People familiar with Abovitz’s next project said it centers on building entertainment content for smartphones and augmented reality devices, including Magic Leap. His spokesman later clarified that there would be no interview and referred subsequent questions to Magic Leap, which declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Magic Leap declined to comment, and Amazon didn’t respond to request for comment.Ībovitz responded to an interview request with a message consisting entirely of link to a research report, which estimates long-term growth in the augmented reality market. The conversations are at an early stage and may not result in a deal. Magic Leap is engaged in discussions with about packaging the headsets with Amazon’s cloud services, according to three people familiar with the talks. The new CEO, Johnson, is trying to revive the business through partnerships. ![]() Shortly before he was appointed CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai joined Magic Leap’s board in 2014 and declared the product would “revolutionize the way people communicate, purchase, learn, share and play.” Pichai quietly withdrew from the board in 2018 and installed a Google subordinate in his place.Īfter Magic Leap’s $2,300 headset bombed, the startup narrowed its focus to professional applications, tried unsuccessfully to sell the company and fired more than half of its staff. Investors wrote down their stakes by an average of about 94% over a 12-month period ending in June, a steeper decline than WeWork, according to data collected by Zanbato, a research firm that tracks institutional investors. Magic Leap’s plan was to squeeze the technology down into a consumer device, construct a factory to manufacture it at scale, design an operating system, video games and films and spark the creation of a vast new content industry.ĭoing it all, in Abovitz’s eyes, was the only way to outrun the corporate giants who also wanted to own the future. “It’s like if we were a coffee company, and we would have acquired a mountain and the soil and created the coffee bean in the particular climate and then made the roaster and controlled all the parameters,” Abovitz told Bloomberg at Magic Leap’s headquarters in Plantation, Florida, in 2018. “If you look at the best computing products, at the history of them, people that had hardware and software integration and understand the entire consumer experience, they built the best overall products.” He elaborated in a separate interview: “This is like Apple in 1978.”Īt its peak-a peak that predated any public evidence of an actual product-technologists raved about Magic Leap’s potential. Private demonstrations of the technology, which made it appear as though digital objects viewed through the headset existed in the physical world, helped procure capital from China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., AT&T Inc., Google and the chipmaker Qualcomm Inc. ![]() Many high-profile investors made the pilgrimage to a swampy, downtrodden suburb of Miami, where they became convinced Abovitz was building a kind of Apple for computers strapped to people’s faces. Abovitz, one could assume, is the mythical bird. Just as his replacement, Peggy Johnson, was taking over, he tweeted that he was “ working in stealth mode on something new:-).” The cryptic message was accompanied by a change to Abovitz’s Twitter bio referencing something called Project Phoenix. Abovitz, whose infectious optimism helped Magic Leap secure total investments of about $3.5 billion, didn’t stay down long.
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