UPDATED 22:06 EDT / DECEMBER 10 2019

EMERGING TECH

Magic Leap shifts focus to augmented reality for enterprises

Troubled augmented reality company Magic Leap Inc. today shifted focus to enterprise AR less than a week after it was reported that the company had laid off dozens of staff because of low sales.

The shift in focus comes after The Information reported Friday that the company had sold only 6,000 of its $2,295 Magic Leap One Creator Edition headsets introduced last year despite having expected to sell 100,000.

Changes at the top of the company are said to have included the departure of Chief Financial Officer Scott Henry and John Gaera, senior vice president of creative strategy.

Magic Leap has launched the Magic Leap 1, a $2,995 mixed-reality headset that’s a slight update on the original Magic Leap One Creator Edition headset. The headsets come with an Enterprise Suite that includes two years of dedicated support, device management tools, fast device replacements and extended warranties. Enterprise users will also have access to a range of AR-friendly world apps that cover areas such as collaboration, location-based experiences and 3D visualization.

On top of the newly named headset, Magic Leap also announced that it will roll out Jump by Magic Leap, “a communication, collaboration and co-presence platform beta program, that will allow people who are either physically present or digitally co-present to collaborate.” The service is said to allow companies to merge their digital content and experiences with “multi-person, multi-site volumetric co-presence in the physical world, allowing for new forms of collaboration that were never before possible.”

The obvious comparison now that Magic Leap has shifted from a consumer to an enterprise focus is Microsoft Corp.’s Hololens 2. Magic Leap does have the advantage of being slightly cheaper — a Hololens costs $3,500 to buy outright — but Microsoft already has a far larger potential user base for its product.

The overall market for enterprise AR headsets is still young, however, creating potential opportunities for a player like Magic Leap to take market share. Whether it can is another matter.

Magic Leap has raised $2.6 billion to date, a serious sum of money, but it has so far failed to deliver on its hype. What is clear is that its shift in focus to enterprise could be the last roll of the dice for the company after it failed in the consumer mixed-reality market.

Image: Magic Leap

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