An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR: Magic Leap 1 AR headsets will ‘cease to function’ from December 31, 2024, the company announced. Magic Leap 1 launched in mid 2018 as the first transparent AR headset marketed and sold to consumers. The headset is powered by a tethered waist-mounted compute pack and came with a single tracked controller, though it got hand tracking support too. Content for the device included avatar chat, a floating web browser, a Wayfair app for seeing how furniture might look in your room, two games made by Insomniac Games, and a Spotify background app.
But Magic Leap 1’s eye-watering $2300 price and the limitations of transparent optics (even today) meant it reportedly fell significantly short of sales expectations. Transparent AR currently provides a much smaller field of view than the opaque display systems of VR-style headsets, despite costing significantly more. And Magic Leap 1’s form factor wasn’t suitable for outdoor use, so it didn’t provide the out-of-home functionality AR glasses promise to one day like on-foot navigation, translation, and contextual information. The Information reported that Magic Leap’s founder, the CEO at the time, originally expected it to sell over one million units in the first year. In reality it reportedly sold just 6000 units in the first six months.
