[krenzo]

I'm a VR/AR developer, and here's my experience with trying to buy a Magic Leap 2 to check it out:

See the PR announcement that they're shipping. Go to their web site. Click "Where to buy". Go to the first link to "Insight US". Place an order. Get a call from a representative to confirm the order. Ask the representative to clarify that Magic Leap 2 is in stock and shipping. They responded "yes."

Wait a few days. Check on the status of my order: "Stock: 0", and the estimated ship date is just an automated date that increases by 3 whenever current date equals estimated ship date. Call up Insight US to ask is it in stock or not. They admit it's not in stock and won't be available until maybe December/January.

Call up Magic Leap (they surprisingly have a phone line to call) and ask their sales representative if anyone has stock. They respond they don't know and to try the second supplier. Ask them what the supplier's phone number is to confirm stock. They say they don't know and that supplier only communicates through e-mail. Supplier responds via e-mail, "of course we have stock! Place an order to get an estimated ship date." I'm doubtful.

So there you have it. Magic Leap 2 shipping now, maybe?

[1letterunixname]

Their go-to-market / sales channel management people need to get their act together if they wish not to become a very expensive failed startup. Can't have sales be an afterthought and business culture lacking fiscal discipline until the money runs out. IYAM, paradoxically, the more money is thrown at a project, the worse the returns because there's an atrophying of resourcefulness when there's not as much survival pressure.

[IshKebab]

They're basically guaranteed to be a very expensive failed startup. Microsoft and Google have already proven that industrial AR is a small market. Way too small to support a 1000 employee company.

[onion2k]

I'm not suggesting Magic Leap are necessarily going to succeed, but a competitor 'proving' that a market is small isn't really a sign that the market is small - it's just a sign that the competitor couldn't (or wouldn't) grow the market. And launching a startup that's trying to take some percentage of an existing market is a bad idea anyway. With every single startup the goal should be to make the market bigger. Its much, much easier to persuade someone to buy a product they don't already have than it is to get them to switch from a competitor to you. Growing the market also makes your competitors less likely to get defensive because you're not eating into their business. That helps a lot at the start. You really don't want a price war with Microsoft or Google.

You're right that the current industrial AR market can't sustain Magic Leap, but hopefully Magic Leap know that and have a plan to get more companies using AR somehow.

[toxik]

I disagree, AR could be very useful - much more than VR IMO - but it’s very hard to pull off. You need a killer app to begin with, and the product needs to be good enough. HoloLens is great at the AR tech part but bulky and expensive without a clear use for now.

[csydas]

I'm not yet convinced Augmented Reality has proved its case for people and that AR is chasing big numbers and companies without showing what they would actually use it for every day.

I will give Magic Leap some credit on their marketing for the article link in that they show some persons in non-office settings such as laboratories and what presumably are hospital settings.

But for me what's missing is seeing it actually used productively by the persons or testimonial stories about how AR integrates into their workflow.

People are resistant to change even within the face of pretty cool technology. I would position many people don't know what they want to improve their workflow and can only define such wants as complaints about the current workflow. That's my experience working with customers where they have a complaint but just don't know what to search for to see if there's a solution.

To show how I think this should work, when I add a new tool to my workflow usually I can pinpoint exactly what I don't like about something and I have specific terms that help me find it. For example, my org uses Teams, and Teams is unfortunately linked by the hip to Sharepoint which I cannot stand. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest issue is that Sharepoint tries to load everything in-browser, even if it cannot. Eventually it will show you a download link, and for the content I am working with, I don't want Sharepoint to try to load it, I just want to download the file and use the appropriate app to work with it. In business rules, I want all Sharepoint links to automatically convert to download links.

Armed with this, I could search for browser extensions to redirect links to another link, and I found Redirector: https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector I cannot sing the praises of this tool enough, and it saves me tons of clicking and waiting by letting me write rules to handle specific link formations and redirect them to another. It was a perfect fit because I could _describe my annoyance_ and the preferred behavior, and armed with that, I could know whether a tool met my needs or not.

This is what is missing for me with AR. As someone in tech, I can describe a ton of my issues with daily workflows quite easily. I can define my problems and how I prefer it works. What I can't see is how AR helps me. Like many, I imagine that persons like technicians, mechanics, anyone who needs their hands available to work on complex hardware/items might benefit from AR, but what I don't see are testimonials from these people that some AR company demoed their product with them and found a way to make their workflow better. I'm not a mechanic; I can do basics with cars or house-hold appliances, but I'm not a professional, and I imagine the AR companies out there aren't either. Why there aren't field tests with discussions and interviews with the proposed target audience for AR is beyond me.

