Make it lighter and integrate it into a helmet. Display navigation and performance metrics on 3D graphs in the environment. Hazard detection. Then it's a toy that can really have a life outside work.

I'm mostly joking, but the more I imagine it the more I want one for my PEV helmet.

See also Karl Guttag's review at SPIE [0] (in particular read the "Conclusions" section) and HN discussion from Feb 2022 [1]

[0] https://kguttag.com/2022/01/31/magic-leap-2-at-spie-ar-vr-mr...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30170924