This is such a weird company. They created big buzz over years and it seems they are just fading away quietly with nothing to show for the money they took in. Reminds me a little of Theranos (although not as criminal). Why do these investors keep pumping so much money into a company that has nothing to show? I thought they do due diligence.
1. Put the goggles on some investor's head (in a normal looking room, but with known lighting and spatial properties...).
2. Show them some flashy demo that has some limitations, but promise that with their investment, they will be able to remove those limitations.
3. Investors, who probably lack the deep knowledge of optics to know that those limitations aren't so trivial, throw money at them. Because if those limitations (e.g. FOV, opacity) were removed, it would be world-changing tech.
I've had the opportunity to demo their product on 3 different occasions. Each time it was a clunky interaction, stopped working in the middle of the demo, and I left thinking my kid's Playstation VR could run circles around their tech.
they allegedly had an insane demo for investors only, before around 2016 (at least that's when I heard of it) you needed to sign an NDA to even get in the room to see it.
The consumer product is quite lacking compared to what people said was a demonstration of game changing technology.
It makes it sound to me more like a Séance (with its usual implications) than anything else. Or, for an easier to understand analogy, selling a Disney ride as if it was real.
Now with COVID-19, they really DO have a killer demo:
1. Put the goggles on some investor's head.
2. Investor catches COVID-19 and dies.
Nobody wants to share VR or AR gear any more. The whole idea of location based VR / AR entertainment centers is deadly now.
If it's so great you can't believe it without trying it yourself, and nobody wants to stick their head in a device that anybody else has been drooling and coughing and vomiting in, it doesn't matter how great it is, nobody's going to try it.
Don't be such a wuss. None of that is something a little Lysol can't fix, and these places should have always been using such (though I imagine they don't).
be careful with alcohol, it can destroy screen coating as well. make sure to check website of specific hardware manufacturer.
"Facebook also noted that alcohol-based wipes and cleaners are not recommended for use on the lenses. The lenses can be damaged by alcohol, so users should opt to use a dry microfiber cloth instead. If a smudge is being stubborn, users can dab a small amount of water on the cloth as well, but alcohol should not be used on lenses at all, according to the company."
Why shouldn't I? The exterior surfaces of "electronics" are just glass, plastic or aluminum and lysol seems to work fine on all three. It's sold in plastic bottles so it's not like it'd create nerve gas or something.
Not that I generally take marketing claims seriously, but lysol advertises itself as appropriate for use on electronics: https://www.lysol.com/cold-flu/home/how-to-clean-electronics... If there were any real danger, I expect their lawyers might not let them do that.
Exterior surfaces for electronics are usually fine for stuff like Lysol. The fear is largely that if it gets inside on the electronic components it may leave behind conductive residues. Straight alcohol will entirely evaporate soon after application so a bit of ingress with the device powered off shouldn't cause any lasting effects, but who knows what makes up the fragrances and other ingredients in many cleaners.
Just use common sense. Wet a paper towel with the cleaner and wipe down the electronics with that, rather than dunking your phone into a bucket of the stuff.
Anytime I've seen public VR demos they had a disposable cover. A quick google search brings up [1] as one example, and I'm sure cheaper alternatives exist too.
I feel like I have heard rumors about amazing closed door tech demos for Magic Leap for years now, so I always assumed that's how they got so much money. The question then is did they just have a really good pitch/canned demo, or do a good job of stirring up rumors and riding off that.
It's easy to say in hindsight, but investors were taking a bet based on the little bits of promising information they had a decade ago. Both sides knew the risks, and that's the whole point – VCs and the company both believed they could make something happen, and it seems they weren't able to, and that's just how this works.
This is it. Everyone knew that it was a hedge to get in on the ground floor in case the technology blew up faster than anyone could predict. Nobody wants to be the person who missed out on the next Google or Facebook, especially Google or Facebook.
It's just about taking a bet. I'm sure that magic leap must have had some demo (perhaps rehearsed) of a rudimentary alpha version they showed investors that was enough to convince people it was possible. From an investor standpoint, there isn't much downside outside of losing money. But the potential upside would have been huge.
I am not sure if financials really work out the way i assume, so i could totally be talking out of my ass here. But i have a feeling it could work as a really nice money laundering vehicle for investors (even though i dont think it was fully the case here), and the company doesn’t even need to be aware of it.
You make X in dirty money, then invest it into a cool sounding company promising groundbreaking stuff that has a bunch of big known investors on board already. If the company does well, you take the clean money out with a nice profit on top. If it doesn’t work out, hopefully you pulled out at a level where you lost some money but not much. And it still returns you clean money at the end, so the goal is accomplished.
Typically, this kind of money laundering is done through retail businesses like restaurants and such, but it is way easier to just drop those money as an investment into another company, rather than maintaining your own retail business. Plus, the amount of money you could launder by investing is way higher, since it isnt as suspicious to drop a few hundred millions on a startup investment, as opposed to claiming that your small restaurant that is almost always empty is bringing you tens of millions per year.
I think that any funding source would still be subject to US money laundering rules and laws. If I try to invest $5M in Magic Leap, I have to be a qualified investor and the funding has to be received by some US bank. Also, it seems like having these holes in a company’s books would be found by reputable investor’s due diligence since it’s a pretty huge risk that could impact the return.
Not speaking from direct experience, only logical first principles. I think the money needs to be laundered before i vesting in US firms.
Is there some exception to money laundering rules I'm not aware of where the government doesn't investigate the source of cash if it is invested in a company from overseas?
Oh, if it is a foreign power, they arent laundering it to prevent the US government from discovering the source, they are doing it to prevent discovering the source from their own governments. Because those foreign actors wouldn’t be running away from taxes from the US, since those money were never in the US in the first place.
Also curious on how it would work. If a rich foreign national decides to invest into a random startup, i dont think US has the ability to look into where the money came from, unless that foreign national claims to have made those money in the US.
Again, could totally be wrong here, so please someone correct me if that’s the case.
The US has many levers with which to find out where a foreign national's money comes from, simplest being to tie them up in a review of them being a possible security risk or not. This might be applicable too:
There's always exceptions to rules if you're sufficiently (politically) powerful, e.g. the tradeoff of going after someone causes an unacceptable loss to someone higher up in your own chain of command.
One of the early seed investors is close friends with the founders of Google. Needless to say it wasn't surprising when Google funneled a bunch of cash into it. After that, I'm sure it made it easier to get others to follow suit.
Palmer Luckey (Oculus founder) has repeatedly dragged them for cheating on their demos. Given how much faith some investors have had in them, I imagine that's what happened there, too, at least for the first batches.
