Magic Leap and the Big Fall

Hollywood made movies that incorporated the idea, suggesting that we would soon be able to jump into computer generated worlds and do everything from navigate file systems in three dimensions exciting I know, to taking off like Superman. But as people got a chance to actually try out virtual reality set ups in the nineteen nineties, they became disillusioned. The tech chnology just couldn't live up to the hype. You could get an immersive experience, but the graphics were primitive.

The headsets were typically so heavy they had to be suspended from the ceiling with cables. Your movement was limited, and system latency caused a lot of folks to get motion sickness while trying one out. Interest in VR plummeted, and the industry found itself the proverbial redheaded step child of the tech world as well as the investment world. A lot of people continued to work on VR hardware and software, but it was much more challenging to get funding.

Progress was slow. It typically meant that you were appropriating stuff from other industries like the video game world or smartphones in order to get your stuff done. Thirty years later, we're seeing something similar with dedicated augmented reality headsets. Magic Leap a company that at one point was so exciting that it raised around three billion dollars that's billion with a B. Much of that money, by the way, was raised years before the company had anything significant to show off.

It seemed to be on a pretty similar path as VR back in the nineties, and sure enough now in twenty twenty, the company scrambled to secure a three fifty million dollar lifeline investment after laying off about one thousand workers plus the founder of the company has stepped down. Today we're going to explore Magic Leaps story, and while like a Leap, there's a rise and a fall, this

story is not yet over. Magic Leap could potentially recover, or they might fade into obscurity, or it may just become a company lesser than what it was intended to be. But before we get into the history of the company, it is good for us to define terms like virtual reality and augmented reality, both of which fall into a spectrum of technologies that a lot of folks call mixed reality.

And it all has to do with a combination of real world experiences and computer generated experiences and meshing them together in some way. So if you think of mixed reality as a spectrum, on one extreme end, you've got

pure virtual reality. In VR, computer is providing the sites and sounds, and theoretically it could provide other sensations as well, including touch through haptic feedback peripherals, or scent through various perfumes or oils and dispensers, though not many VR systems go as far as replicating smells, and very few, as far as I know, replicate taste. But the idea is that the computer generated sensory input is substituting for what

we would see in our real world. So instead of seeing a boring office or a retail space in a shopping mall, as was the case when I first experienced VR back in the ES, we would be transported into say a rainforest, or a pirate ship, or a fantasy realm, or, as was my case, a bunch of vector graphics of really blocky tero dactyls flying around. Using a control system, we can navigate these virtual environments and we can interact with them. A true VR experience should be both interactive

and immersive, and not all VR is created equal. Some VR experiences are fairly light touch, with only a bit of interactivity and primitive graphics. Typically, the hardware for VR includes a head mounted display so that your vision focuses only on the world that's created by the computer, and some headphones, plus some sort of control system. There may also be external cameras to help track your motion and translate that into what you experience in the virtual environment,

giving you a little more nuance to your actions. But in the end, the thing to remember is that the stuff you are experiencing through your senses is in large part computer generated. Augmented reality is closer to the other end of the spectrum of mixed reality. With a R, you have a view of the real world through some sort of display. It could be a head mounted display like VR, or it could be something as simple as

a smartphone or handheld game system. But whatever it is, it has to be able to overlay digital information on top of your view of the real world. So let's imagine a pair of glasses that can display information on the inside of the lenses so that you can see it. The lenses themselves are transparent, so you are looking at the world as if you were just wearing a normal

pair of glasses. And maybe you put on a pair while you're walking in an unfamiliar city, and the glasses start to display information on the inside of those lenses about the area around you. Maybe they provide you directions so you can get to a specific destination. With augmented reality, the whole idea is that a computer system isn't replacing your real world ex experience, but instead it's enhancing or

augmenting your experience in the real world. Between true VR and a R is a whole band of mixed reality technologies. Some are headsets allow wearers to have experiences in which the display they use inserts visual elements into their physical space. So you could wear a mixed reality headset, look at the room around you and watch as a video game character like I don't know, like Mario or Master chief

or crash Bandicoot just walks right into the room. A tabletop might become a virtual battleground for a little toy armies. A wall could become a window into a fantasy realm. The possibilities are limited only by computer processors, the software, and the imagination of developers. VR and a R share a lot of history, and a lot of tech engineers have repurposed technology intended for one and used it for

