Hololens 2 uses hand tracking for interaction (which works really well!), so it's surprising to see a controller device being used with the Magic Leap 2. Apparently ML's hand tracking tech isn't ready yet? If you're a company planning to deploy AR for the enterprise (for example, for aerospace manufacturing), is there a compelling reason to choose Magic Leap 2 over Hololens 2? I heard that with Magic Leap 2, they switched from their own custom Lumin OS to Android, so I could possibly see some companies preferring Android development over Universal Windows Platform. However, it seems like Magic Leap has a massive hurdle to overcome to take market share from Microsoft in the enterprise AR space.
The difference is that Apple sells to consumers, the general public (if somewhat upmarket). Magic Leap can't because it's not good enough for public adoption and still too expensive. Microsoft maybe could make a consumer viable device but hasn't chosen to lead, but rather go for industry and be ready to target consumers if xR takes off--every year has been the year of VR and the pandemic wasn't enough to launch it. Meta is doing great, waiting to see how Quest 3 compares to Apple's. Either way, we still need a killer app with network effects.
Yes, their original vision was b2c, but they pivoted to b2b. The reason is that AR is currently too expensive (and frankly not polished enough) for consumers, but it is good enough for industrial applications where it’s worth the cost.
