Magic Leap shows off its next-generation enterprise AR glasses — hands-on preview

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After almost four years of work, Magic Leap is showing off its next generation of augmented reality glasses for enterprise applications.

I got to try it on this week at a demo in San Francisco, and I was pretty impressed at the advances the headset showed after the first generation debuted — sadly to much criticism — in 2018.

Founded in 2010 by Rony Abovitz, the company set out to be a pioneer in augmented reality and mixed reality technologies. Abovitz raised $2.6 billion in multiple rounds and developed the Magic Leap One, a mixed reality headset that debuted in August 2018.

But sales were slow for the $2,295 device, as consumers didn’t dive into the expensive tech. Finally, in April 2020, Magic Leap decided to shut down its consumer division and laid off about 1,000 employees, or half its workforce. In May 2020, Abovitz announced he would replace himself as CEO (while staying on the board) just as the company got a major lifeline with a $350 million raise.

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And Microsoft veteran Peggy Johnson became CEO. She noted the company still has 1,000 employees and it has begun recruiting back some of the people who left. Manufacturing of trial headsets has begun, and it has a 92% yield rate on the 2,000 headsets produced so far.

“We tried to take everything we learned from Magic Leap One from the enterprise users and built the improvements into Magic Leap 2,” Johnson said.

Johnson showed me the new headset and talked about what the company is driving for. The exact price isn’t set yet, but it will probably cost close to the $2,300 of the original one. But maybe that isn’t a crazy price, now that Magic Leap is targeting enterprises