A Memorable Magic Leap Experience

As many of us are now officially former Magic Leap employees I wanted to share the incredible experience I had with my colleagues there. I joined Magic Leap in early November of 2018. During that time we had commercialized the first product, the Magic Leap 1. From that point on I would have one of the most memorable work experiences of my career.

I’ve had some rewarding career highlights, including building Unity’s Enterprise Game business in the early days and working with some cutting edge XR tech at other start-ups. The experience I had while working at Magic Leap ranks among my favorite with regards to peer interactions and professional problem solving.

I strongly encourage everyone to try the current experiences in the ML1 and look into the future of HCI. Spatial computing is how humans will all compute within the next 10 years. Whether you're making 3D art in Spatiate, hosting a virtual immersive meeting with an AEC partner in Cavrnus, or flying small 3D rockets around your living room in Weta’s Boosters, it’s easy to understand where we’re going with our digital interactions and lifestyles.

At Magic Leap I’ve never worked in a work environment with so many brilliant minds working towards the same thing. Building an interoperable hardware plus software system has proven to be one of the most difficult things for any company to achieve. Building this system to include robust contemporary computer vision, integrated into a small wearable headset is damn near impossible. As one of our co-founders likes to say, "we make the impossible look difficult."

It's unfortunate that Magic Leap has been prone to questionable press and rumors throughout its history. Without Magic Leap (pro-actively) owning its outside narrative, many in the XR industry have projected their POVs onto who and what Magic Leap represents, whether opinion or fact based. The truth is no one is perfect, and Magic Leap has been a magnet of attention for many years now.

Beating on successful technology giants (which ML is not one of yet) is a strangely popular activity for many in the AR/VR/MR industry. Much of this may stem from natural feelings of envy (raising $2.6B+) or perhaps personal career frustrations. That behavior ignores obvious positives.

Only two companies in the world, Magic Leap and Microsoft, have accelerated the evolution of high-end spatial computing into the enterprise and consumer marketplaces globally. That’s an impressive legacy to leave within a world where many competitors have had less successful output or are simply waiting to be followers.

For Magic Leap to have successfully developed and released the current Magic Leap One commercially is ML’s biggest achievement yet, and it’s the employees aka Leapers who made this a reality. The fact that global enterprise and Hollywood have adopted the platform is further proof that it stands alone with Hololens at the top of the current spatial computing food chain.

When the press was focused on the ML units sold by end of 2019, they forgot to double check Hololens sales numbers in its first 12 months. It turns out that ML probably sold many more ML1s in its first 12 months than Hololens did. But, early tech. device sales are only a small part of the story these days. Selective data, editorial journalism, and fortune telling has led to a lot to false outcomes in our industry.

In my opinion, Magic Leap's most important resource has and always will be its talent. I had the pleasure of building some very special relationships at Magic Leap that will continue throughout my life. The width and depth of talent there is mind blowing to me. I worked with people who were not only domain experts in their field but also incredibly thoughtful generalists, ready to jump in and lend support whenever needed.

The software, hardware, product, sales, marketing, business, legal, finance, IT, operations, security, recruiting, people, and experience teams at Magic Leap have been stacked with some of the brightest minds in interactive and immersive technology. It was the Directors and leaders of each group or sub-org that were constantly professional in their focus and vigilance to progress our mission. Magic Leap's vision is still unique a decade later. Executing the vision into the mission is what I think most of us are proud of.

I commend and genuinely thank my leaders and peers for giving me one of the most satisfying work experiences I’ve ever had. It didn’t end the way I’d hoped for, but my journey in this space is not over yet. Many of us will continue v2 of our spatial computing careers. I’m excited to see the future output of that work!

I also wanted to share this update with my LinkedIn network and beyond, because some of the talent I worked with is currently available and looking for their next position. I will continue to promote my friends and colleagues, both on the inside and outside of Magic Leap.

If you see anyone in my network who you'd like to know, please don’t hesitate to send me an intro. request. As we move our efforts forward and reset certain endeavors, I wish my ex and current Magic Leap peers only the best in their personal and professional lives. Onward and upward!

- MTM

#magicleap #spatialcomputing #mixedreality #ar #vr #technology #talent