the other. And I think it's safe to say that most, but not all VR implementations have a head mounted display that can track where someone is looking and then adjust the point of view in the virtual environment accordingly. So that way, if you turn your head left, your virtual point of view also turns left. And that's incredibly important

if you want an immersive experience. Just imagine how disorienting it would be if you put on a headset and you're looking at a video game world and you turn your head to look up at the sky, but your view looks down at your feet. That would really throw you off. Likewise, not all a OUR implementations have a head mounted display, but many do. These displays have to do something a little different from VR. They have to

present a view of the real world. Now, they either do that through a transparent view screen or through a video screen that's got a video feed of the real world. So in other words, that screen has to be paired with a camera that's feeding a live image to the screen. To do that, thee has to be able to analyze what someone is looking at in order to overlay relevant information. Right, it doesn't do any good if you just get random information.

I mean, if you were to wear an a R headset and you're walking through Paris, but then the headset starts to giving you directions as if you're on a walk in Moscow, that would be less than useless. So the tech needs sophisticated code to interpret information. That could include things like image recognition, compass directions, GPS, coordinates, your orientation,

and more. All of that is super complicated, and it goes a bit beyond our story, but it's a good thing to remember that to pull off either convincing VR or a really useful a R experience, you need a lot of sophisticated code, and typically you need a fairly powerful computer system running in the background, whether it's on board in some sort of device you're wearing or tethered to a smartphone or tethered to a PC. VR and a R are not interchangeable, but they are close cousins.

Augmented reality is probably the more productive member of the family. Many but not all, of virtual realities applications relate to entertainment in some way, and many but not all of augmented realities applications relate to productivity. Okay, that's a good overview of two of the big subcategories of mixed reality. Though I should point out there are many other aspects of mixed reality that I've not covered, but that could be its own episode. Now let's move on to Magic Leap.

The company's founder is Ronnie Abovitz. Abovitz was born in Ohio. His family moved to Florida when he was a kid, and he went to the University of Miami, where he ultimately earned a master's degree in biomedical engineering. So I think it's safe to say he is pretty darn sharp. He earned his master's in nine and the following year he would co found his first company, e CAT that's a Z hyphen k a t Z. CAT was a

medical technology company. The focus of the company was to develop technologies to assist in minimally invasive surgical procedures, which have numerous benefits including a reduced risk of infection and faster recovery times. The company developed robotic tools that surgeons

could control to make precise, delicate incisions. The control systems could translate surgeon commands into steady and small motions with the robotic arm removing jitter and other muscular movements that would make these kind of procedures difficult or impossible with that level of precision. In two thousand four, the company chose to spin off its robotics division into a new

entity called Mako Surgical Corporation. And the logo for Mako was super cool too, reminiscent of a shark's fin makos a type of shark, and as a side note, the Magic Leap logo is reminiscent of a leaping whale, So there's a very marine theme going with Abovitz's work. So Abavits served not just as a co founder of Mako, but the chief technology officer and chief visionary officer for the company. Like z Cat, Mako would develop technologies to help surgeons as well as implants for stuff like knee

replacement surgery. The MAKO systems gave surgeons the information they needed to make real time decisions during a surgical procedure, including feedback systems to alert surgeons when they were getting close to the border of a predefined safety zone for a particular procedure. It's all super cool stuff that helps minimize any impact to quality of life during the recovery period. Sometime around twenty Orlen Abovitz began to think about another project.

The surgical assistance technologies rely partly on augmented reality tech. Digital information would augment the surgeons operating room, but A Pivitz saw possible applications for this kind of technology that extended not used into the medical field, but beyond. He called the project Magic Leap, and he would create a corporation under that name INN. But as for the details of what Magic Leap was all about, that remained a mystery.

Things didn't exactly coalesce the following year when Abavits put together a presentation for the two thousand twelve ted X event in Saratoga, Florida. The presentation is on YouTube and it's really more performance art than anything else. It actually reminds me a lot of the interactive art experiences from meal Wolf, a collection of artists out of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and perhaps by no coincidence, Meal Wolf is

listed as a potential artistic partner with Magic Leap. By the way, if you're interested in art, performance, tech, and absurdism, I highly recommend you check out Meal Wolf. Their work ranges from whimsical to unsettling. Anyway, I don't think I could describe the ted X presentation from two thousand twelve effectively. It's just kind of weird. If you want to check it out. It is on YouTube and it's called the

Synthesis of Imagination. And I'll just say this, there is no hint at all what the heck Magic Leap is about in that video. Now, that was sort of okay. At that point, the company name wasn't widely known, and you would be forgiven if you were walking away thinking magically was some sort of art collective that was particularly obsessed with fudge. Seriously, you need to watch the ted X talk from two thousand twelve to understand that reference.

