Magic Leap hasn’t come out with new hardware since it launched its seminal AR headset in 2018, Magic Leap 1. Now it seems we’re getting our first glimpse of what may very well be Magic Leap 2.
Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson released a photo of the device via LinkedIn. She says in the post that more will be revealed during CNBC’s Power Lunch at 2PM ET today. We’ll be following along, so make sure to check back then for more details as they arrive.
In the LinkedIn post, Johnson says she’ll speak a bit about her experiences as CEO at Magic Leap and “share a glimpse of what lies ahead for AR and our organization.”
Image courtesy Magic Leap
From what little we can see, it seems the new Magic Leap hardware is looking to replicate a more glasses-like form-factor. It’s not for certain whether this is indeed Magic Leap 2, however in February Johnson said its second-gen headset would be “50% smaller, 20% lighter, with 100% larger field of view.”
The company has stayed tightlipped on Magic Leap 2 thus far, however Johnson previously mentioned that early access availability of its next-gen device is slated for Q4 of 2021, so this may be our first look at what’s to come. General availability is said to arrive in Q1 of 2022.
A previous veteran of Qualcomm and Microsoft, Johnson took over the reigns from company founder Rony Abovitz in 2020 to help pivot Magic Leap away from its roots as a company appealing to prosumers and businesses, and focusing entirely on the enterprise segment.
Mixed Reality (MR) headset manufacturer Magic Leap didn’t have a particularly great 2020, even though it raised $350 million USD, as there were layoffs and CEO Rony Abovitz stepped down. Now with ex-Microsoft and Qualcomm veteran, Peggy Johnson at the helm the company is looking towards a brighter future, confirming Magic Leap 2 is on the way with the initial launch beginning later this year.
Magic Leap One. Image credit: Magic Leap
Talking to Protocol this week, Johnson said the Magic Leap 2 will be focused on enterprise customers with those part of the early adopter programme gaining access to the new headset in Q4 2021. This will then be followed up by a general release in Q1 2022.
While no images or detailed specifications have been released just yet for Magic Leap 2 Johnson did have this to say: “For frontline workers, the product has to be something comfortable that they can wear all day long. So we’ve made the product half the size, about 20% lighter. But most importantly, we’ve doubled the field of view.” She went onto comment: “That’s a hard thing to do. The optics around that are complex, but we have a very talented engineering team.”
Making the product lighter and more convenient will be an important step when it comes to offering a product that can offer a better experience than Magic Leap’s competitors. The main one is Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 which recently secured a $22 billion deal with the US Department of Defense to supply soldiers with augmented reality (AR) headsets based on HoloLens technology. Even though Magic Leap lost that deal it will continue to look at the military sector. “I think our next-generation product hits all the right feature sets that are needed for soldiers to wear the device for longer periods of time. It needs to be comfortable indoors, outdoors and [in] all types of environments,” she mentions.
Hopefully, the new Magic Leap 2 will offer a lower price point allowing more companies to get involved in AR and the possibilities it brings. For further updates from Magic Leap, keep reading VRFocus.
Magic Leap is getting ready to ship out its so-called ‘Magic Leap 2’ AR headset at the end of this year, which will be done via an early adopter program.
Update (April 21st, 2021): Speaking to Protocol, Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson reconfirmed that the company’s next-gen follow-up, officially named Magic Leap 2, is headed to select enterprise partners in the fourth quarter of this year.
Additionally, Johnson said general availability is slated for the first quarter of 2022.
There’s no information on price or hard specs, however Johnson reconfirmed it will be “half the size, about 20% lighter,” and feature “doubled the field of view.”
Original Article (February 1st, 2021): Johnson didn’t speak directly about the company’s next headset on stage at FII, however a slide was shown promising a Q4 2021 window for early access release.
There’s little else to go on for now, however the company says its second-gen headset will be “50% smaller, 20% lighter, with 100% larger field of view.”
Image courtesy FII Institute
Looking at the first-gen Magic Leap headset itself, and not taking into account the compute unit, the 2018 version weighs 316 g, which would make the second-gen device approximately 250 g.
As for FOV, Magic Leap 1 features a 4:3 aspect ratio, and an estimated horizontal FOV of 40 degrees, a vertical FOV of 30 degrees, and a FOV diagonal of 50 degrees. There’s no telling what aspect ratio the next Magic Leap headset will feature, or how the company will effectively market its “100% larger” FOV moving forward; the company only quotes the diagonal FOV of 50 degrees in marketing material.
Here, it’s very likely the company is talking about a 100 percent increase of overall surface area, and not a 100 percent increase of a single spec (re: not going from 40 to 80 horizontal FOV). That would give it around a 55 degree horizontal FOV.
Note: To increase the specs of all provided FOVs by 100 percent, the surface area would need to increase by four times, which is a tall order.
This comes as a modest upgrade, but one that businesses can probably get behind if it’s delivered at a competitive price point comparative to Microsoft’s HoloLens 2, its largest competitor in the field of enterprise-focused AR headsets. Since Magic Leap’s pivot to enterprise last year, the company has been serving mostly the same clientele, which includes industrial applications, medicine, education, and manufacturing.
AR headset maker Magic Leap is laying off “a number of employees” in what it says is a response to the difficulties raised by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
A blog post from company founder Rony Abovitz today stated that “recent changes to the economic environment have decreased availability of captial”, which has led the company to take “a close look at our business and are making targeted changes to how we operate and manage costs.”
“This has made it necessary for us to make the incredibly difficult decision to lay off a number of employees across Magic Leap,” Abovitz said.
After raising billions in investment, Magic Leap finally launched an AR headset, the Magic Leap One Creator Edition, to markets in 2018 for $2,300. Similar to Microsoft’s HoloLens, the device projected virtual images into the real world, which users can interact with using a motion controller or hand tracking. The kit is powered by an external processor the user attaches to their waist.
