[baybal2]

One on my list of mind boggling "Tech 2.0" scams were:

1. Teranos

2. Magic Leap

3. Andelur Ghost

Only the last one still didn't get enough media attention. People who scored Andelur handshakes with the military & intelligence are the types who did it for Advanced Tactical Security & Communications Ltd ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 )

Andelur is basically trying to sell the governments around the world a Chinese toy copter for millions of dollars through incredible "Tech 2.0" type marketing fudging.

One thing these fellows can do for sure is a Hollywood grade CG. I was with a company on a competing bid for border patrol drone.

Even I, somebody with quite good experience with CG, was initially fooled by their videos. Indeed, they intentionally were trying to numb your guard by showing it flying in the rain, and being sprayed by water. https://youtu.be/5xDEroiMQWk?t=100

It took me a few minutes to figure out that the rain, and water spay in their videos were also impressively disguised computer graphics.

[knownjorbist]

Would you care to reply to the people who attest that the magic leap is actually underwhelming given the current state of AR?

[baybal2]

I will. I work in an engineering company which shipped a number of AR glasses projects (for clients I can't name,) and I can say that whomever did engineering for Magic Leap had no idea whatsoever about basics of optics, and such.

And their overall engineering level is totally amateurish — you cannot have such shoddy job being done for money, let alone such amount of money, but they have everything to tick the checkbox in the buzzword department: waveguides, holographics, structural colour, photonic chips...

Want talk more, leave a way to contact you on your profile page

One main point:

Holographic waveguides, and such are a dead end development with a substandard image quality which you cannot do anything about, as well as its inefficiency (these waveguides waste 70-90%+ of light.)

You can make them more opaque to preserve more light, but then you get VR sunglasses, instead of what the promise is.

The fundamental problem is that the amount of image light transferred is inversely proportional to the amount of light obscured. — they are extremely inefficient, and there is physically no way around this.

For this reason this solution really had to be sent to the wastebin on day one, and not be presented as the next best thing after sliced bread. This is obvious to anybody knowing optics on above a high school level, and it's inconceivable how anybody paying real engineers can opt for this solution.

[knownjorbist]

If you had to distill this down in layperson's terms- AR glasses are impossible without being essentially sunglasses? Or some sort of other tradeoff?

[baybal2]

The first point. This is the case for holographic waveguides, which currently seem to be the industry-wide obsession.

Many other optical schemes don't share this weakness.

[notabanker]

Do you mean Anduril?

I have only a passing knowledge of Anduril, thanks for sharing your impression of them. But knowing his track record, I tend to believe Palmer Luckey has the ability to achieve daring innovations. That said, with quantum leap innovation, failure is the more likely outcome.

[baybal2]

> Ghost is practically invisible to the targets it observes, with a frontal cross-section smaller than some of the phones I have owned over the years. Stay tuned for true invisibility.

I don't tend to believe people telling something like this being credible.

Especially when they try to pass lobotomised Chinese RC toy heli for "an Apex of Aerospace Engineering," and carefully photoshops all its photos to disguise its Made in China ancestry https://ibb.co/8DT5JMc

And now these guys seem to be heading towards starting an IPO.

[notabanker]

Watched the video from start to finish. It's basically too good to be true -- modular, undetectable, lethal, rain proof, etc. Picturing the meeting room where the Anduril salesman plays the video to investors. A distortion vortex is in play due to the founder's previous success and no one in the audience dares object to the claims in the video. Bereft of challenge, the startup quadruples in valuation after the meeting.

[notabanker]

The video you shared is unbelievable (in every sense of the word).

[LegitShady]

> I tend to believe Palmer Luckey has the ability to achieve daring innovations.

If you're talking about oculus, they 'stole' a lot of their development from valve because there were valve employees who convinced whoever was decision making there to just give oculus tech without any license prior to the facebook acquisition, and then those employees got hired by oculus once they had facebook money.

Oculus is the story of one of the biggest tech scams in VR and the scam was on valve by employees who took advantage of and betrayed valve.

[notabanker]

It's for insights like these that I come to HN. Thanks for disabusing me of the notion that Oculus was a classic garage to greatness story.

[LegitShady]

alan yates (posting as vk2zay on reddit) said the launch rift architecture was identical to the valve room headset architecture with its own tracking implementation and its own fresnel lens system.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4klu94/oculus_becomin...

