Leap Motion (which is not Magic Leap) recently showed a design with a much larger FOV, using so-called "bird bath" optics (which Meta 2 is also based on). It's not anything you'd want to actually wear in everyday life, but it should be an interesting platform for prototyping AR software. http://blog.leapmotion.com/northstar/

To be fair, VR headsets look ridiculous as well. So, use them in the same settings and it'd be fine.

But how much does it really buy over VR if you only use it in the same setting?

It would buy a lot more if it wouldn't only be in the same setting, but I think pretty much all current day AR headsets are too dorky to wear on the subway anyway. But it would still help a lot with office work, being able to continue working and doing small chores is still a big pro that VR can't fulfill.

Everything has tradeoffs and Hololens, MagicLeap and Meta have made different choices resulting in different ones.

The Meta2 has quite a large field of view (though a very different design compared to the Meta1, Hololens or ML). It is conceptually similar to taping a smartphone to the underside of a baseball cap lid and hanging plastic googles off the lens to reflect the light back into your eyes. Also, you need to connect a bunch of cables back to a gaming level PC to make everything work.

Hololens is very light, but is using tiny projectors to reflect back into your eye (also entirely self contained in the headset!).

MagicLeap has a different display tech, along with a bunch of other refinements and additions (eye tracking for foveated rendering, occlusion, etc.) also requires a smartphone sized battery pack/processor with a cable that goes to the glasses.

So you have on the physical UX front:

Hololens (headset) beats MagicLeap (headset + pack) beats Meta (headset + gaming PC).

And then on the FOV front:

Meta beats Hololens beats MagicLeap

And then on the "number of super promising and ambitions technologies put into a single device:

MagicLeap beats Hololens beats Meta.

ALL of these devices are still clearly being pitched as "Developer" Units, none of them are ready for even the level of (still somewhat lackluster) consumer adoption that VR has seen.

Which is not to say that they're bad or that ML has blown $2B dollars, etc. I really don't think this is Theranos situation, it's just EARLY. In cell phone terms, AR still isn't quite to the Motorola razor level of development (and everybody's expectations are at iPhone/Android level).