This is particularly interesting since Gary Bradski is also a Co-Founder of Industrial Perception Inc., a robotics company that Google acquired in 2013.

Reportedly Bradski walked away from Google right after the deal to join early Magic Leap, leaving lots of cash on the table and Google stock unvested.

Yeah, they just can make a deal - drop the case in exchange for former employees silence about whats going on in the company...

I am not even sure what ' deep learning techniques utilizing robotics' even means.

Gauging off their patents, they've got so much bleeding edge shit to pack into their device that I'm not expecting a consumer ready product from Magic Leap in less than 5 years. I'm just going to have to get used to people throwing around the 'vapourware' accusation in every Magic Leap thread I stumble across for some time to come.

> The reluctance for people to be skeptical of anything to do with Magic Leap is strange to me.

The propensity for people speaking for others trust channels is strange to me, but people still do it. Selling ones own beliefs on the coat tails of others beliefs probably isn't the best way to hard sell skepticism in a brand. That said, I'm more skeptical of Magic Leap's intent than yours, given I trust them about as far as I can throw a whale.

I applied for a job at Magic Leap. I applied for a cloud architect position, because I believe this technology is far more dangerous and insidious than we can begin to imagine. In fact, I believe it could be used to alter people's ability to perceive reality in a way that is life altering to the person wearing the device. I also think that other humans will use that altered realty to control each other.

This device should be impeccably secure, open, and transparent. The reality is that it will be full of security holes, closed source and geared toward profitability of the brands that makes them.

Augmenting one's vision without a new form of software security is going to be a really bad idea. A person in a crosswalk could be made to disappear for the occupants of a car. Drawing a gun in a man's hand could cause a police officer to shoot him.

Subject matter as disturbing as this leads to dissonance in humans, as we have a hard time understanding/simulating all the ramifications at the outset. Dissonance from that misunderstanding leads to confusion and polarization. Polarization leads to endless arguing and rationalizing. And, nothing gets done in the meantime, other than the few people running the company getting richer on all the people gobbling up their products because they think they have to have them because everyone else does too. (I rationlize this is an observation, but it's still pretty blame-y). And, the worse part is, none of them will be really thinking about how bad guys can make really bad things happen when you can change what people see with a piece of code.

As for the job, well, I found their HR process error prone, the rhetoric about the technology disingenuous, and their lack of proper scheduling worrying. Busting meetings is not a great start to hiring people, or securing advanced technology from ill doers.

  Augmenting one's vision without a new form of software security is going to be a really bad idea. A person in a crosswalk could be made to disappear for the occupants of a car. Drawing a gun in a man's hand could cause a police officer to shoot him.

That's one of the better dystopian visions of the future I've seen.

fair point. I'd add that if a person has $10+ billion, already (or whatever his net worth is), then you can afford to risk blowing a few billion, here and there, on things which might turn into a loss. On the upside, he'd be better off and humanity would be better off. On the downside even if his bet failed and he and therefore the Page estate got reduced to a mere, say, $100 million in net wealth he and his children could still live out pretty good lives.

In other words, it might not have been as hard to convince him as one might think. "Gee, I can invest a big amount in a Theranos/MagicLeap/SpaceX or I can put it into the next random/fad-ish social/pic/buzz/RailsCRUD/BigData/leadgen/TODO/PM/cloud/viral/app startup. Hmmm, choices."

How much savings does the typical American family have to invest? It's around $1,000 (actually less). This investment would be a bit like a typical family investing $17 dollars in something. Or if you're going by the typical total net worth of an American (around $45k), it be like investing $800.

I'm sure he's is not in the habit of frivously making bad investments, but a $500M investment has the financial impact to Larry Page that purchasing a computer has to the typical American. Except that that computer purchase will probably affect the money left over to pay for bills, food, rent/mortgage, sending kids to college, etc. so really the financial impact on Larry is much, much less.

If they create something that convinces the average family to shell out $800, I'll be impressed.

And maybe I have the secret to cold fusion open in a text file in front of me. Are you looking for an investment opportunity?

Deep learning and robotics qualify as far fetched tech? Anyone with a laptop and one of a dozen open-source frameworks can get started with deep learning today. Rendering a 3D object that blends in real time with a person's perspective of their physical environment and beaming it directly into their retina seems far more far fetched.

Perhaps the deep learning using robotics is simply related to this larger task, for example controlling the projecting element to account for retina movement or something similar.

Just this week at the Twilio Signal conference they announced a partnership and that 10 devs from the Twilio community will be of the first group to build on their SDK... When asked if next year it would be more widely available, he said he would adapt a cheshire cat grin and say maybe... JeffL the CEO of Twilio said he's seen it and it is amazing. http://www.engadget.com/2016/05/25/magic-leap-partners-with-...

It'a hard to believe they'd have $1.4 bn in funding without giving some tech demonstrations o their investors.

You really think suing two ex-employees is their plan to make money? Most of the money those employees have is the money MagicLeap paid them.

Is "artificial reality" a term that AR/VR companies are actually starting to throw around, or is possible that the term arose out of reporters mistakenly thinking "AR" stands for stands for "artificial reality" and not "augmented reality"?

Companies like to use nonstandard terms so they can claim that they are "the only ones working in the artificial reality space."

Old school term from the 60's. Here's a book about it.

http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Reality-2nd-Myron-Krueger/d...

No

AV? https://blogs.intel.com/evangelists/2016/04/26/the-case-for-...

Trying to muck up the short hand for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.