How did Magic Leap become irrelevant?

AR is a really tough problem. Go read this blog to find out why

https://kguttag.com/

It is very hard for AR to compete with conventional entertainment. The headset costs roughly $2000 and a $2000 investment in home theater is certainly going to improve most people's enjoyment of TV, movies, video games, etc. The $2000 headset doesn't have a lot of software, image quality doesn't compete with a $200 TV.

Like other companies in the field, ML has pivoted towards enterprise uses.

https://www.magicleap.com/en-us/

Certainly those exist and could deliver enough value to pay for the headsets. For instance if you could read the manuals on a headset while you work inside a jet engine that could be helpful. If you could see the plans for a building under construction overlaid over the building it might save expensive mistakes. On the other hand, Microsoft contracted to sell a bunch of Hololens 2 to the US Army and it hasn't worked out so well

https://www.roadtovr.com/report-microsoft-hololens-ivas-fiel...

Facebook has gotten dominant market share in VR headsets because it has sold headsets below cost. That's not a sustainable business plan. People are skeptical about their plans for both AR and VR and some think that this is mainly a feint aimed to distract people away from their current problems.

Yes, they have blown their shot at it by failing to launch a compelling product while the rest of the industry was not paying attention. The rest of the industry has had a few years to figure things out and whatever advantage they had five years ago, no longer exists or is greatly diminished.

I wouldn't count Meta as the victor though. So far, all we have is a lot of vapor ware and a lot of rumors about what Facebook Apple, Google, MS, etc. may or may not do. We'll likely get some new generation of goggles in the next few years but beyond that, I don't think there is much of a plan.

This smells a lot like the late nineties when the battle was on for who would own the best walled garden. We had Compuserve, AOL, Yahoo, and many other contenders. In the end none of those walled gardens survived and However, people instead pivoted to using the products of completely new companies (like Google).

I think we'll get a repeat of that and somebody will find a use for those shiny new goggles (beyond games and porn, the traditional accelerators of any new thing on the web). I don't think that's likely to come out of the corporate headquarters of big public companies.

Magic Leap was AR not VR. VR blocks your view entirely with a screen. MagicLeap overlays onto the real world.

I’ve tried Magic Leap and HoloLens, and in my opinion, the tech is just too early for a successful consumer product.

The very first Oculus made me think “I want this now”. Magic Leap made me think “Interesting, but I don’t actually want to use this until it’s far more advanced, which feels like it’s probably decades away”.

Seems to be simple math. To render a 4k screen that looks to be 10 feet away on glasses a few inches from your face you need an order of magnitude or two pixel density more than the screen. Then you need portable hardware to render it and a battery to power it. All of those are far ahead of what we have now.

I think the simple answer is that they released an actual product after years of magical hype. The reality was a such a distant shadow that everyone stopped paying attention.

There are some companies researching micro led displays integrated into waveguides that have much better brightness, fov and size characterizes than anything MagicLeap has ever had. We could be seeing every day useable AR glasses in the next few years based on this tech.

I don't think Magic leap is out of the game yet. Microsoft, Meta, and Apple are all coming to the AR table though, and they're probably also spending boatloads on the problem. They're trying to create new hardware technology here.

I think they'll probably continue to be a player to some degree, it's just hard for me to picture what the AR competitive landscape is going to look like for the consumer space. Everything we've seen so far is pretty expensive and lackluster.

I think looking at who is relevant in the AR/VR space currently is like asking who was relevant "pocket computer" market back in the mid-90s.

There are some products in the market, some people use them, but functionality is limited, and there isn't a killer app or use case yet.

Many people are saying resolution, or other tech is what is holding AR/VR back, and that may be partially true, but PalmPilot unlocked the early handheld computer market by restricting use to what was possible at the time, and having a few killer features for a small subset of users.

Blackberry then extended on that, and we thought that was the market. Decent quality email on the go was such a huge draw they owned the market.

Microsoft was making some inroads with PocketPC, but Crackberry really owned the market, and thought they'd own it forever.

Then came iPhone and Android, fullscreen devices, touch keyboards, real internet on the go. It wasn't even the apps at first, but the ability to use the web, and not a half-assed version.

So, is MagicLeap irrelevant? I think they probably are, not because of technology or hype, but because they didn't find the killer app that will make the market valuable.

They hyped up their tech and when they discovered it didn't work, they gave up and made a hololens clone

Making the same ridiculous claim as the rest of the industry, from Intel to Microsoft, but not having earned the same trust as others.

Microsoft has been riding a wave of bullshit, sorry of "vaporware", for decades with advertisement that show no relationship between what they sell and what they actually deliver. Yet, that managed to own a market through entrenching themselves via lock-in, bundle sales and lobbying. So even if you do hate Microsoft then in practice you are stuck with it as your staff is trained on it. Intel didn't do it as much but if you do look more carefully things like volumetric capture or what more powerful computing "could" enable, it's pretty close. At least they could blame the lack of progress on others.

Anyway MagicLeap did the same but as a newcomer people do wait, try, shrug and move on simply because they can. To dig a bit more :

- over-promise, the infamous whale without headset and complete field of view - trying to shift developers to new tools rather than rely on a well known stack - believe they have enough funding and skills to make their own OS

Honestly what they did in few years is actually impressive. Going from nothing to an actual headset, OS, framework and even content is a tremendous feat. Unfortunately the value delivered in term of actual experience for the end user is just not sufficient. Again if you are Microsoft and you can afford this entire billion dollar exercise as a marketing campaign to show you are innovative then sell yet another spreadsheet license to a government, that's fine. If your core business itself is not perceived as good enough then, totally different story.

PS: I have a MagicLeap ML1 in my office and had one since they sold it, so few years ago. I programmed for it. I also have a HoloLens2, VuzixBlade, Google Glass Enterprise 2 and few others AR and VR headsets. Overall they truly did a good job but compared to the expectations they set and overall needs, still a long way to go.

I was fortunate to try Magic Leap at Sundance in 2019. Super cool demo, but way too low resolution and limited field of view. I’d guess we’ll see a resurgence of AR in the near/medium term now that VR headsets have improved.

By being too protective of their tech and overhyping their own progress such that when it actually launched, it didn't seem to be such a desirable thing.

edit: typo

Yes. Magic Leap failed to ship a substantial product. They may have had a beautiful, perfectly working unit and just failed to actually get their ducks in a row. They may have been all flash and no bang.

Basically, regardless of what they had and could do, they didn’t ship. And others are coming to sell a product that Magic Leap Promised.

They were way too early. Think of it as the Apple Newton. Eventually everyone would carry around a mobile computer but miniaturization and wireless networks weren’t ready yet when the Newton came out. I don’t think AR popularizes until it can be put in something that looks like a pair of Ray Ban glasses. We are a long way off from that.

No, but the device market will eventually look like the smartphone market. Lots of competition and hopefully not too many different OS that it makes targeting all platforms a pain

A related relevant question is about the huge investments they had. How did they manage to raise so much?

Someday, people may talk of Meta the way they (don't) talk of Magic Leap.

Have they even released a product? How can something that doesn’t exist be relevant?

> why is no one talking about Magic Leap?

Do they have a product yet? No? So that's why.