The team began working on a longer term goal of creating a mixed reality system capable of generating really compelling, impressive digital overlays on top of our real world, not even just on top of incorporated into our real world. In two thousand fourteen, more people would begin to take note of Magic Leap as it held a round of investment funding and brought in fifty million dollars in the first quarter of the year, But Magic Leap had yet

to get truly widespread fame at that point. That did begin to change once people heard who some of these investors were. One of them was Richard Taylor, the Oscar winning special effects guru who worked on movies like Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson's King Kong. Other prominent figures in fields like video games and tech companies also were among the number of investors, and in October two thousand fourteen, Magic Leap received five hundred forty two million

dollars from numerous investors, including Google. It also didn't hurt that Abavits had recently seen his company Mako get acquired for a significant sum of money, more than a billion dollars, so things were going pretty fast and furious at this point. Now, clearly something special had to be happening, right, But what was it? As we'll see the mystery would be part of the selling point and the problem for Magic Leap. But before we get to that, let's take a quick break.

Abevids and crew made a choice to be secretive and mysterious with the goal of the company, which did drum up a lot of speculation and buzz about Magic Leap. But that can be a double edged sword, because while people were starting to talk about this enigmatic company, it also meant that they were left to fill in the gaps of their knowledge by themselves. And here's a little secret for all of you out there. The odds are that whatever thing you're really working on is unlikely to

match up to unfettered imagination. And this is why horror movies that leave stuff up to the imagination of the audience can have a much longer lasting effect than a movie that just shows you everything. The same is true for technology. If you don't lay out your vision, people kind of do that for you. And if that vision doesn't line up with reality, you're setting yourself up for failure. As you know, you're bound to disappoint people in the end.

But maybe I'm jumping ahead too much here. The company did give a few members of the media some early glimpses into technology it was working on. One of those journalists was a New York Times reporter named John Markoff. Magically demonstrated some early technology to mark Off, not a production model, just something that was sort of in the R and D department. This implementation wasn't a wearable headset.

Markoff described it as looking like quote, something from an optometrist's office end quote, And it was projecting what is called a digital light field into his eyes. So what the heck does that mean and why is it necessary at all? Well, Markoff goes into the fact that one of the challenges with both VR and a R has to do with depth and the way we perceive depth. So let's say you're looking down the street and you're watching a someone. Let's say it's Josh Clark, of stuff,

you should know someone this Josh Clark. He's skipping merrily down the street towards you. And actually, yeah, that's that's actually how he walks, and no, I don't know why he does that. Anyway, you would see Josh Clark is starting off pretty far away from you. You'd focus on him in the distance, but then he's gradually getting closer

and closer, skipping, perhaps somewhat menacingly toward you. He would appear to get larger because he's getting closer, until at some point he would block out your vision due to the fact that he has also and he does not mention this very much. He's also a giant. Okay, but let's say you're sitting with a VR headset on instead,

and this is simulating you looking down the street. Now you see a virtual representation of Josh Clark skipping toward you, but you're not actually looking at someone who is really far away. Right, the virtual Josh Clark is an image on a screen, and that screen is just an inch or two away from your eyes. Josh isn't actually getting

closer to you. Instead, the image is getting bigger. To simulate that sensation, you're getting visual cues that he's getting closer, but the entire time you're focusing on something that's actually right in front of you that screen. Now, it's hard to create a real sense of depth on a screen.

You can create visual cues to simulate depth, mimicking what we perceive in the real world, but then we have a situation in which our eyes are trying to focus on something that in our brains appears to be very far away from us, but in fact it's on a screen that's right in front of us. This can create fatigue and discomfort for the viewer, and it's called old virgins accommodation conflict. And if we move this over to augmented reality, we can really see a disconnect. The physical

world around us has actual depth. If we want a compelling a our experience that is more than just projecting text in front of our eyes, we need a system that can also incorporate depth in our virtual images so that they fit into the real world around us. Otherwise we'll be trying to focus on stuff that's on a screen, even if it's a transparent one that's right in front of us, while also trying to focus beyond in the

real space around us. Enter the light field. Now, way back in the day, I talked about light field technology with the lightro camera. This digital camera could do something super cool. You could take a digital photo with it and then after the fact, you could change the focus of that image. Now, to understand why that's cool, let's think about standard photography. A camera, whether film or digital, has a lens. Typically there are cameras that don't have lenses,

but let's just talk about the lensed ones. The purpose of the lens is to direct light. It bends the light toward a photoreactive element, either photoreactive film or a digital sensor. The physical curvature of the lens will determine how much it will bend that light. By moving the lens closer to or further from that photoreactive element, you can direct light from different distances toward that element. You will get a different point of focus, a different focal point.

