No, it costs $2,300. They have developed the tech to do multiple stacked waveguides (12 I think?) but this device only does 2, probably for price reasons. Anyway the company is valued at $4.5 billion which has nothing to do with how much it will cost, only the amount of profit they think they can make from devices and patent licensing.

I think you misunderstood what he was saying. Magic Leap, as of now, has received $2.3B in the comments[1]. This is mentioned in the article's subtitle.

[1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-leap

Yes but what they're buying is a share of the company and its profits. No one is paying $2.3B to develop the tech.

Not for price reasons. Its because the more wave guides you super glue together the more image disruption you get. It's allready blocking a significant proportion of the light, not to mention the splitting out of colors.

Any idea what they are doing differently from the Vuzix Blade?

Vuzix Blade is an "eye-mounted tablet". It has a basic orientation sensor in it, but it's really bad and most of the apps I've seen don't use it. You've basically got a low-power Android device in the corner of your eye, with an interface designed around three buttons.

It has a front-facing camera, but it's used strictly as a web-cam for "see what I see" calls and QR code detection. It does not do any environmental analysis.

About the only things they have in common is "they look like goggles".

> You could go to the moon with that cash.

Not quite, but you could get low Earth orbit.

To compare, ST3, the light rail project in the Seattle area, is costing about $54 billion. That could take 1 WA State resident to the Moon and back.

Other similar devices (Hololens, Oculus Rift, Google Glass, etc.) have had similar costs. Remember that not all of the costs are hardware design or even production, they need to build a developer ecosystem, software, do marketing, etc. The costs involved in bringing a new hardware device in a new category to market are much higher than a CRUD web app... CastAR raised "only" $15M, which is enough for some software startups to operate for years, and crashed and burned.

Hell, you could go to Mars with that cash! After all, a rocket ship is basically just a tube with fuel strapped to one end and people strapped to the other.

Right! And a computer is just a pile of sand in metal casing.