At launch, Magic Leap focused on attracting consumers, with new games and experiences from famous developers such as Insomniac Games. But a report from The Information in late 2019 stated that Magic Leap was well behind in sales targets, with a successor still “years away”. Shortly thereafter, the company announced it was now pivoting towards businesses, much like Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 does.
“Adapting our company to these new market realities and our increased focus on enterprise means we must align our efforts to focus on the areas of our business that advance our technology, ensure delivery of Magic Leap 2, and expand product-market fit and revenue generation,” added Abovitz in today’s blog. “This transformation also means that we must decrease investments in areas where the market has been slower to develop, providing us with a longer runway while retaining the ability to explore and build on future use cases when the market signals readiness.”
Magic Leap, the multi-billion dollar AR startup, could be exploring the possibility of a sale, a Bloomberg report maintains, citing people familiar with the matter. Other options reportedly under consideration are potential partnerships and a stake sale.
The Plantation, Florida-based company has raised $2.6 billion since its initial Series A financing in 2014, garnering cash from the likes of Google, Alibaba, Qualcomm, and Andreessen Horowitz over the years. The company’s deep pockets funded the release of Magic Leap 1, an AR headset targeted at developers, enterprise, and anyone with $2,300 to spare.
Bloomberg maintains the company has valued itself at “more than $10 billion if it pursues a sale,” its sources say, noting that the company has contacted an adviser to consider strategic options.
A meeting was also allegedly held between Facebook and Magic Leap, however Facebook was uninterested in acquiring Magic Leap at the time.
When asked for whether the company was pursuing a sale or not via Twitter, Magic Leap Founder & CEO Rony Abovitz declined to answer.
“The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42." (Douglas Adams)
In the same breath, Abovitz isn’t shying away from hyping the company’s forthcoming Magic Leap 2 headset, which he says is nearing release to select partners this year. A wider launch is said to come a some point in 2021.
Further underlining the company’s resolve, Abovitz even goes as far to reveal that Magic Leap 3 is currently in its R&D phase—an unorthodox strategy to be sure, talking about its third device even before getting number two out the door; companies typically talk about one product generation at a time, but then again, Magic Leap clearly isn’t like other companies.
If Magic Leap is indeed looking for a parachute amid reportedly slumping sales of its $2,300 AR headset, it comes as no surprise. The company struck an all too hopeful tone with when it first released its ‘Just another day in the office at Magic Leap’ video in 2015 (retroactively renamed ‘Original Concept Video’) which painted a rosy picture of the near future of the company’s then mysterious AR headset.
Upon launch of Magic Leap One (now Magic Leap 1 – don’t ask) in 2018, the headset saw a tepid release, with Oculus founder Palmer Luckey serving up a scathing review of the headset, criticizing it for its HoloLens-adjacent FOV and function, and concluding that while overall a solid device, it simply didn’t deliver on the hype.
In the company’s defense, Magic Leap has been spinning its fair share of plates. It’s built a real, live, totally-not-vaporware device, and has funded the creation of apps for years targeted both at enterprise and consumer segments—despite it in no way being accessible to consumers. It’s created its own OS, SDKs and everything else needed to get the product off the ground and into the hands of developers. Making what must have been substantial investments in R&D, premium content and developer tools isn’t anything to sneeze at, although it’s clear the company hasn’t seen the return on investment. And it probably won’t until it can at least replicate the success of Microsoft’s purely enterprise-focused HoloLens headsets.
Magic Leap’s next-gen AR headset, Magic Leap 2, is officially slated to launch sometime in 2021. Company founder and CEO Rony Abovitz says in a Forbesinterview that ML2 will be targeting enterprise and early prosumers, calling it “a major new platform packed with sensors, and advanced optics.”
Speaking to Forbes, Abovitz says its next headset is now passing through its final build stages, although he didn’t delve into specifics regarding any of the device’s upcoming features, saying only that the company plans to work with customers to perfect the Magic Leap 2 throughout 2020—exactly how, he wouldn’t say.
In a bid to further position itself as a solution for businesses, Magic Leap has now done away with the Magic Leap One Creator Edition moniker, replacing it simply with ‘Magic Leap 1’.
The $2,300 base price tag is still the same, and it doesn’t appear to be physically different in any way from the Creator Edition, which was launched in August 2018. However now the company is ostensibly trying to attract enterprise users, as its newly updated website puts professional use cases front and center—a definite change in tone from the quasi-consumer approach the company has taken since launch, which has showcased games, music apps, and experiences as the platform’s biggest draws.
The company has also put together a Magic Leap 1 ‘Enterprise Suite’ package, priced at $3,000, which includes two years of access to the company’s newly released Device Manager software, enterprise support, limited warranty, and rapid replace plan.
Some of this likely comes as response to a damning report recently released by The Information that alleges the company only sold 6,000 Magic Leap One headsets in the first six months after launch.
That same report maintains that Magic Leap Two will include 5G connectivity, a wider field of view, a smaller and lighter form factor, and different color options. The report claims however this second iteration may be stymied by “fundamental technology constraints,” making a hardware refresh a possibility too. Critically, Magic Leap disavowed the report, calling it “littered with inaccuracies.”
Whatever form Magic Leap 2 takes, one thing is for certain: the company is taking a clear step back from its ambitions as a consumer device, and meanwhile locking down street cred as a business-friendly device provider, putting it in closer competition with Microsoft’s HoloLens platform. Its 2021 release date is also encroaching upon the same time frame Apple reportedly could release its first AR device too. Where those two dots connect, we can’t say just yet (especially since the Apple report is unsubstantiated), but it seems the roaring ’20s are going to be a very interesting decade for AR, to say the least.