So you might have one setting that you can capture so that you get a clear image of a very distant object, and then you would have a totally different setting if you wanted to get a clear photo of something that was much closer to you, or you might even swap out lenses if you had to get a wider angle, or if you wanted to really zoom into something that was really further away. But the nitro camera

and other light field cameras are different. They capture a light field, which describes all the rays of light moving in all directions within a given area the frame of view of the camera, and it includes not just the direction of the light, but the intensity of each ray of light. The special images these cameras produce, which require a special app to manipulate afterward, represent all the different rays of light within a shot, and so you can

change the focus of that image. You can choose which rays of light you want to really focus on. So if you've got one object that's close to you and another that's in the background, you can actually switch focus from background to foreground over and over again, just choosing whichever one you want to look at at a given time.

But how the heck does this technology actually work. It's one thing to say that the camera captures the light field of a scene, and another to actually make something that can do at So, your typical light field camera has all the elements of a normal camera. That is, has a lens to direct incoming light. There's an aperture or a hole that the light must pass through in order to hit a sensor for recording the image. But the lightro also has what's called a micro lens array,

which sits between the main lens and the sensor. Now, as that name suggests, a micro lens array is a collection of very small lenses that can capture light coming from different distances from the camera's sensor. If you think of a camera as having detachable lenses where you can put a different lens on in order to get a different focal point. Just imagine a whole sheet of tiny little lenses that all can do that, and each lens has a slightly different curve to it so it can

focus at a slightly different distance. You've got an entire array of these tiny lenses and they're all directing light toward particular pixels the digital cameras sensor. Each micro lens is doing the same thing and for its own focal point that is. That means you can have different micro lenses dedicated to those specific focal points, all capturing all

the information to that sensor. Using the special app and photo file type, you can then select which batch of information you want to look at, and in this case, the batches of information relate to different focal points. So you can say, I want to look at all the light that was at this object, and it brings that object into focus. Then you click on a different object and you say, now I want to look at that one, and it brings all that light into focus instead. It's

just switching lenses virtually in a way. There are companies working on technologies that will allow for light field displays without a micro lens array, but that topic is pretty darn complicated, even more so than just the standard light field cameras, So I'm gonna save that for another time. Now. The magic Leap concept that Mark of got to see also had light field technology, but in this case it was a light field display, and the goal was to project an image onto the retina of the user's eye,

rather than to create a special type of digital photo. Ideally, the goal would be to create three dimensional virtual objects using depth cues and meshing those virtual objects with the real environment, so that to your eye it would be no different than if the virtual object really were there in the same space as you. So if you had a floating castle as your virtual object, to your eye, it should look like the floating castle really is floating there.

Not only would the virtual objects seem to belong to the physical space that appeared to occupy. You could view that virtual stuff from different angles. So you're floating castle, you could walk around it, and you let's say it's floating at say chest level, you could walk around see it from every single angle. It would be sitting there in the air as if it were actually be there. You could squat down and look under it. You could get on your tiptoes and look at the turrets and

the parapets and everything. From the top. It would appear to actually have a physical presence. Now, markov only got a first glimpse at this technology, and to be fair, the New York Times piece was really more about the general potential of a R and VR and light field technologies. But that piece did have a little nugget from Abovits, who said, quote, our real market is people doing everyday things.

Rather than pulling your mobile phone in and out of your pocket, we want to create an all day flow. Whether you're going to the doctor or a meeting or hanging out, you will all of a sudden be amplified by the collective knowledge that is on the web end quote. Now, I think the phrase that will end up being something we'll have to look back on is our real market is people doing everyday things. I've got to keep that in mind when we get to stuff like how much

the actual product costs. Now the world got a little more insight into what Magic Leap wanted to do. They wanted to create an a R technology that could enhance our day to day activities in various ways. But while there were some tentalizing details fed to the general public a lot of Magic Leaps actual work was still an enigma. In two thousand and fifteen, Magically began releasing demo videos

of what its technology would be able to do. These videos stated that the footage that was shot was through the Magic Leap technology, with no special effects or compositing used after the fact. The demos were definitely compelling. My favorite one showed a miniature virtual representation of the Solar system seemingly hanging in the air over a desk, and right next to the solar system was a woman at work on a computer. The details of the model were incredible.