Instead I see people in offices on conference calls, I see random stock photos of people in lab outfits, and I see marketing copy telling me that AR is limited just by my imagination. Thing is I can imagine quite a lot, and I don't see proof AR can do any of it.

If AR has a product ready for betas, this needs to be in the hands of people who might actually use it and developing case studies. The technology is interesting, I'm not denying that, but I want to read stories about actual use cases and testimony from someone who honestly feels "this made my life better." Until that happens, I'm not confident AR is going to take off in a meaningful way for work related purposes instead of recreational.

[staticassertion]

Here are things I would like to have in an AR/VR environment.

1. More monitors. I can only fit 2, maybe 3 monitors on my desk. If I could easily reposition 5 or 6 virtual monitors that would be great.

2. Whiteboarding. I like to draw things when I have some discussions. Doing that in VR is a pretty decent workflow.

If I could start a Slack 'huddle' with someone and instantly be able to start drawing or have us both interacting with the virtual monitors, I think that'd be enough for me to justify paying.

The tech still has to go further. For multiple monitors you'd really want to offload rendering and I think that current VR goggles are still just too heavy, they need to get cut down to maybe 20% of their current weight, at which point I think they would be comfortable enough to wear for a large portion of a workday.

The benefit of AR would be that I can seamlessly switch between "real life" workflows and "virtual" workflows. For example, I want to get up and grab some water, but I can take one of my virtual desktops along with me so that I can keep watching a conference talk or whatever.

[Corrado]

I'm thinking the killer app might be more along the lines of personal use. A HUD for your car or directions to that Egyptian spice I can never find in the grocery. Or measuring the height of your refrigerator to see if will fit under you cabinets. What about hooking it up to my door camera so I can see who's at my front door while I'm in the garage.

Then there are general functional improvements, like dynamic magnification. I would love to read the tiny text on my prescription bottles. Or integrate it with Alex/HomeKit to provide a visual output for those services: "Alexa, what does Brian Singer look like?"

I know "professional" use is easier to sell to, but I think AR won't really be successful until they start making it useful to normal, household users.

[blululu]

All of these can already be done with a mobile phone and only navigation could make the case that it is better with an AR HUD and even then I’m not sure I really buy it based on my personal experience doing so.

[ClassyJacket]

I'm not aware of any attempt at AR glasses by Google. Google Glass wasn't AR, and ARCore, while very cool, is not head mounted.

[culturestate]

> I'm not aware of any attempt at AR glasses by Google. Google Glass wasn't AR…

Trying to treat augmented reality, mixed reality, assisted reality, and <insert other non-virtual reality here> as technologically distinct verticals with clearly defined boundaries feels like an exercise in madness.

At any rate, Google announced[1] a few months ago that they were planning to start trialing new augmented reality glasses in public.

1. https://blog.google/products/google-ar-vr/building-and-testi...

[Retric]

These are meaningful distinctions at both a technical and practical level.

Google glass created a passive screen independent of the environment. This allowed the hardware to be really simple but essentially turned it into a tiny hands free floating screen because it couldn’t block most of your vision without preventing you from walking around.

Augmented Reality maps out the environment so it can selectively replace part of your vision with what it wants to show you without blocking important things. This lets you say designate a large chunk of a wall as a TV but if you turn away the TV stops blocking your vision.

At this point the limitation of augmented reality is really more on the software side of things. Building hardware that in theory adds NPC style names over peoples heads at a party is straightforward, writing software to identify people and insert their names after someone introduces them in conversation is probably decades away.

[abudabi123]

The mic plans to ship 5000 unit waves of Microsoft Hololens AR, the first wave is expected next 12 month.

[Simon_O_Rourke]

Reading that back, it sounds like a complete scam you might encounter from the lowest reaches of the web.

For me, Magic Leap used up any good will by over promising and under-delivering on their initial release.

[classified]

The number and quality of WTFs connected to the name Magic Leap is hilarious, I wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole.

[keyle]

That's dreadful. That's the kind of confidence drop like a cliff buying into a product / company.

If they can't ensure a solid shipping line then they surely can't make good on replacements and/or warranty issues.

[emptysongglass]

It's the exact same story with Intel Arc GPUs. The ASRock A380 is nowhere to be found. People have to import the Gunnir Chinese models if they want one. Shameful.

[dannyw]

It was always a test run

[skerit]

This reminds me of my Eve Spectrum order experience.