![]() ![]() Just over a month later, in late May 2020, Abovitz resigned. Sales of its initial headset reportedly came up short, and the company reportedly laid off half its workforce in the early months of the pandemic. The buzzy, secretive, South Florida-based startup has raised well over $3 billion from investors since 2014 (including $500 million in October), with the promise of building a headset that can mix digital imagery with reality in ways that appear realistic and dynamic. Johnson, who was previously an executive at Microsoft, said Magic Leap is pushing the headset toward three types of business uses: visualizing objects in 3-D training employees (such as for medical procedures) and getting remote assistance (such as a factory worker who needs help fixing a piece of machinery). Despite the fact that VR has been taking up much of the conversation, Meta’s announcement in late 2021 that it would focus on building a metaverse “was a tailwind” for Magic Leap, she added. “Absolutely, we’re taking it,” Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson, who took over after founder and CEO Rony Abovitz left the company in 2020, told CNN Business this week about the broader embrace of headsets. Magic Leap's upcoming headset, Magic Leap 2, will be aimed at businesses, rather than consumers. (While virtual reality headsets can give the wearer a sense that they’re in an entirely different world, AR headsets mix the real and the virtual.) Growing comfort with headsets in general and interest in the idea of a “metaverse” - that still-squishy concept of an interconnected virtual world - could help Magic Leap gain fans. While the market for AR headsets is still tiny, a related technology - virtual reality - is growing at a rapid clip thanks to the popularity of Meta’s Oculus Quest 2 headset. The company is also hoping its timing will be better in 2022. Instead, it’s focusing on a narrow range of companies that might find its AR offering more useful and also be less intimidated by the price tag, which has yet to be announced but will continue to run more than $2,000 per headset. For starters, Magic Leap is no longer aiming the product at developers and other early adopters who it had hoped would come up with compelling uses for it (and then, perhaps, drive consumers to pick it up). But this time, it’s doing some things very differently. Now, the company is trying again, with plans to launch a new headset later this year. It was years in the making, and came after the company raised billions in funding - and it was a flop. The creator edition of Magic Leap One, however, is slated for a 2018 release - provided no delays occur.In 2018, Magic Leap released an augmented reality headset that could show crisp, three-dimensional images as though they were right in front of you on a coffee table or living room floor. ![]() Magic Leap has been showing off its headset to a bunch of users, but there's been no detailed reviews about the headset since they're all under nondisclosure agreements, save for a highly interesting preview Pitchfork released in December 2017. "We'll have even higher-end for hyper-pro, and then we'll have wide mass-market" editions, according to Abovitz. The creator edition of Magic Leap One is positioned somewhere in the middle of Magic Leap's overall price range. "I think we're trying to establish certain tiers - we're not going to be a single-product company over time," said Abovitz at the Code Media conference. However, Abovitz didn't bat his eyes at the mention of whether the headset will cost as much as a $1,000 iPhone X. Magic Leap is planning to release multiple editions of its headset for different levels of consumers and professionals, and the cheapest headset will cost as much as a "higher-end mobile phone to a higher-end tablet." That puts it around $650 and up, perhaps slightly lower. No information about the other sizes, though. Second, the company has seemingly confirmed that there will be multiple sizes available for its headset, including a "Magic Leap Large" variant that fits the head of Shaquille O'Neal. These screens can display statistics, replays, and even commentary - all while the user is tuned to the game. Part of the partnership is a new NBA app that'll be available exclusively through the Magic Leap One platform, which will let users bring up multiple virtual screens into their field of view. ![]()
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