I interviewed at Magic Leap in 2017 when it was a mysterious secret company. Flew down to Ft Lauderdale and interviewed for a whole day. At the end of the day was a demo of their product, an area with 20 feet curtains across from Rony’s glass office. They put a tethered headset and the rest is complete and utter awe. Magic Leap’s tech has mimics accommodation of a real human eye (‘accommodation’ is a technical term related to depth + scale perception). They put on two demos. First one was cyberpunk brass mosquito and another was to overlay the wall in front of me with a massive theater screen. I was totally blown away by the resolution and clarity. It was like AR but with 20% window tint. Magic Leap somehow mimics accommodation of your eyes so that a 50 ft theater screen looks not like a postage stamp, both occupy the same FOV in your vision, but actually make it feel like a 50 ft screen. It was unreal.

I couldn’t publicly say these things because of NDA but I don't think they give a shit anymore after 5 years and I don’t either.

Magic Leap’s failure was in manufacturing from what I’ve heard from other employees working there. They had set up a line at their Florida factory, buying an old Motorola facility, but it was really hard to mass manufacture optics at an affordable price. I was totally sold on the tech. I can see why Google invested $2B in Rony’s vision. I feel bad for them because they were so secretive and made huge bets on full stack: optics to headset to content. They wanted to go all in on production of exclusive content. Sort of like the PlayStation model - Take a loss on hardware. I saw a magical campus, full of animation posters and characters, kind of like visiting Pixar studios. I also feel bad for their employees.

Others are calling it the Theranos of VR but unlike them, they didn’t hurt anyone and it was worth a shot. I went on the factory floor during the interview (only a small section where calibrated optics). I saw all the stuff. It was not malice; I blame their stupid PR team that propped up so much hype that expectations were out of control. Blame Rony for that but also when you have a tech like that, I can imagine the confidence that it brings. Just remember, stuff fails. Don’t get nasty about it. There were real genuine people working there; I didn’t get the job but it was totally the right thing to happen to me in retrospect. Just sad to see what shitty PR strategy does to public - Rony probably learned a few lessons from this. I wish them good luck with this enterprise/industrial pivot. I am thinking of buying a dev kit.