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Sometimes frontier technology doesn't turn out as planned. Welcome to the tech industry - you will encounter more of this as your career continues ;) So: Magic Leap built a technology demonstrator, on a rig that was bolted to a table (as everyone has said). That demo was great. It was also, yes, bolted to a table. They have not turned that into a shipping mass-market consumer product. Somehow, a bunch of people on the internets decided that because they, personally, hadn't seen the demo, anyone who had must be lying (or on acid?). This was, well, 'a bit silly', for lots of reasons, and it also missed the real challenges. The question was never 'does the tech demo exist?' Rather:
Can they turn the optics on the table into something you can wear (that also has even better optics, with acceptable FOV, occlusion etc)?
Can they go from a display technology to an actual platform? Presume for the sake of argument that they solved all the optics etc questions - then they would be in the position of a company that had invented multitouch. That doesn't give you an iPhone. You still have to make an actual smartphone, work out the software and the UI, build an ecosystem, create an app store, get to scaled mass production, and that's really expensive. Or, someone had to - you could licence it out in some way (which is what Qualcomm did with CDMA - Qualcomm doesn't make phones or build cellular networks) So: imagine back in 2006, you'd seen Jeff Han's multitouch demo. It was three feet across, came in several packing cases, and it was very very cool. But it wasn't an iPhone. |