Oculus founder roasts Magic Leap One as ‘HoloLens 1.1’, bemoaning hype

After giving his personal Magic Leap One development kit to iFixit for a physical teardown last week, controversial Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has posted a blunt and detailed conceptual teardown of the Creator Edition on his personal blog. Calling the augmented reality headset a “tragedy in the classical sense,” Luckey bemoans not only the $2,295 product but the impact Magic Leap has had on the AR industry, saying that the company’s “massive funding and carefully crafted hype sucked all the air out of the room.”The crux of Luckey’s criticism is that Magic Leap One was designed impractically, relying on gimmicky display and controller technologies that don’t work particularly well now, and can’t easily be scaled upwards to improve. “It is less of a functional developer kit,” Luckey says, “and more of a flashy hype vehicle that almost nobody can actually use in a meaningful way, and many of their design decisions seem to be driven by that reality.”