It was a bad choice if they wanted a successful consumer product. But I think the simplest explanation here is that the company's real product was fancy demos for investors. $2.6 billion in revenue! In operation since 2011! Thousands of jobs created!

I'd call it great choice. They wouldn't have been able to make nearly as much money on a purposeful, targeted device, because nobody's put in that much money for a narrow market. Worse, it would have been much easier for investors to figure that the more modest product would fail. Much better to sell moonbeams, to sell the glorious possibility of AR just like they saw on Westworld and Black Mirror.

I mean sure, the wheels had to come off eventually. After a while, you run out of fools. But most startups fail eventually, and you have to admit that 9 years is a great run for something that never worked, and probably never could have worked.

While sounding slightly cynical, I have come to believe that your comment is a good description of the current state of "the latest buzzword" startups.

I’m printing and framing this. SPOT ON!

I've only used the quest for a short demo, but I have a hard time seeing what full AR gets you that a quest in camera augmented setup mode can't.

What's the point of crappy half dim see-through display when you can just pipe the camera output to a normal VR screen?

Wearable anywhere. AR's unique value is not big bulky things you play with at home, they're to be a nearly invisible accessory you wear everywhere. You get a few grams to hang off people's faces in the form of glasses, not a half kilogram. Otherwise, you're right - VR meets the need well enough.

Currently the cameras are low fidelity, but perhaps that will improve enough in the future.

Camera quality is the easy problem. The hard problems are getting camera latency down and dealing with depth of field and all the other things you lose when you replace the incoming light field with camera images.

I’m pretty impressed with the depth of field the Quest is able to develop in Passthrough+ mode just using the 4 wide field tracking cameras and a smartphone processor from 3 years ago. A residual, after-thought capability like that on a $400 device is pretty impressive, IMHO.

given the rate of improvement in camera tech, I'd say we are very far away from passthrough to be usable

> we are very far away

For different definitions of "very far away". We're only talking about 15 years since we started getting proper video recording in phones, and only about 4 since the big players started focusing on software enhancements.

that's a fair point, but vision is such a high-dimensional and dynamic input that my feeling is the last 20% of super-fast autofocus, auto color balancing, high dynamic range, removing motion-blur, etc. will be very difficult to improve upon. it seems that just increasing brightness/fov by making better waveguides or MEMS will be much easier. that being said, magic leap's lack of success doesn't bode well.

Platform != product

If there was even 1 amazing game, they'd be ok. Think halo->xbox, sonic->sega, mario->nintendo+gameboy, ... .

But apparently not. Nothing people want to buy.