I'm a VR/AR developer, and here's my experience with trying to buy a Magic Leap 2 to check it out:

See the PR announcement that they're shipping. Go to their web site. Click "Where to buy". Go to the first link to "Insight US". Place an order. Get a call from a representative to confirm the order. Ask the representative to clarify that Magic Leap 2 is in stock and shipping. They responded "yes."

Wait a few days. Check on the status of my order: "Stock: 0", and the estimated ship date is just an automated date that increases by 3 whenever current date equals estimated ship date. Call up Insight US to ask is it in stock or not. They admit it's not in stock and won't be available until maybe December/January.

Call up Magic Leap (they surprisingly have a phone line to call) and ask their sales representative if anyone has stock. They respond they don't know and to try the second supplier. Ask them what the supplier's phone number is to confirm stock. They say they don't know and that supplier only communicates through e-mail. Supplier responds via e-mail, "of course we have stock! Place an order to get an estimated ship date." I'm doubtful.

So there you have it. Magic Leap 2 shipping now, maybe?

Their go-to-market / sales channel management people need to get their act together if they wish not to become a very expensive failed startup. Can't have sales be an afterthought and business culture lacking fiscal discipline until the money runs out. IYAM, paradoxically, the more money is thrown at a project, the worse the returns because there's an atrophying of resourcefulness when there's not as much survival pressure.

They're basically guaranteed to be a very expensive failed startup. Microsoft and Google have already proven that industrial AR is a small market. Way too small to support a 1000 employee company.

I disagree, AR could be very useful - much more than VR IMO - but it’s very hard to pull off. You need a killer app to begin with, and the product needs to be good enough. HoloLens is great at the AR tech part but bulky and expensive without a clear use for now.

I will give Magic Leap some credit on their marketing for the article link in that they show some persons in non-office settings such as laboratories and what presumably are hospital settings.

But for me what's missing is seeing it actually used productively by the persons or testimonial stories about how AR integrates into their workflow.

People are resistant to change even within the face of pretty cool technology. I would position many people don't know what they want to improve their workflow and can only define such wants as complaints about the current workflow. That's my experience working with customers where they have a complaint but just don't know what to search for to see if there's a solution.

To show how I think this should work, when I add a new tool to my workflow usually I can pinpoint exactly what I don't like about something and I have specific terms that help me find it. For example, my org uses Teams, and Teams is unfortunately linked by the hip to Sharepoint which I cannot stand. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest issue is that Sharepoint tries to load everything in-browser, even if it cannot. Eventually it will show you a download link, and for the content I am working with, I don't want Sharepoint to try to load it, I just want to download the file and use the appropriate app to work with it. In business rules, I want all Sharepoint links to automatically convert to download links.

Armed with this, I could search for browser extensions to redirect links to another link, and I found Redirector: https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector I cannot sing the praises of this tool enough, and it saves me tons of clicking and waiting by letting me write rules to handle specific link formations and redirect them to another. It was a perfect fit because I could _describe my annoyance_ and the preferred behavior, and armed with that, I could know whether a tool met my needs or not.

This is what is missing for me with AR. As someone in tech, I can describe a ton of my issues with daily workflows quite easily. I can define my problems and how I prefer it works. What I can't see is how AR helps me. Like many, I imagine that persons like technicians, mechanics, anyone who needs their hands available to work on complex hardware/items might benefit from AR, but what I don't see are testimonials from these people that some AR company demoed their product with them and found a way to make their workflow better. I'm not a mechanic; I can do basics with cars or house-hold appliances, but I'm not a professional, and I imagine the AR companies out there aren't either. Why there aren't field tests with discussions and interviews with the proposed target audience for AR is beyond me.

Instead I see people in offices on conference calls, I see random stock photos of people in lab outfits, and I see marketing copy telling me that AR is limited just by my imagination. Thing is I can imagine quite a lot, and I don't see proof AR can do any of it.

If AR has a product ready for betas, this needs to be in the hands of people who might actually use it and developing case studies. The technology is interesting, I'm not denying that, but I want to read stories about actual use cases and testimony from someone who honestly feels "this made my life better." Until that happens, I'm not confident AR is going to take off in a meaningful way for work related purposes instead of recreational.