Magic Leap, Which Has Raised Over $2B, Lays off 1,000 Employees and Drops Consumer Business (bloomberg.com) 41
Magic Leap, the augmented-reality startup that raised more than $2 billion from high-profile investors including Alphabet and Alibaba Group, is cutting about half of its workforce as part of a major restructuring. From a report: About 1,000 employees will be affected, the people added. The company is planning to wind down its consumer business and will instead focus on its enterprise products, the people said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private. The decision to abandon its consumer ambitions represents a dramatic retreat for a company that was at one time seen as the future of at-home augmented reality. "While our leadership team, board, and investors still believe in the long-term potential of our IP, the near-term revenue opportunities are currently concentrated on the enterprise side," Chief Executive Officer Rony Abovitz said in a statement posted on the company's website, confirming the earlier Bloomberg News report.
translation (Score:5, Funny)
Nobody is buying our stuff, but our board has a lot of friends on boards of other companies that will buy our stuff to temporarily keep our stock price up until we can all cash out.
It was a stupid idea. Augmented reality, *and* virtual reality, just don't work well enough. There are a small number of uses for them in the enterprise, but most of those uses are in the "Boy, this sure looks neat! Our stunted boy-man CEO will love it!" category.
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This isn't really that different than a lot of technology. The earliest pioneers aren't always the ones to succeed, but the investment means that there are people who've studied and worked with the technology that
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The market is there but they screwed up the implementation. Quite simply motion is bad for virtual reality glasses, you want fixed field of view for comfort, all you are doing is creating a 3D very large screen view in a small efficient structure. Rather than complex attempts at 3D and the cost of say a 150inch screen, they can do it much more cheaply and effectively on your face with glasses, with the right fixed frame lense for the specific user (you would sell it at optometrists) very light weight no adj
Re: translation (Score:2)
The trouble is magic leap were not the early pioneers. Valve and Occulus were. Magic Leap was just a scam to steal the limelight (and investors money).
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Valve and Oculus made the first affordable(-ish), comfortable, responsive, reliable VR headsets - and they work. Well enough for action games. Without motion sickness. That wasn't entirely their own work though: They were able to do this where previous companies failed because the components they had to work with got better. Tiny cameras, screens and accelerators designed for mobile phones were the key, combined with the sufficient graphic processing performance designed for non-VR gaming.
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Gartner hype cycle or Covid? (Score:2)
I'm biased but it seems more like this was the inevitable result of the age old "Hype Cycle" for Augmented-Reality - hyped way beyond any reasonable ability to deliver. Not sure how they managed to keep fooling everyone into dumping ever increasing rounds of cash, it would be interesting to see their recent pitch decks about imminent delivery of the most 'awesomenest product evah' - which makes me wonder about the truthiness of their execs. And of course they kick those 1000 developers right in the family
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The hype augmented virtual reality has to face actual reality at some point.
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I wonder if the tech was really as good as claimed (Score:4, Interesting)
A big part of the appeal of Magic Leap was supposedly the display tech looking much better than other mixed reality headsets (like the hololens). I wonder if that was true; it seems like there must have been something to it, for them to raise so much money.
However even if the display tech was great, I just didn't see how they could make it as a consumer item. Unlike Microsoft they don't have a strong gaming company to back them for entertainment aspects of the device, and unlike Apple they don't have essentially infinite amounts of R&D money to do things like build LIDAR into headsets for better local object detection.
Even in the enterprise space, to compete against Microsoft seems rather daunting. But maybe whatever tech they have is just that much better and they can find a way to make it. Seems more likely to be purchased by Apple, Microsoft, or maybe Alphabet by someone working on a pet 20% project.
AR doesn't have a good path to Consumer (Score:4, Interesting)
AR is tricky, because it has to be either camera driven (degrading the real world view) or settle for very limited field of view (since they can't use optics to extend field of view without ruining the pass-through). Also, opacity is a problem in the latter case.
