Reality finally reached Rony Abovitz in May. The augmented reality headset that had been in development for nine years at his company, Magic Leap, had been a colossal failure. In a tearful speech during a video conference, Abovitz told employees he would resign.
Abovitz, whose infectious optimism helped Magic Leap secure total investments of about $ 3.5 billion, didn’t stick around for long. Just as her replacement, Peggy Johnson, was taking office, she tweeted that she was “stealthily working on something new :-)”. The cryptic message was accompanied by a change in Abovitz’s Twitter bio that references something called Project Phoenix. Abovitz, one might assume, is the mythical bird. That turns Magic Leap to ash.
Magic Leap once burned bright. Google and chipmaker Qualcomm. Inc. Magic Leap’s plan was to introduce the technology into a consumer device, build a factory to scale it, engineer an operating system, video games, and movies, and spark the creation of a vast industry of new content.
Doing it all, in Abovitz’s eyes, was the only way to leave behind the corporate giants who also wanted to own the future. Abovitz told Bloomberg at Magic headquarters in Leap in Plantation. , Florida, in 2018.
He spent his early childhood in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland before his extended family moved en masse to Florida in his teens.
Two years later, he stepped down as CTO and assumed the amorphous role of CEO. visionary. . According to Abovitz himself, he was adrift, daydreaming at night and looking for something else to do. At first, Abovitz envisioned some kind of media venture, perhaps a movie or a game. He then became obsessed with building one aspect of his fantasy world, augmented reality headsets, for the people of Earth.
Johnson started his job at Magic Leap last month and had to wait weeks before entering the office due to the pandemic. She declined an interview request and Magic Leap did not provide anyone else for an interview.
It also focuses on making Magic Leap more competitive with the HoloLens, a $ 3,500 headset that Microsoft sells to medical and manufacturing institutions and that critics say is technically superior to what Magic Leap offers. The startup has a handful of registered corporate clients and Johnson’s first task is to close other deals in the works, including the one with Amazon, according to people familiar with the plans.
Some of the people who left or were fired by Magic Leap this year have landed on Apple and Facebook. Abovitz offered a different message on the day of his resignation: “We have created a new field. A new medium, ”he said. “And together we have defined the future of computing.” It will be up to someone else to make that future come true.
