I'm a bit fed up of the childish negativity that always seems to be sent in Magic Leap's general direction.
Instead of putting energy into this I'd suggest pointing the energy towards creating something yourself.
To the Magic Leap Team - I am a believer :-) especially if you nail the stuff that others don't focus on like smooth interaction models (i.e. voice, gesture, 6DOF mobile controller etc.)
It's less negativity and more caution. People have been burned by early adoption of breathlessly-advertised tech before.
People claim that their products can solve all sorts of interesting problems every day, and it's easy to get excited. But if they cannot demonstrate that their product actually can do what they say it does, then people are going to get suspicious.
Combine the lack of transparency with the long lead times that consumer hardware devices tend to have, and people will start wondering why nobody has been allowed to interact with a live demo of the product when it's supposed to be available to anyone within 9 months.
Everyone wants a product like this to work, but we're also worried about getting taken in by little more than slick marketing; that's how you get companies like Theranos.
I disagree that it's childish. Magic Leap hasn't been clear on what they are actually demonstrating in their demonstration videos. They started out with some really bold claims and have been gradually scaling them back into something more reasonable (and less unique). In my opinion, the skepticism is well earned.
Thanks for the upvotes. Gratifying to see there are others who choose to think positively too. I do understand some of the skepticism, but I think saying:
"The product doesn't exist. The only image of the device on that Creator page is a 3D render"
..about a company that has received over $2billion in funding is pretty childish.
If Magic Leap are watching and want to send the team here at R01 a Creators Edition we'd be really happy to start creating on the LuminSDK with UE4 and represent here in London.
Anyone from @magicleap.com - feel free to use the chat widget at the bottom left of our site to get in touch (http://realityzero.one).
Edit: took Trolls comment off - because I realised, ironically , I was now the one being overly negative. Sorry about that.
Epic Games Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said: “Magic Leap has truly created something magical in this combination of hardware breakthroughs and software innovations, which represents a giant leap towards the coming spatial computing revolution.”
Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games and head geek for Unreal Engine 4, must have tried Magic Leap One and he doesn't strike me as someone who just goes ahead and drinks the Kool-Aid. I guess we'll all have to wait and see.
Apologies for annoying so many people here. Now I'm getting down-voted into oblivion :-(
The triggering point is just the belief that just because entity X received Y dollars in funding, that X has any legitimacy. There are more than enough counterexamples in the valley (juicero, theranos, bodega, etc) that demonstrate investors really lack the capabilities or wherewithal to conduct proper due diligence. The downvotes you are getting is a direct reaction to this.
And I'm a bit fed up with the fanboyism over vaporware and the lack of perspective while simultaneously accusing those who /have/ perspective as being lazy.
I, for one, /did/ try creating something at that company. Instead all I got was a cut in pay, overwork, and a lack of career prospects while still being required to play roles with rediculous levels of responsibility under working conditions even OSHA would find intolerable.
Mind you, this was all happening while being told that my many years of experience actually shipping consumer products at other companies was worthless and that the failed leadership forklifted from Nokia would save the day as they proceeded to continue making short-sighted decisions and ignoring the experience they hired.
No, I will /happily/ sit back and watch and heckle. And why am I not starting my own thing? Because when they fail to deliver the ill-defined "magic" they so heartily promise, they will destroy an entire field I used to have faith in actually taking off. Funding will dry up and VCs will turn away after this fiasco.
Believe what you want, but keep your accusations of lack of trying to yourself.
Interesting. I'd certainly love to hear more about the inside scoop (but obviously don't say more than you legally can).
What's your take on the current push with the SDK coming out? Do you think this signals that they're really getting ready to ship something, or do you feel that they're still unready based on what you saw there?
I don't think the negativity is childish at all but completely warranted. This product seems to have all the hallmarks of vaporware designed to pump the value of the company through pure hype and zero delivery.
Ah man, the irony of complaining about childishness, insinuating everyone against you is a loser, and then making a new comment just to thank people for upvotes... 20 minutes after posting the first one.
It smacks of when Theranos supporters were shrieking down suggestions of malfeasance.
>>Instead of putting energy into this I'd suggest pointing the energy towards creating something yourself.
attitude. Just because I don't play football doesn't mean I cannot criticize the coach. Just because I'm not in politics doesn't mean I cannot criticize politicians.
Magic Leap appears to be this generations Phantom Console.
Lots of promises, lots of hype, a crap ton of money poured into it... and then basically nothing of substance for years.
Eventually, when it is finally released it'll likely be very underwhelming (so far they really are just showing normal hardware for the space, so they're already there).
It's not surprising people are negative - they've given us nothing to be positive about and lots to criticize. I'm more suspicious of those who are positive about them at this point.
The other thing that needs to happen is that the skill, time and money required to create quality VR & AR content needs to be significantly reduced. This will come with time too.
We're doing our own small part to try and make that happen with our automated 3D scanning platform (http://realityzero.one)
From my experiences, I think there are several completely different axies of quality.
If it’s a cartoonish game, the imaging doesn’t need to be photo-realistic. If it’s ‘toon style or lit and textured by photography of real environments, the polygon count doesn’t need to be high.
What it does need, beyond the hardware, is immersive physics, and a gameplay-justified reason for why you can’t run through the furniture/wall/cable that you can no longer see. The game “I Expect You to Die” does that perfectly because you’re sitting down the whole time.
I don't think the skill,time,money required for VR is the man problem. It's not all that much harder to make a VR title vs non-VR title the coat is roughly the same. The problem is there is not a large enough VR market to justify the normal AAA size budgets.
