Honestly it shouldn't take a billion to make a viable product. I mean come on that is more than 20 Juiceros worth of funding. Why is VR/AR still not compelling enough after years of investments?
To be fair, what Magic Leap is doing is a few orders of magnitude more complex and innovative than what Juicero was attempting to do.
As in, its an industry that doesn't quite exist yet, there are problems that were never thought would be problems in the first place, and the whole concept of programming things for real time three dimensional overlay on a device that's light enough to fit on your head is kind of a bigger challenge than squeezing a smoothie out of a large ketchup package.
But I would like to see where and how the money is being spent.
magic leap is one of those companies sitting on a goldmine waiting for a platform(AR glasses) to become a reality. if they could even make a sensor that'd fit into a smartphone,it'd be killer. the latest htc flagship u12+ tries to do what vive does already with hand sensing in the camera and such. it would be amazing if they opened a layer of interaction on top of just touching the phone