When talking about Magic Leap, the first thing everyone thinks of is the company’s many miracles. For example, it has no woolen products. It fooled many investment institutions with a broken prototype and raised 2.5 billion in financing. US dollars. For example, before the product was released, it was boasted that I was the best in the world, and it was as shocking as the Big Bang. After the product was released, the product effect was not even half as good as the Hololens released three years ago. It was like Mount Tai collapsed, everyone was shocked, and then only one person came out. Only dancing.
Rony Abovitz, the founder of Magic Leap, is known as "American Jia Yueting". Of course, the old Jia is more skilled in terms of methods, but when it comes to deceiving high-end elites, Rony Abovitz is in his own way, and he doesn't give in too much. Since 2012, Qualcomm, KKR, Google, Alibaba and other investment institutions have all been conquered. Even now, when Magic Leap’s products are so bad, there is still the super stupid DoCoMo who has bravely taken over and invested another 280 million. US dollars.
Rony Abovit is a serial entrepreneur. He previously founded a medical device company, MAKO Surgical Corp. This company's products were exposed to a technology called fiber optic projection, which was mainly used in endoscopes at the time. , the principle is very simple, using piezoelectricity to make the top of the optical fiber spirally rotate at ultra-high speed, thereby scanning a higher-definition image. In 2010, Abovit founded a new company, Magic Leap. In the early days, this company mainly worked on some digital multimedia-related projects, during which it was also exposed to AR technology (in fact, AR is still a commonly used technical means for marketing exhibition displays until now). At that time, the company's main business had nothing to do with AR.
Until 2012, Google released the moon landing project Google Glass. This product seems to be a failure now, but it caused a great sensation at the time. AR was hyped as a hot spot for the first time, and AR glasses As a consumer-grade product, it officially entered the stage of history. At this time, Abovit's eyes lit up and he thought of fiber optic projection technology. This technology can also be used to make fiber optic projectors to project images to the human eye, achieving an effect similar to Google Glass, but it is simpler than glass's prism optical solution. Provides a higher field of view and can also achieve light field effects. At this time, there is only one theoretically feasible optical fiber projection solution, which is far from mature technology. But it doesn’t matter. The advantage of this plan is that it is grand enough and revolutionary enough. If realized, it will far exceed existing products and it will become an excellent story.
At that time, in addition to the prism solutions and fiber projection mentioned above, there were also various solutions such as polarized waveguides and fiber optic waveguides. However, optical fiber projection is the least mature, difficult to mass produce, and difficult to be compatible with upstream and downstream modules. This means that even if Magic Leap's optical fiber projection solution can be mass-produced, it will still face problems with the industrial chain, and may even have to create an original industrial chain. If the technology is explored normally, this plan will be abandoned soon, but Magic Leap, which has received the benefits, cannot stop. Its early stories are so touching that even it believed it. After receiving a large amount of financing, Magic Leap started Technical research, but they soon encountered a bottleneck and found that this solution could not be realized in the short term and could not reduce the optical system to the size of glasses. Time was too tight, Magic Leap needed to explain to investors, and in order to keep the game going, they began to fake it. Many people have seen the CG Demo videos that Magic Leap spent millions of dollars to produce. These CG videos were so shocking that they As for Magic Leap, it made a lot of money after releasing these "Demo videos", and even Jack Ma was cut off.
After three years of playing this money-making game, Abovitz often wakes up from his dreams laughing.
Then in 2015, Hololens was released, giving Abovitz a heavy blow because this product was so great. It achieved the effect described by the AR concept for the first time and allowed people to experience the intuitive AR experience for the first time. Until now (2019), they are the best AR glasses in the world, the true light of AR. At this time, Magic Leap only has a few large prototypes, and perhaps they are not even prototypes, because they are too big for users to even wear them directly. Abovitz felt an inexplicable insult, a kind of rubbing on the ground. He could only make up his mind to completely abandon fiber-optic projection and switch to a more practical grating waveguide solution (Hololens also uses grating waveguides). The official statement is that the fiber optic projection solution has been downgraded to a long-term research and development project.
However, when Magic Leap gave up the fiber optic projection solution, the core of this story was broken. The previous product that was popular every second was sentenced to death and would never be released again. So at this time, does Magic Leap have any unique technology or any other awesome products? The answer is no. Magic Leap uses mature technology to develop AR glasses and finally released Magic Leap One in the second half of 2018. A semi-finished product that is unsatisfactory in every aspect. However, it is paradoxical that such a clumsy company and such a clumsy product are still constantly defrauding funds and deceiving the public.
I have never seen anything so horrifying in the past ten years.