Hi everyone — the photo you are all excited about is NOT what you think it is.”
So said Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz on Twitter earlier this month, responding to the latest PR crisis embroiling his Florida-based augmented reality (AR) startup.
Days before, Business Insider published what it said was the first photo of Magic Leap’s secretive, never-before-seen hardware. That was a big deal because — to date — the world had only seen videos purportedly shot from the point-of-view of a Magic Leap wearer, showing computer-created “holograms” — everything from floating jellyfish to C-3PO and R2-D2 — appearing to interact perfectly with objects in the real world.
The problem: In addition to the expected head-mounted AR goggles, the prototype revealed in the Business Insider story what appeared to be the guts of a desktop PC grafted onto an impromptu backpack. Not exactly the ready-for-prime-time tech some of us are expecting.
Magic Leap, in case you haven’t been paying attention, is a 7-year-old startup that’s raised more than $1 billion in its quest to make a truly next-generation portable augmented reality device: a head-mounted system that was said to project images onto the user’s retina, rendering computer-generated images that seem to exist within your real-world field of vision. And it was widely understood that the final product would be a portable headset, not something tethered to a PC like today’s current high-end virtual reality systems, the HTC Vive and Facebook’s Oculus Rift.
Crisis contained — maybe. But just two days later, the company was back in the news after getting hit with a sex discrimination lawsuit from former employee Tannen Campbell, who claims that a gender imbalance at Magic Leap “renders it so dysfunctional it continues to delay the launch of a product that attracted billions of investment dollars.”
If 2017 was getting off to a miserable start for Magic Leap, it was because December 2016 had been no better. Early that month, The Information (subscription required) published an exposé that pierced the company’s previously inviolate hype bubble. Among the revelations: The company’s initial prototypes involved some considerable compromises, and a 2015 YouTube video that purported to show a first-person shooter game running on Magic Leap hardware was (as many had suspected) merely a conceptual rendering, not actual gameplay video. (“This is a game we’re playing around the office right now,” says the misleading caption on the video’s YouTube page.)
That was quite a reversal from the cover story of Wired’s May 2016 issue, in which editor Kevin Kelly presented a largely positive picture of Magic Leap’s technology. It was an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the company that was part of a larger report on the future of the entire virtual reality and augmented reality space. It hit within a month of release of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
When anticipation turns to frustration
Let’s take Abovitz at his word — that the weird-looking motherboard backpack was an R&D device, not a prototype of the “real” Magic Leap device. (Magic Leap didn’t respond to CNET’s requests for comment about the photo or Campbell’s legal action.)
But the online schadenfreude the image generated is easy to understand.
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Source: Cnet