I find it fascinating that SpaceX manages to pull off one of the most amazing things in the history of humanity and the top comment thread here on HN somehow manages to get bogged down in discussing race, gender and sexual orientation as it relates to the "hosts" of the live stream. These are important issues to be sure, but the self appointed thought police of generation "I'm offended" who feel the need to instruct everyone on how they should behave, write and think are beginning to get on my tits. I clicked on here hoping to feel and read everyone buzzing about this great news and instead I just switch off from HN and think "meh". Disclaimer: I'm a privileged middle aged white guy.
Edit: grammar and rephrasing to allow for the inclusion of the phrase "beginning to get on my tits".
Anyone know what the poly-limit is for uploaded models?
Would really like to see them support GLtf from Khronos as an input/output(API) file format. That's one of the formats we're watching closely at http://realityzero.one
I may just do a test upload of some of our scanned models later on. In fact have been scanning a load of Jurassic era fossils that will be part of the supporting cast for a late YC application submission :-) Might need to polyreduce but may still look good on Poly if poly-limit is not too low.
Interesting business. Model cost was killing me 10 years ago when I ran a virtual world company.
Do your company just handle static models right now? Animated ones are a whole new level of difficulty.
How about generating levels of detail on the model?
So many more things that are challenging! Good luck.
Check out VirtuaGL and TurboVNC. It is possible to run these two things inside a docker container, install a DE and accelerate a GUI app. I've been doing it for quite a while.
Also for all those checking the OPs original lib out. It does work and it is great and also probably the most mature option, but my understanding is that future focus for GPU inside containers is with this newer lib, also looked after by Nvidia:
I'm fairly familiar with this stuff, though not an expert, for my startup http://realityzero.one. But, I've not been paying that much attention to this area of late, so if I've got this wrong then please feel free to correct me. Perhaps they're for different things. I know there's been some discussion from the k8n crowd about the newer lib in k8n's github issues.
I agree with all the points you made specifically about AltspaceVR. They may have been in a better place right now if they'd tried to bootstrap. Who knows, there are probably a number of factors at play here. When I tried it ages ago I was wowed by the potential, but put off by the idiot to interesting ratio. Also sometimes just being too early is enough to kill you right out of the gate.
On to whether you'd be insane to fund VR right now. When I checked http://vrlfg.net/ just now there were 2587 active VR sessions from a total of 840797 active Steam sessions. Thanks for that link by the way! Put another way approximately 0.3% of all active sessions on Steam right now. This does not sound terrible to me given how embryonic immersive computing is and how expensive the first generation of PC based VR kit is. I wonder how the stats would stack up for mobile VR? Most likely not higher I'd guess.
So, what's the market for PC games in 2017? Approximately $25billion (sources: http://bit.ly/2pm1wBO && http://bit.ly/2qc61ef)? The 840797 active sessions above include free or free to play PC games on Steam. There aren't so many free VR games and so today's 0.3% on Steam if extrapolated to the PC gaming market as a whole could easily equate to $75million. Not an insignificant number for a new market and new medium. Sure if you want less risk and more potential upside make a mobile game for a market with an established channel. But the signal to noise ratio in that market makes it difficult to get noticed there if you are not already established. Plus poking at a screen is not as much fun as VR development :-)
Those studios and companies that get an early foothold in the immersive software world could be the Zynga or even Google of tomorrow. I sure know how difficult it can be to raise finance in the immersive sector - especially in Europe. There are plenty of investors, even early stage ones, who still consider investing in immersive tech to be too risky/early at this stage, but I'm not sure many of them would go as far as to say doing so right now would be insane. Many of them are making some tentative investments, I only see momentum increasing in this respect.
Ask yourself this question. Do you think you'll do most of your computing sitting behind a physical mouse, keyboard and monitor in 50 or even 30 years time? Humans evolved to work in three dimensions. I just don't see us jabbing at touch screens forever. Remember the typewriter?
Disclaimer: I run a company related to immersive technology (http://realityzero.one) and own the Vive, Rift, Gear VR and Daydream. So I guess you could say I'm more than a little biased when it comes to discussing the merits of immersive technology.
I dont think it is possible to boot strap a VR company. I have tried. Unique art assets cost a small fortune, as do animations, I found even with as much user generated content I still needed an artist, a server dev, and a front end dev. So unless you can get 100 hours a week of pro work, you dont stand a chance.
Right now it's extremely scene dependent. If your scene works well with it ( lots of far objects, not too many objects in the clip plane area ) it can get you 20+% perf wins. If you have a scene that doesn't work with it ( small rooms, lots of objects in the clip plane ), you're gonna lose performance, as there is a non trivial cost of running that third monoscopic view and doing the mono compositing into the stereo buffers.
The feature can be dynamically turned on or off though, so devs can work with that :)
We still have issues with transparency around the clip plane area.
The idea is that the parallax of two objects that are say 200 meters and 250 meters in the distance is negligible and can be ignored as long as you get the parallax correct for nearby objects.
You might have to set your nearfield scale based on the contents of the scene. It wouldn't work if there were say, some buildings at 200 meters and then mountains a kilometer away. But if you're in a cathedral with some chandeliers high up on the ceiling, cheating to remove the parallax of the chandeliers will not detract from the VR effect.
Looking forward to this too. I'm going to the launch party for Houdini 16 here in East London tonight. Make sure to check out Fabric Engine too, especially if you're doing any realtime VR/AR stuff.
Overall, I'm most excited about VR/AR/MR in relation to storytelling and education and how the two can be combined. Houdini and Houdini Engine for UE4 are definitely are worth a considering as part of your VR/AR development stack.
