Technology

Heresome unusual news: AWS, Amazoncloud computing arm, today announced that it plans to bring its Relational Database Service (RDS) to VMware, no matter whether thatVMware Cloud on AWS or a privately hosted VMware deployment in a corporate data center.

While some of AWScompetitors have long focused on these kinds of hybrid cloud deployments, AWS never really put the same kind of emphasis on this.Clearly, though, thatstarting to change — maybe in part because Microsoft and others are doing quite well in this space.

&Managing the administrative and operational muck of databases is hard work, error-prone and resource intensive,& said AWS CEO Andy Jassy . &Itwhy hundreds of thousands of customers trust Amazon RDS to manage their databases at scale. We&re excited to bring this same operationally battle-tested service to VMware customers& on-premises and hybrid environments, which will not only make database management much easier for enterprises, but also make it simpler for these databases to transition to the cloud.&

With Amazon RDS on VMware, enterprises will be able to use AWStechnology to run and manage Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB databases in their own data centers. The idea here, AWS says, is to make it easy for enterprises to set up and manage their databases wherever they want to host their data — and to then migrate it to AWS when they choose to do so.

This new service will soon be in private preview, so we don&t know all that much about how this will work in practice or what it will cost.AWS promises, however, that the experience will pretty much be the same as in the cloud and that RDS on VMware will handle all the updates and patchesautomatically.

Todayannouncement comes about two years after the launch of VMware Cloud on AWS, which was pretty much the reverse of todayannouncement. With VMware Cloud on AWS, enterprises can take their existing VMware deployments and take them to AWS.

It isn&t the most usual situation for a founder to write a review trashing a competitornew product, but Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey has never been the most conventional entrepreneur.

Yesterday, Luckeypublished a review of Magic Leapdeveloper kit on his personal blog titled &Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap.& In it, he offereda few compliments, but he spent the majority of his words highlighting shortcomings of the new device while seeking to remind everyone of all the shit that Magic Leap execs talked about existing AR tech and how they nevertheless ended up running with a device that, in his opinion, made only minor improvements over the three-year-old HoloLens.

There are a number of digs he makes in his review. Perhaps most insightfully he takes on the tracking technologies used for the headset and controller, noting areas where they are actually steps back in user experience. The Magic Leap Onecontroller uses magnetic tracking, a system far different and generally more complex than the optical tracking systems that almost all VR companies, including Oculus, utilize. Once you read the paragraph where he trashes the lack of a clickable trackpad, it becomes clear that this is probably more than a little personal for Luckey.

Magic Leap One ‘Lightwear&

At this point, Luckey has moved beyond his VR days in a professional sense (for the most part). His new company, Anduril Industries, is focused on creating border security technologies; nevertheless, he has remained a very vocal personality in the VR space with a reputation of a hardcore hobbyist.

A lot of this beef seems easy to identify. Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz has spent the last several years raising a lot of money while developing technology in secret and trash-talking existing tech in public. In Luckeyview this hasn&t been great for investment in the AR/VR space, where investors have had unrealistic expectations put in front of them that may have reduced interest in other existing companies that were taking a more conservative approach to hyping themselves.

The most brutal takes are reserved for the ML1display tech, which Luckey points out really isn&t any different from what other companies have been looking at. While the Magic Leap team invented terminology to describe what they have built, Luckey points out that they didn&t solve what they claimed that they would:

They call it the &Lightwear&. This is the part that has gotten the most hype over the years, with endless talk of &Photonic Lightfield Chips&, &Fiber Scanning Laser Displays&, &projecting a digital light field into the usereye&, and the holy-grail promise ofsolving vergence-accommodation conflict, an issue that has plagued HMDs for decades & in other words, ensuring that the focus of your eyes always matches their convergence, something that Magic Leap has touted as critical in avoiding &permanent neurologic deficits& and brain damage. It is even more important for AR than VR, since you have to blend digital elements with real-world elements that are consistently correct.

TL;DR: The supposed &Photonic Lightfield Chips& are just waveguides paired with reflective sequential-color LCOS displays and LED illumination, the same technology everyone else has been using for years, including Microsoft in their last-gen HoloLens. The ML1 is a not a &lightfield projector& or display by any broadly accepted definition, and as a Bi-Focal Display, only solves vergence-accommodation conflict in contrived demos that put all UI and environmental elements at one of two focus planes. Mismatch occurs at all other depths. In much the same way, a broken clock displays the correct time twice a day.

