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This week AR hype machine Magic Leap will finally – finally! – start selling its headset to the public but you’ll need to go to one of three AT&T stores in Boston, Chicago or San Francisco, to buy them. And fork over more than $2,000 to get a pair.
Thanks to the company’s effort to build buzz in the tech community, we finally got to try the glasses on without having to sign an NDA or go to its headquarters in Florida because it was giving demos at the Intel Capital conference in Phoenix on Monday night.
It’s been eight years since the company first started promising to revolutionize pretty much everything. But it missed deadline after deadline, in large part because it can’t make a critical component of its system work.
Well, we can exclusively reveal, that, yeah, it still hasn’t fixed it. So if you want to fork over $2,295 for something that will, most likely, become obsolete almost as soon as you put it on, then go ahead. But don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Here’s the truth: the Magic Leap headset is actually quite nice. It is not like the big, bulky VR headsets that we occasionally try on, it’s pretty light. And it fits comfortably, although you have to wear it at a weird angle, so it feels a little like when your glasses droop off your nose.
Talking of glasses, it won’t work with them. But Magic Leap has worked around that by producing a series of lens inserts in a range of strengths. Except the one that worked best for this reporter’s eyesight didn’t fit. Why? Because it was designed for the “1” headset and not the “2” headset.
What does that mean? We asked the guy doing the demos – Magic Leap actually has two sizes of its headset – to accommodate for different sized heads (different sized spaces between people’s eyes). Someone had only shipped the size 1 lens additions and I needed a size 2 headset and lens.
