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Frame from Whale Surprise Jumps into a Gym in Mixed Reality (Exciting) by Magic Leap Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Whale Surprise Jumps into a Gym in Mixed Reality (Exciting) by Magic Leap

IamVR Official
Demos
YouTube
Cited on HN 3 times, 2018–2021, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Cited mostly critically as the infamous whale demo that overstated what the Magic Leap hardware could deliver.

A short Magic Leap promo clip of a whale breaching through a gym floor in mixed reality.

1 citations · 2 critical · Demos · news from the time

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@dmix Jun 2019 Cites it
on HN thread Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China
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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.
@raesene9 Oct 2021 Pushes back
on HN thread My first year at Magic Leap and the opportunity ahead
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.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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