{"id":155643,"date":"2025-10-31T16:56:37","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T16:56:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/155643\/"},"modified":"2025-10-31T16:56:37","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T16:56:37","slug":"magic-leap-google-extend-partnership-and-show-hud-glasses-prototype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/155643\/","title":{"rendered":"Magic Leap & Google Extend Partnership And Show HUD Glasses Prototype"},"content":{"rendered":"

Magic Leap and Google have extended their partnership by 3 years, and showed a HUD glasses reference design in Saudi Arabia today.<\/p>\n

Magic Leap was one of the most hyped startups of the 2010s, with grand teases of bringing true augmented reality to the world backed by more than a billion dollars in funding. <\/p>\n

In 2018 it finally launched a product, Magic Leap One<\/a>,\u00a0the first true AR headset sold to consumers. But its $2300 price and the narrow field of view inherent to shippable transparent optics (even today) meant it fell significantly short of sales expectations.\u00a0The Information reported<\/a>\u00a0that Magic Leap’s founder, the CEO at the time, originally expected it to sell over one million units in the first year, but in reality it sold just 6000 units in the first six months.<\/p>\n

In late 2019, around 16 months after launch,\u00a0Magic Leap pivoted its strategy to enterprise<\/a>\u00a0and launched a new $3000 bundle with business warranty and support.<\/p>\n

In late 2022 it launched Magic Leap 2 at $3300, focused on enterprise,\u00a0leapfrogging HoloLens 2<\/a>\u00a0with a taller field of view, brighter displays, and unique dynamic segmented dimming.<\/p>\n

This brings you up to speed on the company before the Google partnership, which you can read about in the rest of the article.<\/p>\n

Google was an initial investor in Magic Leap, leading a $542 million funding round back in 2014. Google CEO Sundar Pichai also joined the Magic Leap board at the time, but he stepped down in 2018, saying his schedule was too busy.<\/p>\n

Last year, the two companies announced a “multi-faceted, strategic technology partnership” to combine Magic Leap’s “leadership in optics and manufacturing” with Google’s “technology platforms”.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Magic Leap And Google Announce AR Partnership<\/p>\n

Magic Leap and Google have entered a \u201cmulti-faceted, strategic technology partnership\u201d for AR devices.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, Magic Leap and Google have extended their partnership through a 3 year agreement.<\/p>\n

\u201cMagic Leap\u2019s optics, display systems, and hardware expertise have been essential to advancing our Android XR glasses concepts to life,\u201d said Shahram Izadi, Google\u2019s VP of XR, in a prepared statement. \u201cWe\u2019re fortunate to collaborate with a team whose years of hands-on AR development uniquely set them up to help shape what comes next.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two companies also showed off HUD glasses on stage at Saudi Arabia\u2019s Future Investment Initiative Institute event today, which they describe as a prototype and reference design for hardware companies to enter the HUD glasses market.<\/p>\n

(Magic Leap is majority owned<\/a> by Saudi Arabia.)<\/p>\n

Magic Leap and Google\u2019s talk at Saudi Arabia\u2019s Future Investment Initiative Institute.<\/p>\n

The prototype incorporates a microLED display from Raxium, the startup which Google acquired in 2022<\/a>, alongside a waveguide from Magic Leap, and the presentation saw Google pitch the same use cases it demoed at TED<\/a> and I\/O<\/a> earlier this year.<\/p>\n

That of course begs the question: how exactly does the Magic Leap waveguide differ from the one used in the Samsung-made prototype presented at those conferences?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat makes this prototype stand out is how natural it feels to look through,\u201d Izadi said in another prepared statement. \u201cMagic Leap\u2019s precision in optics and waveguide design gives the display a level of clarity and stability that\u2019s rare in AR today.\u201d That suggests it offers superior visual quality.<\/p>\n

To be clear, this is not a prototype of a Magic Leap 3. Magic Leap seems<\/a> to have pivoted from making devices to providing\/licensing its waveguide technology to others instead.<\/p>\n

Combined with this Google partnership, the pitch here is that any interested hardware company can easily launch their own high-quality HUD glasses, leveraging Magic Leap\u2019s optics and Google\u2019s software, to take on Meta Ray-Ban Display<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meta Ray-Ban Display already does a lot of the things Google keeps teasing on stages. But Gemini is inarguably more advanced than Meta AI, for now at least, while Google Maps would offer vastly wider coverage than Meta\u2019s limited navigation system. That\u2019s not to say Meta doesn\u2019t have its own advantages, such as integrating the largest communication platform on the planet (WhatsApp). But it does mean Google is set to bring serious competition.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Samsung HUD Glasses, Powered By Google, Could Launch Next Year<\/p>\n

Samsung and Google plan to launch HUD glasses next year to take on Meta Ray-Ban Display, South Korea\u2019s The Financial News reports.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So when might we see that competition arrive? No company has yet publicly committed to shipping Google-powered glasses with a HUD \u2014 Google described the display as \u201coptional\u201d when announcing<\/a> the Warby Parker and Gentle Monster partnership \u2014 but South Korea’s The Financial News recently reported<\/a> that Samsung plans to do so next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Magic Leap and Google have extended their partnership by 3 years, and showed a HUD glasses reference design…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155644,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[260],"tags":[18,19,17,82,286,287,288],"class_list":{"0":"post-155643","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-virtual-reality","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-virtual-reality","13":"tag-virtualreality","14":"tag-vr"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115469837707585732","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}