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Magic Leap Creator One on Sale for $2595
August 13, 2018 Magic Leap founder’ Rony Abovitz’s never explained how the technology worked, but before the company had a headset or software or programs, it hired marketers to sell the Dream of Magic Leap, all the while promising that a product was just around the corner. Abovitz dropped mysterious hints on Twitter, hid Easter eggs inside old TED talks, and accepted an invitation to speak at the 2015 TED conference, bailing just days before his scheduled talk. For the past four years, the headsets Abovitz has promised have failed to materialize, and questions arose, whether people will even want to wear headsets at all, given the ability to pull up apps on their iPhones to augment reality. The company has guarded its secrets, revealing very little about how its light field technology works or what its future product might look like. Figure 1: Magic Leap Goggles Source: Company
Developers, analysts, and general tech enthusiasts had grown increasingly skeptical that Magic Leap was developing anything worth following at all. Headlines ask “Why Do People Keep Giving Magic Leap Money?” and cry,“Believe It or not, Magic Leap Says Its Headset Will Ship ‘This Summer.’” As Jono MacDougall, developer and author of the blog GPU of the Brain, wrote, “It makes us feel like they are in a secret club and they won’t invite us in. It makes us feel like they think they are better than us.” He added, “It makes us want them to fail.” Yet for all the things that have gone wrong, a few important things have worked out. Magic Leap has now raised more than $2.3 billion, enough money to fuel a lengthy research-and-development phase. It has built a stable of advisers and investors that include Alibaba executive vice chair Joe Tsai, Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, and Richard Taylor, who shepherds Magic Leap’s alliance with his mixed-reality and game studio, Weta Gameshop, a division of Weta Workshop. It has built an eclectic workforce of around 1,500 employees. The first test is about to occur as the company as AT&T begins selling a $2,295 headset called the Magic Leap One Creator Edition. |
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Barry Young
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