IamVR Official
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2018–2021
0:53 · 9.9M views · May 4, 2016
A short Magic Leap promo clip of a whale breaching through a gym floor in mixed reality.
Cited mostly critically as the infamous whale demo that overstated what the Magic Leap hardware could deliver.
3 comments from Hacker News
Summary of the evidence presented in the complaint: 1) Using the same proprietary font in their logo was a really dumb idea: > [LINK] 2) Alleges he engaged in internal meetings "outside the scope of his work at Magic Leap" in order to gain useful information, while simultaneously neglecting his duties at work as he planned to start his own company in China. Before launching a product that looks and functions very similar to the Magic Leap product within a 2yr timespan (quitting in mid-2016, started in 2017, launched in 2019) while Magic Leap has been at it since 2010. 3) Their primary evidence seems to be some useless "Private Information" confidentiality form we all sign 4) The other is some Youtube interview the Nreal founder did where he openly admitted to being inspired by his work at Magic Leap: [LINK] Where he basically said that Magic Leap was being too ambitious with an "impossible" goal of trying to put it all in one small device... and he wanted to utilize Chinese manufacturing pipelines to build the same thing but much simpler by utilizing existing smartphone and laptop tech. 5) Finally another section compared demos by both companies, both involving whales: Magic Leap's whale demos: > this video > [LINK] Nreal's twitter picture demo: > [LINK] That's about it. Points 2) and 3) get repeated ad-nauseam and not very convincingly IMO.
I was careful to say "product claims" and not products. I don't doubt AR is possible, but that the claims Magic Leap made in their early demonstrations were not realistic. I was thinking of the early demonstrations they had, where the lighting and occlusion just didn't seem plausible (e.g. the infamous whale demo this video ). These early demos were called out by skeptics as being not plausible ( [LINK] or [LINK] ) Is AR possible, sure, but it has restrictions and when Magic Leap's product hit the market those restrictions were obvious.
Oh... that's not even their piece de resistance. Watch this one: this video These folks lied straight on face of everyone like there was no tomorrow.