Magic Leap One

Look at Apple’s full iPhone landing page. It’d be silly to explain at the top “iPhone is a wireless digital communication device.” It’s obvious that dude is wearing glasses that look like AR/VR headset. You ain’t gotta spell it out for people.

Their promo videos specifically promise that you could have a crowd of 100 people without the goggles on watching the Magic Leap effects.

They are liars.

I follow this space fairly closely, so here is some context for this.

The first thing to keep in mind about AR is that the "target" for all of these devices is really 5 to 10 years out when the assumption is that an AR goggles/device will replace smartphones.

This is why Google + everyone else are cool with dumping a billion+ dollars into MagicLeap, why FB bought Oculus (Yes, Oculus is currently a VR company, but Michael Abrash and others have publicly stated that is only because it's a more tractable problem than AR), etc. without an immediate payback / shipping device. How many trillions is owning the tech that replaces smartphones worth?

And there's a decent chance that MagicLeap will do this as they're taking a very different approach to the display technology than anyone else. Competitors like HoloLens, Meta, and about a dozen different smaller companies all have some version of a LCD display reflecting off an angled visor.

Meta - https://www.metavision.com/ - the design is like you took a baseball cap, glued a smartphone screen under the brim pointing down and then attached a plexiglass visor to reflect the images up at you.

HoloLens - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens - you can see similar things here with all their layers of visors.

This reflective LCD approach is well understood and in relative terms "cheap" (aka you can buy good LCD screens at volume b/c of the existing smartphone market), but the result is necessarily a very washed out image, it doesn't look real or solid.

What MagicLeap is doing display wise is something very different. Rony's first company (sold for $1.2B) used fiber optics for seeing what was happening inside of a person while they were getting surgery. Imagine a light + fiber in your heart and the fiber is "scanning" back and forth to get a picture of what the valves of your heart look like.

Now _flip_ that - so instead you have fiber optics projecting light into your eye and the resulting image is indistinguishable from reality b/c it's just more light.

The presumption and rumors all along have been that this lightfield tech is real and amazing enough to open the wallets of some of the smartest people on the planet - but initially required something like the arm+lens setup that you use at the optometrist and a massive gaming PC to make it work.

What MagicLeap has been doing with all this time and money has been trying to shrink this system down. There have been leaked reports of "backpack" setups that were more or less a battery and a PC motherboard zip tied to a person. This announcement at least draws a line in the sand with regards to shipping a portable lightfield product and it may turn out to really be something special.