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How Magic Leap is trying to reinvent itself (and AR) for 2021 7/12/2020

Back in 1999, the interactive artist group Blast Theory debuted Desert Rain, one of first augmented reality theatrical installations – then known as mixed reality. Players picked their way through virtual images from the 1991 Gulf War projected onto a curtain of water as they tried to complete an amorphous mission inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s assertion that the Gulf War was a virtual event.To get more latest technology news, you can visit shine news official website.

Since then, the tech-focused group has created eerily prophetic pieces about surveillance tech, the rise of the far right and, in 2019, the effect of a flu outbreak in US cities that ignored social distancing – so co-founder Matt Adams has uncanny predictive form when it comes to discussing recent issues in AR’s consumer tech stumbles such as Magic Leap and Google Glass.

“At its heart, the recent crash and burn is a misunderstanding of the use case for VR and AR,” Adams argues. “The whole use is predicated on you using this in your living room – but you don’t normally put headphones on and absent yourself with other people there. The traditional video-games model is people sitting and watching each other play. It’s still not great in terms of resolution, latency and content, and the question that’s not been answered is: what kind of experience needs to be in that environment? All of these things may yet be solved – it’s not fatally doomed. I’ve seen training for miners underground when there’s a disaster. For that idea it seems really sensible.”

This shift to training and enterprise is the new hope for Magic Leap, founded in 2010 by charismatic CEO Rony Abovitz. Abovitz raised nearly $3.5 billion (£2.6bn) in venture funding from investors such as Google, Alibaba, Fidelity and Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at $6.4 billion (£4.8bn), according to PitchBook, but his long-awaited headset failed to take off.

Last December, the company launched its selling-to-businesses strategy. In April it announced extensive layoffs, Abovitz stepped down as CEO at the end of July and in August, Peggy Johnson, 58, was appointed to the role – having run business development at Microsoft, brokering partnerships and shepherding its acquisitions, including the 2016 purchase of LinkedIn. It’s her job to oversee the new direction, but, she says, it’s also to nurse Magic Leap’s plans to return to consumers when the time is right.

“I had a pretty good view of the company from outside because I knew Rony,” she explains. “He’d invited me down to see the factory in Florida about two years before I started, and I was impressed with the tech. What I found when I got to the company was that nothing was broken. The tech was better than I thought, and what they did in the factory was amazing. If they needed something, they would just build it – the iteration was impressive."

"The biggest issue was: we needed more focus," she says. "Like any early technology you’re not sure where this is going to resonate best and earliest. That happens to be in the enterprise space, much like mobile phones started in enterprise before we were all carrying them.”

Johnson spent 24 years at Qualcomm before joining Microsoft in 2014. She serves on the board of directors at investment management giant BlackRock Inc, and in 2016 set up Microsoft’s venture capital fund M12 to invest in cloud computing and AI start-ups. She sees Magic Leap’s immediate future as focusing on healthcare, defence and telecommunications – with healthcare “maybe a little bit supercharged because of the Covid-19 situation” and defence “already used to the idea of Heads-Up Display in night vision, so it’s a natural progression.” Although the company prefers to say it’s in “spatial computing”, she still likes to talk about AR.

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