2022年11月8日

得到它!在伊利诺斯州罗斯科市的PBC Linear公司的车间里，新工人戴着来自Magic Leap公司的增强现实头盔，这是他们培训的一部分。过去三年里，这家生产轴承和执行机构的私人控股公司一直在使用这种耳机进行指导，最近还将其用于预防性维护和销售。“我们刚刚看到了一些非常酷的硬件的非常酷的演示，我们的老板想投资，”PBC Linear的应用cobotics产品经理博·威尔曼(Beau Wileman)说。“这项技术感觉是为工业环境而设计的。”这与Magic Leap早期的情况相去甚远。Magic Leap是过去10年里被炒得最火的科技公司之一。这既显示了该公司在首席执行官佩吉•约翰逊(Peggy Johnson)领导下的技术在现实世界的潜力，也显示了应用速度的缓慢。增强现实将虚拟指令或3D图像等数字内容与现实世界相结合，而在虚拟现实中，用户完全沉浸在数字世界中。六年前，《福布斯》把Magic Leap及其创始人罗尼·阿博维茨(Rony Abovitz)放在杂志封面上，承诺该技术将成为“颠覆性的机器”。这家初创公司从包括Alphabet和阿里巴巴集团(Alibaba Group)在内的顶级投资者那里筹集了20多亿美元，其估值最高时达到67亿美元。 The technology was cool, but its business model—targeting consumers who had no real reason to shell out big bucks for its AR That September, Johnson, previously executive vice president of business development at Microsoft , took the reins from Abovitz. Her goal: Turn Magic Leap into a real business. Like many tech startups that promised to change consumers’ lives, Magic Leap, which last year raised funds at a reduced $2 billion valuation , found that the best uses for its technology were in industry, particularly areas like manufacturing, healthcare and defense. That’s a similar trajectory that 3D printing went through as the technology moved from the hype of targeting consumers interested in making knick-knacks to real uses by manufacturers looking to redesign parts to be lighter, cheaper and more efficient. “There is a lot of hype, and we are not about hype at all in this Magic Leap 2.0 world,” Johnson told Forbes. Magic Leap introduced its second-generation augmented-reality headset, known as the Magic Leap 2, on September 30. Geared toward enterprises, it’s lighter and more powerful, with better imagery, than the earlier version. The enterprise device, cloud-enabled and including security features, costs $4,999. A base model of the new device is available for $3,299. “Consumers get all the attention for new technology. Things tend to go from tech to toy to tool.” The ongoing shift in strategy puts Magic Leap head-to-head with Microsoft’s HoloLens, which introduced its device in 2015 and has since struggled with the technology, as detailed in a recent Wall Street Journal story. Meta, Apple and Alphabet are also expected to unveil their own AR headsets in the coming years. “Competition is good,” Johnson says. “It’s a sign of a healthy market.” The competition somewhat blurs the lines between augmented reality and virtual reality, with Meta’s new Quest Pro, introduced in late October at a price of $1,500, allowing a new pass-through mode that lets a user see what’s happening around them. Johnson argues that the pass-through doesn’t allow enough precision for technical tasks such as surgery, and that to date HoloLens is the only directly competitive AR device. “We feel strongly that our field of view, which is industry leading, is the right direction for enterprise,” she says. She declined to discuss the company’s revenue or to disclose how many headsets the company has sold to date. Total enterprise shipments for 2022 reached 1.3 million (versus almost nothing on the consumer side), and are expected to rise to 26 million in 2027, according to technology intelligence firm ABI Research. Eric Abbruzzese, ABI’s augmented-reality and virtual-reality research director, figures that there are “a few million” augmented reality headsets in the market today, with Microsoft’s HoloLens holding the lead. Magic Leap’s sales are in the thousands, he says, “absolutely under 40,000, probably under 10,000.” Johnson declined to comment on those numbers. “If Microsoft continues to struggle with the HoloLens, there’s an opportunity to supplant them a bit,” Abbruzzese says. “The general consensus with Magic Leap is wait-and-see.…There’s going to be a question mark, fairly or not, above Magic Leap. They haven’t had enough time to erase that question mark yet.” “There is a lot of hype, and we are not about hype at all in this Magic Leap 2.0 world.” Before taking over as CEO, Johnson, 61, who grew up in Alhambra, California, just east of Los Angeles, had spent her career in Big Tech. She worked for 25 years at Qualcomm