Augmented-reality startup Magic Leap has raised a startling $2.6bn of funding since 2014, and shipped its first ‘Creator Edition’ AR headset in August 2018. How has that done? Awkward-face emoji. Tech-news site The Information claims that the Magic Leap One headset sold just 6,000 units in its first six months on sale, despite the company’s ambition to sell 100k in its first year.
The report suggests that Magic Leap is working on a new headset and possibly raising (even) more funding, but also suggests that it has been laying off dozens of employees in recent weeks. Caveat: Magic Leap claims that the report is “littered with inaccuracies and misleading statements”.
On Twitter, CEO Romy Abovitz has been promising some announcements this week. “In the next 5 years many cool breakthroughs coming in spatial computing. The @magicleap team is working really hard to deliver on our vision each year. Magic Leap One, Creator Edition has been invaluable to us as a platform to inform our product and tech roadmap,” he wrote (i.e. ‘don’t judge it by the sales figures’). “My long-term goal for the @magicleap spatial computing platform has been all day, every day, everyone, everywhere – fully realizing that this will take multiple generations of devices and a massive effort and dedicated team.”
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