Based on What We Know, Magic Leap Making Augmented Reality for Google Glass-Type Hardware - But How Can It Avoid Glass' Fate?

Magic Leap is still super secretive about how its augmented reality technology will work, but there's a fair amount that is public via "talks, patents, job applications and the background of people working at the company to try to find out", as Jono MacDougall explains, proceeding to cobble those clues together to explain how Magic Leap will probably work:

Simply put, Magic Leap is building a device capable of manifesting objects into a person's field of view with a level of realism beyond what we have seen so far from other similar devices. Magic Leap will come in two parts: a pair of glasses and small pocket projector/compute unit, think phone sized rectangle without a screen. The pocket unit will be connected via cable to the glasses. The glasses will be similar in size and design to glasses worn by people today, though they may be a bit chunkier than we are used to. The small size of the headset is the most fundamental piece of this product. It means it will be socially acceptable to wear in public and gives it the potential to have the utility and accessibility of a smartphone.

Much more here. If that's all the case, that's really hilarious. Google Glass' lack of socially acceptability had nothing to do with the size -- people go out in public with ridiculously huge glasses all the time, with nary a sneer -- but, you know, because it had a camera on it. And more subtly, Glass was explicitly generating interactive images in front of the user that no one else in public could see, or even quite knew when they were being generated, even while the user was still interacting in public. This is profoundly different from smartphone use, where it's clear when someone is engaging with digital content: They move their head down and often move away from people before engaging with the phone. (And hopefully say something like, "Excuse me, quick text.") Lacking similar social cues, Magic Leap's augmented reality glasses will likely meet a similar fate as Glass -- a technically impressive but ultimately annoying device which irritates everyone around the device's wearer by conveying that they're not very important, since the owner would literally rather live in another reality than them.

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Comments

[Iggy]

Make the rig invisible. I don't know about the camera and aversion to Glass. Millions of addicted zombies walk around clutching devices with cameras in them all day long.

Google's rig looked dorky. AR needs to become invisible for it to catch on and addict more ADHD moderns.

As for "a technically impressive but ultimately annoying device which irritates everyone around the device's wearer by conveying that they're not very important, since the owner would literally rather live in another reality than them"?

I call that a smart phone.

[Shockwave yareach]

The issue with glass had nothing to do with the fact the user saw things nobody else could. That has been the case with laptops and cells for years.

The problem was that there was a tv camera that was on all the time, and every person who walked into view was now a tv star whether they wanted to be or not. The devices made it impossible to simply walk in public without being in some guys YouTube show, without permission or compensation. While yes, being in public means i have no expectation of privacy, it doesnt mean i can be forced to entertain you and your friends, just because i have to shop for preperation H.

[Rin]

I keep thinking that Googles biggest mistake has been, that they pushed this as a consumer product without any idea what the consumers would ever want to do with it.

Then there was all the very justified controversy about the camera and privacy rights on top and things ended like they did.

I have no idea if I am rightm but I think that if they had pushed it for business application mainly first, it eventually would have become a success on the consumer market too. It might have taken longer of course and in todays world, it seems like if something is not a big hit in the moment it appears, it is considered a failure.

Humans would not have moved out of caves if they would have been thinking like that.

[Thommy Boy]

Even if the AR is mostly invisible, I believe people will be able to tell if you are using or not... an older video, but a possible look into our near term future. https://youtu.be/GJKwHAvR4uI