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Pickle 1 AR Glasses (YC W25) May Be Fraudulent

110 points by tragiclos

by amelius

0 subcomment

> I'll bet Pickle's CEO - Daniel Park - all of their pre-order revenues if they miss their Q2 2026 delivery estimate for US customers. If he delivers in Q2, I'll pay him all the money they've accepted from pre-orders; if he doesn't, he pays me (should he accept).
This guy is serious.

by dmitrygr

0 subcomment

I spend a lot of time on power opt for small systems. The promises w.r.t. power numbers when taken in conjunction with promised features/brightnesses are 100% a lie given current SoC/battery/cooling tech.
"absolutely no latency" -> only apple manages anything close to this, and that -- with custom silicon that can feed data from the camera to screen while it is still being read out from the camera. A no-name startup doing this ain't happening.

by bhouston

2 subcomments

I've run into similar companies like this in the past in a few different niches and what they were doing are just repeating specs from Chinese OEM suppliers. They were not making their own hardware at all, just reselling it with custom branding and sometimes styling.
It could be the case here? What would explain the accelerated development timeline, it is possible because it isn't their timeline at all, it is someone else's who started a long time ago. And it may be they are talking about their supplier's two year roadmap or something similar.
PS. One of the companies (or more specifically its owners) that was doing did was eventually charged with fraud.

by wolvoleo

0 subcomment

It seems to be the same with the immersed visor. Lots of promises, one barely functional demo in 2024 and they said mass production was delayed to "after summer 2025" but still nobody has one yet.
I was thinking of backing it and I'm so glad I didn't. Immersed has a great app so I don't think this was a blatant con but I do think they bit off more than they could chew.

by mkl

0 subcomment

https://xcancel.com/thedowd/status/2007337800430198913 has some of the info. The main article doesn't work for me on x.com or xcancel (X account only? X app only?).

by websiteapi

4 subcomments

I'm surprised no one has tried to skip cameras all together and use ultrasound. mics use two or maybe even three orders of magnitude for an audio -> object inference stack vs visual. of course you can't detect colors or do A LOT of things, but hey, you could make glasses really look like regular glasses, especially if you got rid of the screens too.

by BugsJustFindMe

7 subcomments

I have a degree in Computer Vision, and, whether Pickle is lying about various capabilities or not, this guy is talking completely out of his ass and a whole lot of what he says is just extremely idiotic.
> tracking blah blah 6DoF blah blah IMU
This whole section is just wildly false. Tracking like shown in the video is easily done with just a camera, 1980s-era sparse optical flow, and basic fucking geometry. No IMU needed. People have been doing far more complex and stable motion tracking with no more input than single camera video for literally decades. And this device doesn't just have a camera; it has two HD stereoptic cameras, so they also get a depth map. You can absolutely do what they show with the hardware that Pickle claims is in the glasses.
(If you want a fantastic example, see the intro sequence to the movie Stranger Than Fiction from 2006.)
> It would take time to affix an open source SLAM pipeline and even more for them to build their own.
And this is a complete non sequitur, as SLAM is also not needed for what they show in the video. Nothing shown requires mapping the area. It's also a joke to say that it would "take time to affix an open source SLAM pipeline" unless by "time" he means a few minutes.
> This would indicate either the software is using real-time depth tracking blah blah
The glasses have fucking binocular cameras in them! What the fuck else would they be for?
> But in the photos of Pickle 1, there is no sign of any spot to charge the device.
There is zero reason whatsoever to believe that those images are photos of the final product and not renders or props. It's like he's never seen marketing material before.
I can't even with this.
This guy's LinkedIn bio says "Aug 2022 - Mar 2023: Attended UVA as a first year studying economics and commerce before dropping out to build in VR full time." So it seems he's a self-important child with zero background. That explains a lot tbh.

by notfried

1 subcomments

Putting aside whether or not they are a fraud, their design looks so good, unlike Meta's ugly glasses. Which of course, might be because it's the one thing they've spent time on in the past 2 months of dev time, and they may not actually be accounting for any practical manufacturing realities.