Getty Images / GABRIELLE LURIE

"Magic Leap is a tragic heap," says Oculus founder and former CEO Palmer Luckey, claiming that he's not trying to be glib about the Magic Leap One Creator Edition mixed reality system, released on August 8. But he might have a point.

In a blunt analysis and takedown, Luckey expresses particular concern about the display technology and the almighty wave of hype that Magic Leap has been building since it moved from trying to make a movie and graphic novel in 2010, to developing an augmented reality app in 2011 and receiving $542 million in funding for its tech projects from Google and Qualcomm in 2014, with a 180-page patent application gaining attention – not least of all for its designs copied from film and art – in 2015.


Magic Leap says that the One's "unique design and technology lets in natural light waves together with softly layered synthetic lightfields." Palmer Luckey gave his own Magic Leap One to the iFixit teardown team to reveal what's actually in the guts of the machine.

In order to see this embed, you must give consent to Social Media cookies. Open my cookie preferences. Magic Leap Teardown? pic.twitter.com/nnAHSwKJxD — Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) August 12, 2018

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Luckey and the teardown indicate that what Magic Leap customers are getting is a long way from the company's original claim that its tech would project a digital light field to give the impression of light coming into the user’s eye from multiple angles.

Magic Leap says it uses light field technology to avoid the problem of vergence-accommodation conflict, a phenomenon that can cause headaches and nausea in response to your eyes and brain being asked to focus on a nearby screen that nonetheless gives you the impression that you're looking at something in the distance.


Luckey's most significant criticism of the Lightwear headset is that the company appears to have no such technology, despite its claims and promises over the years. In a summary, he says:

"The supposed 'Photonic Lightfield Chips' are just waveguides paired with reflective sequential-color LCOS displays and LED illumination, the same technology everyone else has been using for years, including Microsoft in their last-gen HoloLens. The ML1 is a not a 'lightfield projector' or display by any broadly accepted definition, and as a Bi-Focal Display, only solves vergence-accommodation conflict in contrived demos that put all UI and environmental elements at one of two focus planes. Mismatch occurs at all other depths. In much the same way, a broken clock displays the correct time twice a day."

Display technology expert Karl Guttag also says that Magic Leap has been taking liberties with what it describes as "digital lightfield" technology: “A true light field projector/display approximates the light rays that would pass through a plane. It would allow the eye to focus various depths in the scene and if the eye moves it could see around objects that are hidden behind other objects without any eye tracking.”

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Examples of true light field displays include the FOVI3D and Nvidia’s Near-Eye Light Field Display, both of whom have shared extensive video and technical explanations of how the technology works.


Even during development, Magic Leap's hardware patents revealed that they were working with standard LCOS displays. Guttag's 2016 patent analysis includes, under 'Best Fit Magic Leap Application with Waveguides', a patent figure that he says "is almost exactly what Magic Leap did. The only difference between Magic Leap and Hololens in terms of optics is that Magic Leap added the second set of waveguides for a second focus plane (that does not really do anything that useful)."

However, Luckey isn't right on all counts. He claims that a WIRED photo showing optical fibres connected to a prototype headset "is just electro-luminescent wire. It looks great to casual observers, but does not hold up to any kind of scrutiny from people who are in the know."

Guttag says that although Luckey is wrong, the image nonetheless doesn’t show the fibre-scanning display that Magic Leap implied it did at the time. He says that people seeing the image presumed they were looking at a fiber scanning display but that "my sources said that the optical fibers were used to couple laser light to a DLP display device.”

Digital Light Processor (DLP) technology, most familiar from its use in projectors, involves an optical chip with an array of mirrors, and Guttag cites a reliable source as saying that DLP was being used in the earlier Magic Leap demos.

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Magic Leap

Former Magic Leap senior technical director Paul Reynolds provides further insight in a Reddit post: "Being as that I'm one of a relatively small group of people that actually put their eyes in that lab set up, I feel confident in saying Palmer is very wrong in saying those were EL wires. Those fibers were functional light sources and in the live demo it was pretty obvious. It was not an FSD, though."

