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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

Wow. So if Magic Leap is vaporware, does that leave Microsoft as the only ones publicly making progress in AR? Plenty of companies are shipping VR, but AR ends up being the future, HoloLens is building up quite a lead.

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Seems like SnapChat isn't doing too bad. Sure, maybe their tech isn't as advanced... but they've begun solving the equally hard problem of getting it into people's hands naturally and getting them to use it and even pay for it.

Does Snapchat actually have any AR? I wasn't under the impression the goggles actually had any UI, just the "active" LED and camera input.

Their current gen glasses do not do any AR - but they've been acquiring / hiring very aggressively in space for a couple of years now. It's pretty transparent what their long term goal is with their glasses.

I think it's actually a really smart approach. MS spent ~2 billion and multiple years of R+D to get the Hololens built. Snapchat's coming at it from another angle, start simple and build up with each successive generation. The fact that they already have people clamoring for something this basic is telling...

There's also Meta which is taking preorders for its second developers kit at $949. It has significantly larger field of view (90 degrees) but must be tethered to a computer

"Magic Leap is vaporware" Where are you getting that? The article seems to imply that feature to feature they are matching the Hololens and that is the worst case scenario.

Edit: On second thought you maybe meeting the exact definition of Vaporware in that they are not manufacturing it yet[1]. No indication that they won't be able to though.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware

Well it hasn't shipped for a long time, and as it stands now it's worse than its competition, not to mention they have way less resources than their competition. And probably the main reason they didn't ship until now is exactly because of all these reasons. Which means the more time they spend not shipping, the harder it will become for them to ship.

I think it's fair to speculate that they will end up as vaporware. Only alternative I can see is them pivoting to a more niche field so that they don't directly compete with hololens.

People started saying Duke Nukem Forever was a vaporware long before the parent company actually admitted it.

"and as it stands now it's worse than its competition"

except it isn't, the information article is one person's opinion and other people that have used the production device have said differently

Microsoft has a product on sale, magic leap have a lot of big claims.

> The article seems to imply that feature to feature they are matching the Hololens and that is the worst case scenario.

But the article specifically says "as it stands now, is noticeably inferior to Microsoft’s HoloLens headset"

So I don't get how matching Hololens is the "worst case scenario"

The fact that they're still far away from getting to market . . . . Their platform strat of making devs work in seattle/sf and timeshare the devices . . . makes it seem as if they're going to fail super hard. Hololens is clearly out front. The device itself is really impressive. And I imagine V2 of the hardware is coming soon. Wait for more credible players to enter the space for real competition.

Hololens has the lead but whoever get's to the consumer market first will still have a huge advantage. The only thing stopping MS from getting to that point is having a consumer friendly price.

I'm not sure that there will be a significant first mover advantage here. Everybody thought that the Oculus CV would be the only headset to get because the DK2 was pretty cool, then the Vive was released and people realized how important motion controllers were for immersion, and Oculus got creamed. I think that there will be bits of tech like this for each generation of VR/AR, one small set of features that's obviously better, which will win the generation.

I think it could apply, a significant part of the advantage is that they already have the OS and they're building the app eco system.

But then again, first mover advantage has been more of the exception than the rule for quite a while in tech.

Edit - Androids "auto add to dictionary" creates a lot of stupid capitalizations.

Check out http://castar.com launching 2017. I backed their Kickstarter so I'm excited to get one :-)

ODG has had AR glasses on the market for longer than Hololens, with an actual glasses form factor, running on Android, and should be announcing their new model at CES2017.

Not on the same scale, but castAR is definitely in the game.

and castAR

When will castAR support dogs and cats? Will dogs or cats be first? Will dogs and cats be able to use it together?

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