Magic Leap is a mystery cloaked in a unicorn. It’s a mystery because very few people have seen its proprietary “mixed reality lightfield” technology up close, and the majority of interested parties have no reason to believe that the videos that have been released are not composite footage done in post-production—though the company has claimed otherwise on at least one of these videos.
Is it a headset? Contact lens? Pair of glasses?
Now, here’s the latest in a series of vague morsels from founder and CEO, Rony Abovitz: 10 lucky developers will get a chance to develop applications for Magic Leap over an unspecified time frame, and the first will be chosen from the winner of a contest at Twilio's Signal developer conference, where Abovitz delivered the news by telepresence robot.
Basically, we’ve seen a picture of a “photonic lightfield chip” from a WIRED article, and we know that Magic Leap is promising to make digital 3D imagery palpable to human eyes by refocusing light so that the image reflects the way our eyes focus and blur our vision, depending on what we look at.
If you look at a computer screen, everything is in focus, no matter where your eyes look. But in real life, what you focus on becomes sharp, and everything else becomes blurred background information. With augmented reality and virtual reality, visual latency and fields of focus have been outstanding issues that contribute to the inherent nausea of every virtual-reality experience on pretty much every headset.
Basically, virtual reality and augmented reality make you sick. Magic Leap is spending a fortune to fix that and create an entirely new computing platform and cultural paradigm that removes screens altogether.
If we go back to the beginning, Google led a $542 million investment in “mixed-reality” company Magic Leap shortly after Facebook announced it had invested $2 billion in Lucky Palmer’s virtual-reality company Oculus.
Today, I suddenly thought about Magic Leap in the context of another mysterious unicorn startup, blood-testing company Theranos. Theranos had all the hype of a monster of disruption—it was going to revolutionize blood testing by using only a tiny droplet of blood and the magic of microfluidics to perform a wide variety of tests through its “Edison device.” If you haven’t been following the news, Theranos has been outed by the Wall Street Journal for changing a huge number of blood test results, and recently released a statement to that effect. Blood test results inform doctors to respond to them with various diagnoses and appropriate treatments. Well, the floodgates are opening against Theranos. So far, two class action lawsuits have been filed by affected patients and Walgreen’s is being scrutinized for not testing Theranos’s technology before making a deal that allowed Theranos blood test kiosks to be placed in selected stores around the country. Now, a company that had high profile board members including Henry Kissinger and raised $400 million to secure a $9 billion valuation may be worthless.
So how skeptical should you be about a company that is making huge promises but being incredibly vague and slightly deceptive (i.e., teaser composite videos supposedly shot through the Magic Leap device) about what it is offering and when?
In my opinion, we should be extremely skeptical of Magic Leap.
That’s why it’s surprising to me that no one has taken a closer look at Rony Abovitz, a man who has cultivated an eccentric public persona and zoom in on his previous ventures. Where did Magic Leap come from?
After all, there are other companies besides Theranos that illustrate how damaging tech hype cycles can be. After the consumer 3D printing hype cycle was over, the valuation of one of the two biggest companies in the industry, 3D Systems, dropped from $97 in 2014 to around $6 in 2015, and CEO Avi Reichental was let go. Stratasys, the other legacy 3D printing company paid $604 million for Brooklyn-based MakerBot, which was led by another semi-eccentric Steve Jobs–worshipping CEO named Bre Pettis. MakerBot has since had to close all of its retail stores, apologize profusely about the fifth-generation 3D printers, fire 20 percent of its staff twice and cancel its American manufacturing center for a much cheaper one in China.
Magic Leap was founded by Abovitz in 2010, while he was still steering a previous company he cofounded in 2004 called MAKO Surgical Corporation. In turn, MAKO Surgical was formed as a successor to Z-KAT, Inc., which was also cofounded by Abovitz in 1997. Z-KAT was formed to develop and market computer-assisted surgeries, and it formed a partnership with Barrett Technology LLC in 2001 to develop a new generation of medical robotics systems. Barrett Technology was founded by William Townsend, who was on a team at MIT that developed whole arm manipulation (WAM).
In 2006, Z-KAT sublicensed a core haptic technology from Massachusetts-based company SensAble, which licensed it first licensed from MIT. The same year, MAKO Surgical entered into an agreement with IBM to use IBM’s patent portfolio for $2 million upon execution of the agreement and $4 million payable after the initial public offering of the MAKO’s common stock. Upon completion of the company’s IPO in February 2008, the company paid the $4 million due to IBM.
From the combination of licensing IBM’s patent portfolio, sublicensing haptic technology from SensAble, and its partnership with Barrett Technology, MAKO Surgical developed the RIO Robotic Arm for orthopedic surgeries. The first MAKOplasty knee surgery was performed in 2006 using the RIO Robotic Arm.
In 2007, SensAble sent a letter to MAKO Surgical saying that they had violated the terms of their sublicensing agreement by using the technology for surgical purposes.
SensAble was later acquired by GeoMagic in April of 2012.
MAKO Surgical was then acquired by Stryker for $1.6 billion in 2013. During the acquisition, MAKO acquired its own “four-year partner,” a company called Pipeline BioMedical Holdings, Inc. for $2.5 million that produced the medical implants for MAKO Surgical’s computer-assisted surgeries. It is nearly impossible to find any relevant information on Pipeline BioMedical Holdings. The only website I found for Pipeline BioMedical Holdings was a very strange blog site.
In 2012, a class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of MAKO Surgical shareholders after the company predicted it would sell 62 of the $1 million RIO Robotic Arms in the first quarter and sold only six. MAKO Surgical stock fell 36 percent dropping to $14.95 from $26.45 per share. The lawsuit was dropped because the company had adequately explained the potential for loss in its “forward-looking statements.”
I’m not sure what to make of this information yet, but it has made me a bit more secure in not trusting “forward-looking” statements, claims, videos, pictures of “photonic lightfield chips” and anecdotes about how this technology was inspired by science fiction—even if author and Chief Futurist Neil Stephenson writes another blog in the two years he’s been with Magic Leap filled with well-worn sci-fi–based platitudes about how the “mixed-reality lightfield” is going to revolutionize everything.
If it sounds too good to be true, see it to believe it. We don’t need a Theranos of “mixed reality.” And yes, I’m intentionally trying to cast doubt, because most engineers don’t believe exaggerated claims until they experience the data themselves, hype or not.