They included a little rotating Earth, and they were all had incredibly vibrant colors. It was amazing. The Sun, the planets, the Moon's all looked solid as they moved in their pathways. Really breathtaking stuff and those videos are still up on

YouTube if you want to check them out. The company filed for a patent on its technology, which included a mention of a quote photonic light field chip in the quote, presumably the technology that could create the projection of virtual objects to then be beamed right into a person's eyeballs. The patent also called for quote an inertial measurement unit

in the quote or I am you. This would later be revealed to be a device that would hold the processor, the storage, and the battery for the Magic Leap system. It would be something that you would have to you know, wear on a belt, you know, clip it to a pocket, something like that. And offloading the tech onto a tethered, wearable pack meant that the engineers didn't have to figure out how to cram all those components into the form factor of the headset itself, which would help keep the

glasses more lightweight and less bulky. Also, it would help deal with heating issues. I mean, this thing was going to require a lot of processing, and processors can run a little warm, and you don't want to have a super hot processor right next to, say, your temple. Now, the mysterious nature of Magically didn't hurt when it came to investments. Heck, maybe maybe it actually helped a lot. Investors convinced that this could be the next big thing

poured cash into magic Leap. In early twenty sixteen, the company had already raised nearly one point four billion dollars in investments. Abavits had a great reputation, his work in medical robotics had been a proven success, and while there had been other attempts at creating augmented reality or mixed

reality headsets, no one had really nailed it yet. Magically claimed that the company was working on a totally new approach to generating augmented reality experiences, which meant that maybe it was sidestepping some of the limitations that had held back other implementations. So instead of saying, oh, well, we we're going to get to market after Microsoft and the hollow lens, they could say we're doing a totally different

approach to augmented reality that is unlike what they are doing. Slowly, the potential for magic Leap appeared to be forming in the minds of the public, and this could be way more advanced than a system that would let you play games. You could use it to replace stuff like televisions or computer displays. You could create virtual screens in your environment. The device would remember where you put stuff, so if you designated a segment of your wall as a giant television.

That's where it would appear. Whenever you wore the Magic Leap, you could still look around and the screen would appear to be anchored in that physical space, as if you had actually hung a TV there. So with this device, you could have multiple computer screens open, all at the same time, and none of them would take up any actual physical space. Now, when we come back, we'll talk about the launch of the real Magic Leap one headset, the tech that makes it work, and what has happened

to the company since that product launch. But first, let's take another quick break. Magic Leap got its start into two thousand eleven, it would not have a product to launch for nearly a full decade. Before that, the company did offer up a limited developer edition of the technology called the Magic Leap one Creator's Edition, starting in August two thousand eighteen. It would cost two thousand, two hundred

nine five dollars, a princely sum. Indeed, a journal called The Information would later allege that Magic Leap was only able to sell six thousand of the Creator Edition model upon the first six months of its release, and it also said that Magic Leap's goal was to sell one hundred thousand units, so the goal was one hundred thousand. Real was six thousand, so as you can imagine, that

represents a pretty severe shortfall. And between the launch of the Creator addition in two thousand eighteen and the actual Magic Leap one headset in December two thousand nineteen, the company would see cutbacks. It would have a travel freeze so that it wasn't gonna pay for corporate travel. There

were layoffs, There were a lot of departures. Beyond the layoffs, the shine on the company was starting to dull a bit, and it had been a long time since those early demo videos and the market response to the Creator edition was underwhelming to say the least. No doubt, some of the investors were starting to get a bit an see. After all, more than two billion dollars had already gone to the company since it got started. Now it was in December two thousand nineteen that Magic Leap introduced the