>While that is generally true in this case every core feature of both the Rift and Vive HMDs are directly derived from Valve's research program. Oculus has their own CV-based tracking implementation and frensel lens design but the CV1 is otherwise a direct copy of the architecture of the 1080p Steam Sight prototype Valve lent Oculus when we installed a copy of the "Valve Room" at their headquarters. I would call Oculus the first SteamVR licensee, but history will likely record a somewhat different term for it...

---

Ben Krasnow (former valve employee who now has the youtube channel "Applied Science" https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience/ which you should check out if you haven't yet) posted here on hackernews back in 2017 during the oculus lawsuit.

> It fits a pattern. I was a hardware engineer at Valve during the early VR days, working mostly on Lighthouse and the internal dev headset. There were a few employees who insisted that the Valve VR group give away both hardware and software to Oculus with the hope that they would work together with Valve on VR. The tech was literally given away -- no contract, no license. After the facebook acquisition, these folks presumably received large financial incentives to join facebook, which they did. It was the most questionable thing I've seen in my whole career, and was partially caused by Valve's flat management structure and general lack of oversight. I left shortly after.

and then further down that thread

> Overall, I think Valve is a good place to work, and I learned a lot from all of the incredibly smart people there. The main reason that I left was the difficulty in merging hardware development with the company's exceptionally successful business model. The hardware team was pressured to give away lots of IP that could have been licensed, with the explanation that hardware is just so worthless anyway compared to online software sales, there was no other choice. It's possible that this was a good faith gamble, however it still doesn't preclude the use of business contracts that would have protected our investment. It also isn't so great for morale to hear everyday that your years of work are going to be given away to another company, and then watch that company get acquired for $2B. This is especially the case since many employees strongly voiced concerns about just such a scenario.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414190

Oculus was built on stolen tech taken by employees working at valve who convinced valve to give the tech away in the spirit of cooperation, and then jumped ship to facebook right away for the $$$.

I won't give them a cent.

Every time people post things to do with John Carmack all I can think about is that he was doing the same thing from his former employer to oculus as well. No matter what he did back in the day to make video game engines amazing, his involvement in oculus is a stain on his reputation. Even if you thought he was innocent in a vacuum, along with the rest of the shenanigans with oculus I don't think it was so innocent. He took the source code he wrote, sent it to himself, then he was involved in the "clean room" reimplementation? I don't believe it no matter what the courts ruled could be proven.

They are literally a company founded on "semi legal" theft, fraud, betrayal, etc.

[notabanker]

Amazing synthesis of facts... so much I didn't know.

I have a copy of The history of the future and was planning to read it. If all it's going to be is PR for Luckey, I will donate it to a used books shop.

Would you have an opinion on VR being the next computing platform? Despite the troubled past, do you suppose Oculus Quest 2 could become THE standard?

[LegitShady]

I've never read this book but I think if you read it, you should take it with a grain of salt. There's a lot of self aggrandizing and making your own myths in tech these days since personal brand is important at their level. What you do with your book is up to you though - if I had it I'd read it just to be aware of what's being said. If you keep it or not is your choice.

>Would you have an opinion on VR being the next computing platform?

Not any time soon, but maybe once the display technology improves. I like VR and don't get VR sickness, but when I take off the headset after a long session I can tell I haven't been focusing my eyes on distant things for a long time and the whole world feels a little unreal. I think the more time you spend in VR the more likely you are to cause short sightedness, but I don't have any scientific evidence of that so its just my opinion.

>Despite the troubled past, do you suppose Oculus Quest 2 could become THE standard?

I have many friends who own the Q2. It's an affordable device with a lot of good ideas. But sadly I think oculus was run by toxic people and being acquired by facebook can't have improved it. Them requiring a facebook login and their privacy policy preclude me from participating.

It's a neat device but I wouldn't call it the standard. The index is the gold standard. The quest 2 is the subway or taco bell restaurant of VR headsets - ubiquitous, affordable, but not better than the competition although the competition costs more.

We'll what happens in the future but I'm not betting on VR/AR computing being common anytime soon. If it is I hope facebook isn't the primary supplier because oculus and facebook are both unethical companies I dont' want to deal with.

But what do I know? I'm just a guy who loved the idea of it and paid attention during the development of the recent VR revival. I think the biggest barrier is resolution, and then graphics silicon need to run it at good framerates.