Re:Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from co...
by npunt on Thursday April 23, 2020 @04:36AM
(#22953927)
A "transformative visual experience" isn't a product, or a vision. It's a technology in search of a problem. They needed to demonstrate a clear use case, and determine if that was achievable with what they had. If it wasn't, they could always be an R&D lab instead. I don't know what you actually do with a $10k light field thing even if it is cool. If you want to make a category-defining product (which $2.6b in funding strongly suggests), you have to define the category, not just ship a thing.
Fast Forward so many years and what got delivered in ML1 ? A consumer format device not capable of delivering on that original vision experience.
Your comment suggests MLeap should have early on baked in expectations for a substandard visual experience in a first mass market consumer product. I disagree. Instead, they should have planned on miniaturization problems and baked in expectations for first delivery of a ground breaking visual experience product not available in a mass market consumer device footprint or price point.
MLeap's killer app should have been their visual experience. That was the day one focus and it got lost along the way, as you say 'pulled in a ton of different directions'.
I tell people I would have bought a $10,000 Motorcycle helmet with a backpack from MLeap if that was able to produce just a good part of original Dynamic Light Field AR experience. Is that a fast moving mass market consumer device ? No, but obviously the ML1 was not either.
I am reminded of Theranos and their maniacal insistence on using 'one drop of blood' and how it defined the format of every component, when it is possible they would have succeeded with just a little more flexibility on that design principle.
As with Theranos setting back the IoT medical space, I fear that the MLeap experience will set back spatial computing in the short to mid term, however I think both these fields are at very early stages of transforming our living environments over the long term.