Magic Leap one system. The company had only held a few demonstrations, mostly to select members of the press, not a whole lot of public demos of this technology, and the demo and concept videos had impressed a lot of people. A few years before. One famous concept video showed a school gym filled with students that were sitting on the bleachers. They were looking into an otherwise empty gym, and suddenly a whale appears to breach from the gym floor, leaping

high into the air and the kids all gasp. But was that the sort of experience people could actually come to expect with the Magic Leap One. Well maybe, but first you would have to meet that sales price, which was the same as the Creator Edition, a hefty two thousand two dollars. That's still the price for the spatial computer as of this recording. And that includes the headset, which is officially known as Lightweare and the I Am You now known as the Light Pack and that houses

the processors and battery for the Magic Leap. It's connected to the Magic Leap headset with a wire and it also includes a wireless controller that you can hold in one hand, similar to the we nun chuck in a way. The processor in the Magic Leap one is an Nvidio Parker s o C. S o C stands for System on a chip. It has six processor cores. There's also an Nvidio Pascal graphics processing unit. Or GPU, and it

has eight gigabytes of ram uh. It also has a one eight gigabyte hard drive, although only ninety five gigabytes of actual storage space is available on it. The battery in the light pack is said to hold enough juice for three hours of use, or you can actually plug into an a wall. You have an little a C adapter that you can plug into a wall for sustained use, though obviously if you do that you're tethered to a

power outlet. One thing Magic Leap does differently from other devices is that the processing can all take place on the system itself, unlike, for example, Google Glass, which you would have to pair with a smartphone. So Google Glass is more of a smartphone peripheral, whereas Magical Leap one is a computer system all by itself. The light pack can connect via USB or WiFi to a computer and

you can use that to download or launch apps. According to Omar Khan, the product officer for a Magic Leap, the Magical Lea one device had some minor updates compared to the original Creator edition, but at least on casual glance, the two seem pretty close to identical. The headset, which looks kind of like goggles, has speakers built into them

and that can create immersive directional sounds. So if you wore the Magic Leap and you were playing a game, you would be able to hear virtual things moving around your real environment. You might be able to hear something sneaking up on you. You'd turn around, you would actually see it there. That's pretty darn cool. It also has a couple of infrared emitters and sensors built into the front of the headset, and these are used to create

a digital map of your physical environment. See to make a virtual character appear as if it is actually in a physical space. First, the Magical Leap one has to know what your physical space is like. So those emitters send out pulses of infrared light, and those pulses reflect off the various surfaces in your space, and then they come back and get picked up by the infrared sensors

on the front of the Magic Leap one. It's a little bit like echolocation, and it gives the Magic Leap one processor the data it needs to understand depth in your environment. Measuring the time it takes the infrared to go out and come back tells the Magic Leap if a table is closer to you than a chair, for example, and so when the Leap starts to project a virtual image into your view, it can incorporate the physical environment

more convincingly. The controller has a magnetic controller tracking device in it. The controller has an emitter, the headset has a receiver, and the controller allows for all sorts of interactions within a virtual environment, from playing a game to performing simple controls with a virtual video screen. The magically one also can track hand movements, so you can do gesture base controls as well. So it all really depends

on the application and what you want to do. The real star of the show would be the light field. Projectors six small lenses lit from the side angle light to hit your eyes, and it's really no different than you looking at something without glasses on at all. Right, light from the environment you are in hits your eyes and then your brain susses out what you're looking at. With the Magic Leap one, the light isn't coming just

from the environment, it's also coming from the device. But if it's done well, your brain doesn't necessarily register the difference, and so to you it appears as though these virtual elements are really in your physical space. The headset does restrict your field of view. However, the visual field refers to the area of space a person can see at any given moment. We measure it by degrees from the center, so this includes the area you focus on as well

as your peripheral vision. So a typical visual field has a full range of one fifty five degrees across horizontally and one thirty five degrees up and down or vertically. The magically one, in contrast, has a horizontal field of view of forty degrees and a vertical field of view of thirty degrees, So clearly it's much more restricted than

the typical one by one thirty five. A lot of that unrestricted view is peripheral, so it's stuff you're not necessarily really focusing on, but you still can see it. So wearing a magically one means that you see less of your surroundings. However, you could argue it also helps direct your focus towards the virtual elements, so perhaps it's also boosting the effect of having those virtual elements in

your environment. Now, I've not tried these on myself, so I can't speak as to what it's like to actually wear them. That being said, the reports I've read make it sound pretty darn amazing, But at that price, the Magic Leap was not really in the ballpark for a consumer device. Most folks don't dish out two thousand dollars for a fully fledged PC. I mean, the gamers do, but most of us don't. So Magic Leap was gearing their marketing efforts afterward towards enterprises, much as Microsoft had