Magic Leap's claim to fame was having multiple focal planes. I just don't see this as being that huge a deal at this point. More basic things are needed before fixing the 'everything focuses at 3 meters away' problem. Maybe it is more important in an AR context than a VR context, but either way the best possible AR experience using this sort of strategy is just not good enough.
For consumer applications, phone AR where the phone is an arms-length viewfinder into the augmented world is next to free and good enough for the current reality. AR as it stands can't be even vaguely come close to being convincing enough to achieve adequate immersion to bother with a headset, except if there are professional applications that will demand hands free.
Re:AR doesn't have a good path to Consumer (Score:5, Insightful)
Magic Leap's claim to fame was having multiple focal planes.
They initially claimed that they can have arbitrary focal planes, allowing AR labels to hang near actual objects. I was really excited about it and I looked at the patent describing it. It turned out to be a dud, without any real information (they just threw a bunch of empty claims).
Right now they only have 2 moveable focal planes and this is not enough for anything really fancy.
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They initially claimed that they can have arbitrary focal planes, allowing AR labels to hang near actual objects. I was really excited about it and I looked at the patent describing it. It turned out to be a dud, without any real information (they just threw a bunch of empty claims).
I'm kind of peripherally in this industry. Rumour has it that they did in fact have that tech and their demos of it were very impressive. Unfortunately they were never able to shrink it down to headset size.
This is not new. For
Peddling IP, the death knell for a unicorn (Score:5, Insightful)
There wasn't much interest in the VR industry (Score:5, Insightful)
I was at VR Days, a convention that's all about VR. There was a VR headset in pretty much every booth, but maybe one Magic Leap that I didn't see.
I asked around and the impression I got that commercial users fell into two camps:
Some used old, cheap tech that consisted in gluing a display to some glasses. That's ancient tech, but it's cheap and for some uses it apparently works well enough. Such companies focus on business and industrial use, so they don't care much it's not sexy, it just has to work to present information to a worker while their hands are busy doing something else.
The rest seem more interested in the "put cameras on a VR helmet" approach, like the Oculus Quest. It's far cheaper than the Magic Leap, and seems a much easier sell because it's existing, tested technology available from multiple vendors.
The Leap seems either too early or too late to the party. Perhaps the Quest ate their lunch by providing a simpler and better solution to that one problem. Or it could be the market will go that way eventually, once people develop a desire for something sexier than a Quest, but that may take a long time still.
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Besides, the Hololens and Leap way of trying to inject overlay into an optical system that is otherwise just passing unprocessed light from the environment means they can't be perfectly opaque and the rendered elements just vanish when they go across the relatively tinier field of view possible with that approach.
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VR faces its own struggles but they may finally be close to sorting most of them out and it definitely has far more mainstream appeal than AR.
Covid (Score:2)
Because of covid no doubt. Surely they woulda been mega if it wasn't for that pesky lipid bag of proteins and RNA. Now send them money, bail them out.
Quantum mechanics predicts their future (Score:5, Funny)
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"Enterprise VR"? (Score:2)
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Please... just what is "Enterprise VR"?
Obviously it's VR that you charge a shitload of money for.
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It's a way to extract more money from silly and naive VC's who are so desperate to find the next unicorn that they'll sink money into the tech equivalent of a goddamn pet rock.
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VR for business use. Generally for training. Businesses have deep pockets for training, so it's acceptable for the hardware to cost a great deal of money if it can deliver performance to match. Think of pilots using cut-down flight simulators with a helmet in place of the instrument banks and screens, or structural inspectors going on virtual visits to buildings learning to spot the defects that need documenting, or engineers who get to strip down and rebuild heavy machinery in simulation. A $10,000 VR head
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Well, AR has had a solid market in defence for decades now. Starting with the Kamov KA-50, pilots' and gunners' helmets have superimposed an overlay with useful information from on-board sensors as well as stuff delivered from other units in the area via the battlefield network. Using head tracking and eye tracking for targeting goes back even further. The Boeing AH-64C had that.
Magic Splat (Score:2)
The pandemic wasn't the problem (Score:2)