Google Glass and Magic Leap had been each among the many greatest know-how flops of the previous decade — however may their underlying concepts energy one thing worthy and new? We might discover out as a result of Google and Magic Leap now have a “multi-faceted strategic know-how partnership” designed to “foster the way forward for the XR ecosystem with distinctive and progressive product choices.”
It isn’t in any respect clear what the deal includes, however the press launch does repeatedly boast about Magic Leap’s optics and manufacturing experience — experience that, it claims, produces “highly-precise eyepieces with extremely excessive yield charges and high quality at scale.” (IIRC, the corporate itself has by no means shipped a headset with an MSRP beneath $2,000 and by no means shared gross sales numbers, so “scale” could also be relative.)
Many main tech firms chasing light-weight glasses are reportedly discovering their optical elements are troublesome to develop and costly to provide and are merely dipping toes within the water whereas they determine it out — like Apple with its heavy and expensive $3,500 Imaginative and prescient Professional, or Meta with its Quest 3’s passthrough mode or the light-weight Ray-Ban Meta good glasses that don’t have a show in any respect however do have a generative AI voice assistant. (Talking of generative AI, it’s additionally sucked plenty of air out of the VR / AR / XR room.)
However maybe Magic Leap has a know-how or a patent that Google thinks will assist it win the race to really good glasses?
If that’s the case, I wouldn’t anticipate finding out anytime quickly. Google additionally inked a thriller cope with Samsung and Qualcomm to provide a headset again in February 2023, and we’ve heard mainly nothing about it from these firms since then — although the rumor mill suggests it’d arrive by the top of 2024 and may very well be revealed alongside the following Galaxy Z Flip and Fold handsets.
