Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022

I've barely cracked the surface of this and it's already one of the best analytical breakdowns of new tech I've seen. Thank you, kguttag!

This is obviously a very hot market. Where do you see AR vs VR in 2 years? Five years? Do you think these companies will have supply chain issues? Do you think AR will face adoption issues? It seems like the lack of light, "glowing eyes", eye tracking cutouts, and other issues will be big hurdles for all companies in this space.

I'll come back with more technical questions after I finish reading. This is great.

I’ve loved your posts for years on piercing through the smoke and mirrors on Magic Leap. Thanks for another great breakdown!

In Florida, not SV

Thanks,

The rumor mill is that Microsoft has slowed down development of HL3 development with many people leaving. Most famously, Bernard Kress, and optical architect of Hololens 1 and 2 has left for Google.

There were very few Magic Leap Ones ever sold. The number I hear is between 5,000 and 10,000 units sold for money with about as many units given away.

Hololens 2 seems to be shipping about 70K to 100K units per year but it is not clear if that has peaked or not. The display quality is very poor as I have written about extensively, but the ergonomics are good enough for some industrial applications.

I get the sense that ML2 was too far gone and with money running out to react to ML2 and thus still has terrible ergonomics. With blocking 80% of the light, not supporting ordinary glasses, and having a cable which is a snag hazard, the future looks bleak for Magic Leap 2 as it was for ML1. I don't know if they would have been a success, but at least they would have had a shot in the same space as HL2 if they had reworked the serious ergonomic problems. The dimming feature is a differentiation that resulted in them missing the market altogether.

They seems to have done some good things. Sadly in AR as well as many high tech markets, it is possible to have a great technical achievement but miss the market requirements. The dimming feature caused them to lose at least 70% of the real-world light off the top. Nothing else they could do would made up for that mistake. It looks like they were focused on novel features over utility.

I think a large part of this is that they were building the ML2 for the high end consumer video game market when one day they they were told it was too expensive and it would now be an enterprise product. I hate the display quality of the HL2, but at least they improved ergonomic and interface issues over the HL1, whereas the ML2 repeats the mistakes of the ML1.