Sunday Snapshot Augmented hype: Playing the mystery card can be tremendously beneficial to a startup, but there's a balance. Much-hyped startup Magic Leap may have typed that balance, and ventured into the realm of the traveling curative salesman, who promises plenty but is actually just repeating a well-practiced and empty pitch. The startup got its first real close-up media inspection by The Information, which took an inside look at the augmented reality company, and actually used its tech. The resulting picture was a somewhat deflated one compared to Magic Leap's own marketing line, which is not surprising, but the degree to which the pre-product startup with the $4.5 billion valuation fell short of wowing The Information's Reed Albergotti might be more than your usual disconnect between marketing and reality. 
Albergotti found that while research prototypes at the company have been wowing big name investors, the production device it has planned will be far less impressive, and likely more in line with things that are already commercially available, including Microsoft HoloLens. It's not what you want to hear about something that has previously seemed able to magically solve all the shortcomings of current-generation augmented reality. I spoke to Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz back in 2014 when Magic Leap was still mostly an unknown quantity, and the founder had grand visions about what was wrong with AR and what his company would fix at the time. He was careful not to even really classify what Magic Leap was doing as AR, and his ability to reframe the discussion using his own, more impressive sounding terms has been part of the company's 'magic,' and lead to the 'leap' of faith made by so many high-profile investors, including Google's Sundar Pichai. But really the investment interest is easy to understand, once you start peeling back the layers; sizeable, but relatively inconsequential sums by very wealthy, very high-profile investors in a technology that, in a limited demo, boggles the mind and hoodwinks the senses. That's easy, especially if you're early and not looking for the kind of capital that comes with serious due diligence. If anything is really all that disappointing about this new look at Magic Leap's reality vs. its carefully tuned fiction, it's that AR isn't as close to become something amazing, easy and fun as we may have thought. The technology still has a lot of potential, and likely more than its fully immersive cousin VR, but with Magic Leap still an unknown quantity, it had appeared more like an imminent quantum leap in computing paradigms, instead of the nascent tech with a long road ahead that it actually is. In more promising news, Occipital quietly surprised with the announcement that it will begin shipping its own mixed reality head-mounted device in March, which uses an iPhone 6/6s or 7 and a built-tin Occipital Structure sensor to map your surroundings in 3D. This smaller, much less hyped company is delivering dev kits as early as later this month, which means its humble, less vaunted approach will leapfrog Abovitz' pre-launch unicorn to shipping mixed reality to end users. Not necessarily a tortoise-and-hare story, since the tortoise still raised over $1.5 billion, but long-term, the slower, more humble player may have a larger impact on the future of AR in our daily lives, which is still something. Get the context: |
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