Price needs to come down and it needs to be wireless. I would wager 3-5 years just for wireless. Could be a decade for price to come down under a thousand. But I also think by then the separate processor wont be necessary anymore, either using your phone or cloud.
Have you seen the breakthroughs that Magic Leap 2 has achieved? Still not at the price point for consumers but it pretty much solves all the annoyances of the first device or HoloLens for that matter. No longer looking through a tiny FOV, holograms no longer transparent, usable outdoors, first device able to display black. It is quite an achievement.
The irony with Karl’s blog is that he’s done nearly a 180 on Magic Leap with the debut of their second product. They’ve ironically becciome relevant again, just not in the consumer space at all.
There is a middle ground between hardware being ubiquitous and being like 3D Tv that fizzled out just a few years after launching. VR has been growing exponentially each year since its consumer launch in 2016. AR will just open up the use cases even more and helps it continue to grow.
They have two products. The second one has already been getting a lot of praise for two major breakthroughs— the ability to display black and the largest FOV in a see through optical headset. The whole topic of this thread is a bit of a straw man, as they’ve actually become relevant again, by making a compelling device and pivoting to enterprise. They’re just not in the consumer game anymore.
Honestly, with high priced dev kits they just need to be given out for free like Valve did with the Vive. Magic leap has given out thousands just to get devs on board.
He's underestimating (though not by a whole lot probably). The 6k numbers from the above article refer to the first 6 months sale. Guttag is talking about the last 18 months. Also doesn't account for the headsets that have been seeded to devs.
Notice that zero VR companies show you through the lens footage. This is not restricted to Magic Leap. You can find amateur attempts by owners to shoot through Magic Leap, Hololens, and various VR headsets if you go on Youtube and Twitter. But no company does this at all. Just another misunderstanding by people here who think they've found another reason to nitpick at Magic leap, but it's a widespread industry issue. VR is actually the worst about this because they only show straight from the PC output with none of the limitations you actually experience like FOV and screen door effect.
That's just how it goes with AR, you can find some amateur clips people have tried to shoot through the lens themselves but it's very difficult. Even Microsoft doesn't shoot through the lens and has gotten similar flack. Best they can do is composite imaging, which actually looks worse than through the lens.