In retrospect, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz realizes that all the hype was a big mistake. “I think we were arrogant,” he says.

It’s nearly 11 pm on a Monday in late July, and we are in the back room of an Italian restaurant not far from the Fort Lauderdale beach. It’s a place he often takes visitors who make the trek from Los Angeles or San Francisco to Mickey Mouse’s Florida homeland for a demo. Oscar-winning visual effects wizard John Gaeta, known for his work on the Matrix and later at Lucasfilm’s ILMxLAB, sits to my right, having joined Magic Leap last year. Former Samsung executive Omar Khan, who is on day 11 in his new role as chief product officer, sits to my left. Everyone is in a good mood because finally, I mean finally, after two years of boastful promises followed by two years of near silence, the company is on the cusp of revealing a headset that actual developers—and any old person in the wild—will be able to buy and bring home.

But it’s unclear, now, whether enough people will be willing to try it. Such a thought would have been absurd just three years ago when Magic Leap was the hottest company in augmented reality, and any interaction with its secretive technology became a status symbol among techies. Yet Magic Leap has promised so much for so long, with no results to speak of, that many of those who occupied that first wave of hype have written off all hope that its infamous, mythical, mixed-reality product is real at all, let alone the transformative technology it set out to be.

Abovitz gets it. In the fall of 2014, when Magic Leap’s entire staff could still fit inside his conference room, and demos were run on a refrigerator-sized metal block nicknamed the Beast, Google led a $542 million series B investment. It was an absurd-sounding amount of money for such an early round of funding—and Google CEO Sundar Pichai joined Magic Leap’s board. Suddenly everyone was curious about the mysterious Google-backed tech company with a quirky founder who eschewed Silicon Valley’s norms—a man who planned to headquarter his company in Florida rather than moving to the West Coast.

Where virtual reality surrounds a user in an artificial world, augmented reality superimposes virtual objects into your real-world surroundings. In its simplest form, that means an overlay of information, like a dangling Pikachu in Pokémon Go. But Magic Leap, has sought to give those superimposed objects shape and heft—if you’re seeing something, you can touch it, or move it, or interact with it, as if it were real. Abovitz bragged that Magic Leap had a new super-slick method for superimposing these digital assets —a technique called digital lightfield technology—that was better than anything Microsoft or Facebook or anyone else had developed.

But Abovitz’s grand descriptions always seemed to fall short of explaining how this technology worked. Before Magic Leap had a headset or software or programs, it hired marketers to sell the Dream of Magic Leap, all the while promising that a product was just around the corner. Abovitz dropped mysterious hints on Twitter, hid Easter eggs inside old TED talks, and accepted an invitation to speak at the 2015 TED conference, bailing just days before his scheduled talk.

For the past four years, the headsets Abovitz has promised have failed to materialize, and tech prognosticators have begun to question whether people will even want to wear headsets at all, now that they can simply pull up apps on their iPhones to augment reality. The company has guarded its secrets, revealing very little about how digital lightfield technology works or what its future product might look like. Developers, analysts, and general tech enthusiasts had grown increasingly skeptical that Magic Leap was developing anything worth following at all. Headlines ask “Why Do People Keep Giving Magic Leap Money?” and cry “Believe It or not, Magic Leap Says Its Headset Will Ship ‘This Summer.’” As Jono MacDougall, developer and author of the blog GPU of the Brain, wrote, “It makes us feel like they are in a secret club and they won’t invite us in. It makes us feel like they think they are better than us.” He added, “It makes us want them to fail.”