He also takes on the headsetsmall field-of-view, something that honestly feels like a bit of a cheap shot when he compares it to other AR headsets that use much more simplistic optical systems. Magic Leapdisplay offers a viewing area that has been estimated to be about 40 percent larger than the HoloLens, but is still a small box in someoneperspective.

If you felt this was just someoneoccasionally harsh look at a big product, the intent is clear when Luckey attempts to estimate sales of the device by looking at the companyorder numbering system:

The Magic Leap order system was really easy to figure out for the first few days after launch. I gathered some order numbers from friends and compared their order times, and I am pretty confident about predicting first-week sales.Unfortunately, they changed the system shortly after I tweeted about it. Based on what I do know, it looks like they sold about 2,000 units in the first week, with a very heavy bias towards the first 48 hours. If I had to guess, I would put total sales at well under 3,000 units at this point. This is unfortunate for obvious reasons & I know over a hundred people with an ML1, and almost none of them are AR developers. Most are tech executives, &influencers&, or early adopters who work in the industry but have no plans to actually build AR apps. This was a big problem in the early VR industry, and that was with many tens of thousands of developers among hundreds of thousands of development kits sold! Multiplying the problem by a couple orders of magnitude is going to be rough for ML.

Luckey doesn&t seem like he&ll be publishing any follow-ups with this device either; he gave his personal device to iFixit to tear down after playing around with it for the review.

Following the post going up, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz responded in typically eccentric fashion, assumedly comparing Luckey to a character from Avatar: The Last Airbender with more strange tweets to follow.

The biggest, most ambitious Disrupt event ever is less than two weeks away!Disrupt SF 2018takes place at Moscone Center West on September 5-7 — thatthree action-packed, business-oriented days of programming. But like you, we know how to have a good time, too. Itall about balance, friends. And thatwhy you do not want to miss the TechCrunch After Party on Thursday September 6.

Disrupt After Parties are the stuff of legend, and this year will be no exception. Expect a &90s theme complete with fun wearables like glow stick necklaces and slap bracelets. And you can get a tote bag — screen-printed on-site — to take home with you.

It wouldn&t be a TechCrunch After Party without a chance to get your dance on. We&ll have DJ King Mos spinning the best &90s music all night long — with an immersive Sound Experience from Envelop.

Thereplenty to do while you sip a beverage and groove on the dance floor. Check out the graffiti artist creating a mural, dive into SnapfiestaBall Pit Photo Booth to capture all manner of silliness, or relax, chill and chat in the Super Mario BrotherLounge. You can also continue to network — hey, we don&t judge.

Speaking of lounges,Universe presents the Top-Secret Lounge. We can&t divulge the details, but you might find specialty cocktails and a variety of &90s games — among other things. You&ll have to keep a sharp lookout, though. Itup to you to find the Top-Secret Lounge: look for discreetly hidden signage to suss out the location and gain access.

We invite all Disrupt SF attendees with an Innovator Pass and above to come and celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit of tech startups, network in a relaxed environment and burn off the adrenaline rush that comes with experiencing TechCrunch Disrupt. Basic Pass holders should email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to upgrade to attend.

In addition to all the craziness we have in store for you, our partners have lined up some activities and giveaways just for Disrupt SF attendees:

Fuel with sweetgreen during Disrupt Week 2018 Take a break from the action with $10 app credit to use at sweetgreen. Redeem your app credit at our SoMa location (171 2nd St.) — only a 5-minute walk away from Moscone. Grab a (new) friend and come by for lunch or dinner. Redeem your $10 credit with this link. Limited quantities available, so claim your credit before they are gone!*valid for new sweetgreen app users only

Virtual Workout Session with AaptivStart your day with an inspiring workout led by one of Aaptivpersonal trainers! TechCrunch Disrupt attendees get free, unlimited access to Aaptiv — on-demand audio workouts you can do in the hotel gym, in your room or on the streets of San Francisco. Choose from more than 2,500 classes for running, cardio machines, strength, HIIT, yoga and more. Get started at aaptiv.com/disrupt.

We can&t wait to party with you!