Reporting by XinZhiyuan
EDIT: LRS
【New Wisdom Dollar Introduction】The popular Magic Leap has always been in turmoil in recent years, from the meta-universe star company to the AR scammer, and recently announced that the second generation of products jumped to 2022. But the founder left, a large number of executives left, the entire company only the chief designer, it seems that the second generation of products still stay in the PPT stage?
Metacosmity is arguably the hottest concept in the technology world at the moment, and it sounds very exciting to allow humans to swim in a new virtual world, so both consumers and investors are particularly interested in this "big pie".
But there is a meta-universe star company that seems to be still unhappy under the wind.
Magic Leap has seen several executives leave this year, including Chief Product Officer Tracey Trewin, Chief Software and Cloud Manager Anuj Gosalia, Cloud Product Head Randall Hand, Software and UI Director Yannick Pellet, Technical Director Paul Greco, Chief Operating Officer Henk Vilestra and Chief Patent Officer David Lundmark all leaving.
Tracey Trewin, the departing Chief Product Officer, worked at Microsoft for 25 years and moved to Magic Leap in March, where he was mainly responsible for guiding magic Leap AR products and platforms, developing enterprise solutions such as AR collaboration and visualization, and exploring target scenarios on the B-side.
Anuj Gosalia was also a senior executive at Magic Leap in March, having previously worked at Microsoft, Oculus and Google, and during his time at Oculus, he served as director of engineering, where he developed the core software architecture of Oculus Rift and GearVR. During his time at Google, Gosalia served as a senior engineering director, leading teams such as ARCore and Google Lens client applications, Google Maps AR navigation, search engine AR preview, and Android AR OEM ecosystem.
The reason for their departure is still unknown, but the speculation is mostly related to the departure of founder Rony Abovit in August this year.
The departure of the large number of executives put Magic Leap into an embarrassing situation, which directly led to the jump of the main product Magic Leap2. Said good fourth quarter release, with Microsoft HoloLens male and female, and now postponed to 2022.
But can it really be released in 2022?
At this time, magic leap is already very empty inside, and there seems to be no person in charge of hardware or software except for the chief designer James Temple.
Could it be better to favor the VR faction big man Meta?
The hugely popular Magic Leap
In 2015, magic Leap, which was still unknown at the time, was red with a hand of "Whale Leaping Dragon Gate", wearing AR glasses on the basketball court to watch whales jump out of the water, splashing in an instant, touching the body is not yet wet, the feeling of perfect integration of virtual and reality is really exciting.
At that time, no one could understand the company's product principles, and since then Magic Leap's position in everyone's mind is the black technology company in the AR industry.
Magic Leap has also successfully attracted the attention of investors, and after round after round of financing, Magic Leap has accumulated more than $1.3 billion in financing, behind which stands technology giants such as Qualcomm, Google and Alibaba. Magic Leap raised money that was even higher than the market capitalization of some listed technology companies, making it the most well-funded startup in the world.
At that time, the promotional video really satisfies the appetite of consumers, everyone can't wait to try such magical glasses, who thinks, wait for three years, but good dishes are not afraid of late!
In 2018, after the actual release of the Magic Leap One, which cost $2295, everyone finally realized that the developers of magic Leap did not understand the principle of this product.
How does this whale look different from the publicity, dare to feel that "the video is for reference only", just added a little special effects?
Magic Leap's competitors were so happy to see this crotch-pulling product.
Palmer Lachey, co-founder of Meta's Oculus, wrote a sharp-tongued review on his blog after experiencing Magic Leap One, bluntly saying that Magic Leap is a bunch of tragedies.
Palmer conducted a comprehensive analysis of the Magic Leap One from the perspective of the device's handle, processor, display experience, and operating system, and there were few good words: the publicity was seriously inconsistent with the actual!
The high-tech concepts that Magic Leap mentioned earlier are either not directly reflected in the product, or they are "redefining" the technologies that other manufacturers have used for a long time. Even the new operating system LuminOS, which is claimed, is just a skinned Android system.
The high price coupled with the hardware products with no substance content, the situation of Magic Leap after the release of magic Leap One can be imagined. Coupled with the sluggish industry, Rony Abovitz has made a bold statement that millions of devices will be sold in the first year of the product launch, but the actual situation is only a few thousand.
Magic Leap announced the resignation of 1,000 employees in May 2020, and a week later, Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz announced his resignation as CEO.
In July 2020, Peggy Johnson, former executive vice president of commercial development at Microsoft, took over the baton and became the new CEO of Magic Leap, who wanted to survive with a broken arm and usher in a new year of development.
Unexpectedly, 2021 has become more and more miserable, and there is almost no executive left.
But there is also some good news, on October 11 this year, Magic Leap announced on the official website to complete a new round of financing of $500 million, with a post-investment valuation of about $2 billion, but it is still much less than the $6.4 billion valuation in 2019 at its peak.
But consider that Magic Leap's valuation shrank to $450 million in September 2020, down 93 percent, and it's been half a spring.
Now we can only hope that Magic Leap 2 will be released in 2022, whether it will be a good medicine for Magic Leap to bring life or a poison that accelerates death, we can only wait and see.
New investment in Meta
Compared to the dismal Magic Leap, the open-source game engine company Godot seems to be doing well.
Godot is a versatile, cross-platform 2D/3D open source game engine that some standalone VR games in the SideQuest store are also developing using, and according to survey reports, more than 5% of developers work with Godot on AR/VR projects.
Godot's developers recently announced that the team has received a second grant from Reality Labs, a division of Meta Platforms focused on AR/VR and metaversms.
But the relationship between Meta and its big-name engine partners doesn't seem to contradict itself, so why did Meta spur Godot's growth with two investments that didn't disclose specific amounts?
There are some industry reasons for this: Supporting the development of open source code is a relatively inexpensive way to incentivize other developers. And VR development is still in its early stages, and it's crucial for Meta to master as many game creators and studios as possible.
In the long run, accelerating Godot's growth could also help Meta build more of its strengths.
Godot's team announced new plans to introduce the editing experience to XR, which also means Godot will support both AR and VR. While Godot isn't the first to emphasize designing and iterating on helmets, Godot's open source team isn't large, So Godot can achieve these goals faster than other bigger companies.
From Meta's perspective, the sooner Godot has excellent tools for producing VR and AR content, the more it will be beneficial for Meta to play a role in those mediums.
There is also speculation that Meta is leveraging the development of future VR and AR devices to roll out to its own chips and operating systems.
If Meta continues to evolve the AR/VR market, the big game engines Unity and Epic's Unreal Engine will certainly support any new hardware or software that Meta adopts or releases. However, because these engines are maintained by some commercial companies, if these companies have other commercial interests in consideration, it may take some time for Meta to start adaptation development after launching new equipment.
So, if Godot is used better and more efficiently on headsets like Quest 2, the easier it will be for Meta to start future engine development efforts.
However, Unity or Epic may have begun to see Meta as competitors rather than mere metaverse collaborators, and it is unclear whether this is good or bad for Meta.
Join glorious evolution, Meta!
Resources:
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/magic-leap-departures-a-look-at-meta-s-vr-open-source-support?rc=epv9gi
https://cloud.tencent.com/developer/article/1803151