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Magic Leap Bashed for Being Vaporware
+hardware
A paywalled story by The Information [theinformation.com] criticized Magic Leap [wikipedia.org] for the company's $4.5 billion valuation and lack of shipping products. The company is working on an augmented reality product that may prove to be inferior to competing designs such as Microsoft's HoloLens [fortune.com]:
In The Information article, Magic Leap is said to use cumbersome equipment in its demonstrations that is at odds with the elegant design of the sunglasses-like product the company said it intends to build. Instead of a sleek pair of shades and low-impact tethering to a small battery pack, the demonstration required a helmet-sized device called "WD3," or "wearable device three," leashed to a desktop computer that the reviewer described as displaying "jittery and blurry" imagery.
This is apparently the same gear that Magic Leap execs showed investors, such as Alibaba baba and Google goog , in the lead-up to its $793 million Series C round of funding [fortune.com] earlier this year. Previously, the company had used a refrigerator-sized device known internally as "the Beast" in demonstrations, a piece of hardware offering visuals that may prove unattainable in smaller appliances, at least anytime soon.
The headset that The Information previewed, the WD3, is not the latest prototype, which is dubbed PEQ, or "product equivalent," as The Information notes. Though former employees told the tech news site that the PEQ spectacles use similar technology to Microsoft's HoloLens, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz disputed the claim in the article and said it "already produced images with more depth that look better" than the $3,000 competitor.
The article also claims that a promotional video [youtube.com] implied to be demonstrating the company's technologies was produced by a special effects studio instead.
Not to be confused with Leap Motion [wikipedia.org]. Also at The Verge [theverge.com], CNBC [cnbc.com], PC Magazine [pcmag.com], and MIT [technologyreview.com].
