[shasheene]

The article reports on the lawsuit, but is light on details about the headset. Tested recently did a 10 minute review on this headset, the 'Nreal Light' [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9A9u-lwjTs

Regardless of the merits of the lawsuit, I can see why Magic Leap would be scared. The AR glasses looks great. They're certainly stylish enough for the mass-market -- they look like normal glasses at first glance, they're quite reasonably priced (at $500), and run from a regular Android phones via USB-C (for power, as well as sensor and video data).

For reference, here's the Tested review for current Magic Leap product, the Magic Leap One Creator Edition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrq2akzdFq8. It retails for $2295. Though it comes with controllers, eye-tracking for focal accommodation, two waveguides displays that are used to provide two separate physical layers to focus on.

[shasheene]

On the merits of the lawsuit, after reading the whole district court filing [1], the core allegation is that the 'Nreal Light' is based on Magic Leap's unproductized internal designs produced "after extensive investment of time (multiple years), money (hundreds of millions of dollars spent on research and development) and human resources (hundreds of engineers)", and that the defendant learned about the product designs and research during his employment, including adapting (as discussed elsewhere in this thread) Magic Leap's proprietary font (https://i.imgur.com/7pYZ8bp.png)

If Nreal Light is indeed based on Magic Leap's unreleased designs, this makes me very sympathetic to the price difference -- Magic Leap One is a development kit backed by 5+ years of huge R&D investment, and is/was never intended for end-users (hence the price and awful aesthetics).

The Nreal Light is an indication of what a consumer Magic Leap was going to be: a cheaper, slimmer, less ambitious product (by avoiding multiple waveguide displays) that appeals to a consumer market, then it's unfair and sad that they didn't have the opportunity to go to market with their own product.

On the other hand, Magic Leap has had ample opportunity to release an affordable high-quality AR headset so I do feel some sympathy in an employee leveraging legitimately acquired knowledge and experience to build a commercial product that beats its competitors. The situation may not that different to the Traitorous Eight, or Steve Jobs infamous "adapting" of design ideas of the Alto for the Apple Lisa and Apple Macintosh, after his visit to Xerox PARC.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.343717...