Magic Leap Inc.

... as that becomes the price point in certain, uh, two, two, two big companies.

Both Microsoft and, and Magic Leap's devices become more broadly available.

Um, we've done some dabbling in, in, uh, in Microsoft's, uh, HoloLens.

Uh, developed a ma- an application.

Quote, "We'll want to find clear stepping stones between where we are now and the long-term vision, where we get technological proof points and market feedback along the way.

Companies like Magic Leap that aim straight for their super ambitious final destination end up disconnected from reality and burn an obscene amount of money, ultimately falling behind competitors who were able to absorb market feedback and build organizational muscle.

SpaceX is probably a great example of doing this right.

The founders, yes, there's more than one, had the borderline ridiculous goal of achieving human settlement on Mars, but they broke it down into a series of steps that achieved proof points and profit along the way.

And based on what we're seeing from their hiring patterns and patent filings, they're not messing around.

They've been pulling hardware engineers from Apple, Meta, and Magic Leap since early twenty twenty-four.

These aren't just any engineers either.

We're talking about people who worked on the iPhone's camera systems, the Vision Pro's spatial computing, and Magic Leap's real-time object recognition.

The job postings specifically mention AI-first consumer devices, which tells you everything about their philosophy.

So what exactly are they building? The glasses prototype reportedly uses GPT four V for real-time visual processing.

And I wrote that up on my blog.

Magic Leap actually put their entire investor presentation into their patent thing.

Basically, when you do patents, you can do background stuff.

So I was able, through my work in patents and all, I was able to figure out what they were doing.

When you were beginning to analyze products like the HoloLens, how did that shape your own technical understanding?

Between learning about HoloLens, I learned a bit about how waveguides work, My knowledge of optics improved tremendously, at least at some level.

I still can't design anything, but my basic understanding of them increased tremendously as I started to study what Magic Leap was doing, and then HoloLens came along.

And then, of course, when HoloLens 2 came out, they combined my loves.

This will be a version.

This is, I call what they're doing is Magic Leap Proof Editor.

They basically merge that into ChatGPT.

Magic Leap and Proof Editor.

Proof Editor is amazing.

So it's a document, looks like Word.

Forty.

Deep dive: What is the G three-D geometry exchange format? At Vim AEC, we process extremely large architectural models and import meshes and BIM data into game engines, such as Unity, three-D editing tools, such as three-Ds Max, and applications running on different devices, such as the Magic Leap.

Forty-one.

From three-D rendering to motion capture.

That's, that's the easiest way to get in, is, is the shooting.

Johnny, one thing I, I just, uh, I'll just say that what you're doing now was a extreme obsession by most of our team at Magic Leap for a very, very long time.

Like, we had Google as investor.

We got to connect with Niantic.

But that, that of course, is the field of view, okay? So a, a lot of people are, are worried about the field of view.

Now, the one thing I would say is there is a little bit of sort of false comparison going on in this industry, where all of the transparent AR devices like XReal and even like Magic Leap and HoloLens, and even Meta's Orion AR glasses prototype from a few years ago, they all talked about their field of view in a, in diagonal, and the diagonal is actually bigger than the horizontal and vertical.

So I see a lot of people saying, "Oh, what? This is only 70 degrees field of view?" But, you know, even the Orion glasses were 70 degrees and XReal Aura is 70 degrees.

You're comparing apples to oranges.

And so the thing I said in my impressions piece, which I would really like you to go and read if you care about this, is that trying to build true standalone augmented reality glasses in twenty twenty-six is like trying to make an iPhone in nineteen ninety-nine.

Even if you had all of the same software of the iPhone of nine-- of two thousand and seven, the hardware means that it just wouldn't be the same thing, and that's kind of what I feel like here.

So, um, the biggest kind of problem with Specs fundamentally is that the field of view is just as limited as the HoloLens and Magic Leap of yesteryear.

It is essentially, from like a field of view perspective in that sense, it is HoloLens 2, but in a glasses form factor.

I mean, you started with, what was it, the X-Reel?

What were the first specs you used? I started with a Magic Leap 1.

In fact, I started way before that with an Oculus Rift with a Leap Motion camera in front of it, which plugged in and gave you a little bit of...

Is that the one where

So yeah, it started a long, long time ago.

It's come a long way.

I think the Magic Leap was the moment where it could have taken off, but I think they made a few wrong choices.

Yeah, a friend of mine was one