I think even if Magic Leap was $100 it would not revolutionize the world. I'm bullish on the potential of AR, I just think the form factor has years of hard technical work ahead to "revolutionary".
I don't like the design. It's really ugly. But in principle, this technology could be discreetly put behind the rim of stylish glasses like you'd expect to find at a department store. The technology hasn't been miniaturized to that degree yet, and you'd still have to drive it with something but for non-AR applications it needn't be complex.
At $100 people would be willing to use this for various new applications. Education comes to mind as a particularly good application. Maybe sports commentary? Maybe pop-up AR booths in malls. That would be enough to jump-start an ecosystem, while the hard technical work is done.
We already have phones in our pockets. Allow me to stick a cable from my HMD into my phone and I’ll be perfectly content to carry the extra weight around. It just has to look decent at the ‘head-mounted’ part.
while the qty will be low for some time to come, intel spent many many millions trying to prove there was even a market for a $1,000 computer and that it would provide performance acceptable to users...
we dont scoff at $1,000 phones hardly at all these days.
this is the first step, we should be thinking about where tech will be in 20 years at all times.
You are forgetting the utility. A $2500 computer in 1992 without internet, GUI etc would be as hard sell as ML-1. As utility of the product increases, the $2500 price tag starts making sense. The biggest issue with AR is that we haven't found the killer application yet. It's not the form factor or field of view (we have had large computers with pathetic displays), it's the utility to a common consumer beyond few minutes of amusement.