While the biggest criticisms about Magic Leap from Luckey and others in the industry focus on the company's misleading claims and insinuations in its promotion of the Magic Leap One, Luckey also raises a number of practical complaints about the usability of the expensive mixed reality kit.

He says the wand-style controller is "slow to respond, drifts all over the place, and becomes essentially unusable near large steel objects" and notes that Magic Leap's bespoke LuminOS operating system is "actually just Android with custom stuff on top, the same approach most people take when they want to claim they have built a whole operating system."

And the headset, he says, is "far too dim to use outdoors", even though its "transparency is about the same as a pair of dark sunglasses – not exactly indoor material", while none of the current apps available for the system even use its eye-tracking feature.

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Although he pulls no punches on Magic Leap's hype, Luckey isn't entirely damning in his appraisal of its hardware. He describes the ML1's Lightpack computer as "the best part of the device by far", praising the decision not include potentially hot and heavy hardware in the headset.

On the display front, he says "the tracking is good compared to most other players in the AR/VR industry, but worse than most of the big guys, including Hololens" and that "the meshing system" – the way in which spatial data is mapped to allow virtual objects to be realistically positioned – "is good, but not nearly as fast as Hololens. It is pretty similar to what you see from companies with a few orders of magnitude less funding, like [depth sensing camera maker] Stereolabs."

While Magic Leap is several hundred pounds cheaper than Microsoft's HoloLens Development Edition, it lacks the enterprise and academic focus of Microsoft's mixed reality system, not to mention Microsoft's significant app ecosytem.

Stand-alone augmented and mixed reality headsets, while potentially less cumbersome than those which rely on a PC or phone to handle most of their processing, are still relatively uncommon. For Windows PC users, a range of competitively priced Windows Mixed Reality units are available, while Vuzix's enterprise-oriented Android-based Blade Developer Kit costs £999 and is designed to bridge the gap between stand-alone and externally-linked mixed reality hardware, with its own ARM processor and Android OS, as well the ability to connect to external devices such as smartphones.

Conspicuously, none of these firms have made claims quite so extravagant as Magic Leap's, and it's here that the problem lies. The Magic Leap One is an interesting piece of kit in its own right, if not exactly revolutionary.

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A growing number of hands-on reports and several different reviews confirm that it's an interesting, if flawed, device that could be useful to those seeking to create mixed reality experiences of their own.

Karl Guttag feels that it's "really more of a very expensive VR device with a limited field of view. It darkens the real world and blocks off most of your peripheral vision, this is not what AR was supposed to be about. It appears to be primarily targeted at gaming."

When it comes to Magic Leap, it looks like Palmer Luckey is right. As Guttag puts it: "Magic Leap is and continues to be a hype machine."

Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz has gone so far as to say that vergence-accommodation conflict can "cause a spectrum of ... permanent neurologic deficits" – an assertion with little to back it up – and that "at Magic Leap we created a digital light-field signal technology that respects the biology of the human eye-brain system in a profound and safe way."

Hyperbolic statements like these do no favours to either Magic Leap or the mixed and augmented reality industry as a whole. The audience with the budget, patience and interest in such devices is limited and becomes more so if you rule out industrial applications.


It's impossible to comment on the accuracy of Palmer Luckey's estimate that total sales of the Magic Leap One are current at "well under 3,000 units", but, if true, it doesn't bode particularly well for an industry that Guttag says suffers major gaps between "what companies are promising, what customers are expecting, and what can physically be built."

Magic Leap declined to comment.

Updated 03.09.18, 15:00 BST: Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz has since contacted WIRED on Twitter, describing Luckey and Guttag as "two deeply biased competitors of Magic Leap".

Linking to a University of California, Berkeley, paper detailing the fatigue and nausea associated with vergence–accommodation conflicts, he added that "the field we are in (spatial computing) is deep and complex – and should have serious discussion. The clinical and scientific side is an amazing path."