Magic Leap gets business and HTC shows us how it’s done at CES 2023
The ephemerality of virtual and augmented reality was matched by the technologies’ ubiquity at CES 2023.
It honestly felt a little like the mid-1990s when every tech company had an internet strategy. Now, almost everyone has either a way of overlaying images in the real world or immersing you in fantasy ones.
The driving force behind this is the hardware, and CES 2023 was packed with it. There was a lot of it on the floor — so many AR glass companies, unafraid to jump into the risky breach that once gobbled up Google Glass.
But the real leaders are Meta, Magic Leap, and HTC. While the once-secretive and now newly open Magic Leap was on the show floor at the metaverse space encouraging everyone to whip through a series of enterprise scenarios, Meta and Vive were offering invite-only demos of their latest gear at nearby hotel ballrooms.
I started with a Magic Leap visit where I met company CTO Julie Larson Green, a once-retired Microsoft Windows legend who is helping steer Magic Leap’s transition from inscrutable and over-promising wunderkind to a practical and purpose-drive AR headset for industry, factories, disaster response, and more.
As we talked inside the packed booth about Magic Leap’s early promise, Green told me, “The tech was too early, and the consumer scenarios were not as clear.”
Enterprise though is a different story. Industry, factories, and even medical theater, “They’re used to wearing things on their faces.”
Green encouraged me to suit up with the latest headset, the Magic Leap 2, which Is 50% lighter and smaller than the original. It also has a powerful new custom AMD SoC.
Unlike the new HTC Vive XR Elite and the Meta Quest Pro, Magic Leap 2 retains its svelte figure by putting the battery and processor in a separate puck that you can wear on your belt. This has the effect of making the headgear lightweight and quite comfortable to wear. It also means you’ll have a cable running from the puck to your head, and I could feel the puck on my hip.
As promised, the Magic Leap 2 headset was comfortable to wear. I tried a scenario in which I was standing in a replica of the Hoover Dam, and we were gaming out our emergency repose to an explosion.