with the Hollow Lens device, another augmented reality headset. They did this pretty late in the game, though, so this is another point of criticism people have levied at Magic Leap because so much of their marketing early on appeared to be directed toward the average person. I mean, this was supposed to help us in our day to day activities, right, But now it was becoming clear that just the cost of producing this thing meant there was no way to

make it affordable for a consumer market. You're going to have to market it towards the enterprise. But that was a disconnect between the earlier messaging from Magic Leap and that report I mentioned from the information was pretty brutal. It painted a picture of a company that had failed to meet both external and internal expectations worse. The piece suggested that a second generation of the technology, a Magic Leap to perhaps one at a lower price point, was

at least two years further down the road. And then twenty happened, and it's still happening. It's happened like crazy to me, and I'm one of the ones who's lucky that it only really happened a little bit. I hope the happening to you has been as smooth as possible. But man, we're all gonna need to do over, I think. Anyway, Magic Leap was already on shaky ground. The lackluster response to the Creator Edition was a bad blow. The informations

report on the company wasn't much better. So Magically collected a veritable who's who in speculative fiction, special effects, computing and more, all of them becoming part of the co report officers or board of directors, really elevating the perception of Magic Leap. But that collection of luminaries began to dwindle. Some were leaving on their own accord, some left after offices shut down, and fewer and fewer of those big

names were still with the company. One person who stepped down was Abo, its himself, who relinquished his position as head of the company in March twenty. That was around the same time that the company announced the one thousand employee layoffs ABO its remains connected to the board of directors. However, so what exactly happened, Well, I think in a way we saw a repeat of the boom and bust of virtual reality back in the nineteen nineties. There was a

hype train that inflated interest. I don't know what the corporate culture of Magic Leap is like. I don't know if the company indulged in extravagance the way a lot of startups have in the past. I haven't seen reports of lavish parties or ridiculous expense says, but just developing that technology and getting it into a form factor that's small enough to fit into goggles and a puck sized

clip on device, just that is an enormous challenge. Developing the tech had to be expensive, and getting the involvement of various big thinkers like Neil Stevenson snow Crash himself, that had to cost a pretty penny as well. And then you've got a lot of money going out and not a lot coming in. You can see that things can't go like that forever. Now. According to the Verge,

Magic Leap is dealing with some pretty tricky issues. Enterprises aren't exactly champing at the bit to invest inexpensive experimental hardware, particularly hardware that is designed to run apps that can only come from a single, unproven source. You know, just as Apple controls what apps you can run on an iPhone by vetting them before they can go into the app store, Magic Leap was making itself the one source

for software to run on the hardware. Developers would have to submit software to Magic Leap for it to become available to run on Magic Leap headsets. But if companies aren't confident that Magic Leap is going to stick around, it makes no sense to sink thousands of dollars in hardware that isn't able to run other types of applications. Really, what this does is drive home how hard it is to do augmented reality well or mixed reality, if you prefer.

Most companies have to make compromises. You can reduce the cost of hardware by offloading work onto a different device like a smartphone or a computer, But if you're using a phone, then you're gonna have limits to what you can accomplish just based on that phone's processor and connection speed. If you're using a computer, you have to figure out how are you transmitting data between the computer and your device.

It might limit the uses for your tech because you may not be able to move that far away from the home base computer. Magic Leap was trying to create an advice that wouldn't depend on any other gadget, avoiding that kind of compromise, but that also meant the cost for the device was going to be much higher to cover the cost of all those components. On top of that, the company was really trying to make most of those components itself rather than rely on existing third party hardware.

That would just add to the cost because you have to develop all those pieces. In fact, it's quite possible that originally they were looking to develop their own processors before they moved to the Vidio ones. In short, there were a lot of very lofty expectations for the technology, and even if the technology delivers upon the experience, the expense means that most of us don't get an opportunity

to try it out, and that's unfortunate. There are a lot of questions out there over whether or not Magic Leap will be able to recover from this pandemic is an added twist to an already difficult path. I think if Magically does survive, it's going to be a very different entity than the mysterious one we have seen, you know, talked about since two thousand twelve or so. I hope

it sticks around. I want to see mixed reality become a more universal technology, but it's going to take a lot of time and development, and that cost has to come down, and that's going to that's a that's a that's a big challenge. I just don't know how you managed to do it. In the short term. It maybe years before we see anything that is truly compelling and practical and affordable. I hope we see it. We'll have to wait, alright, guys. That wraps up this episode of

tech Stuff. If you have any suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows h