I can understand not wanting their product misrepresented, but all the secrecy and censorship about it makes me believe it is bad, and I'm not going to spend money on something I believe is bad.
It appears to have been scrubbed from the internet though because I was trying to find it a while back to show someone and I searched for a while, but couldn't find anything.
Magic Leap seems like a case study of how not to release a product, but maybe they were more focused on raising money?
Either work on your thing in public, shipping units (Oculus/FB) or work on it entirely in secret (Apple), but don't loudly and continuously talk vaguely about how amazing your thing is with no real public examples for years. This plus all the fake marketing video demos - if you're going to do this you better be as good as you're pretending to be.
Someone that good probably wouldn't need to show marketing videos, they'd just show the product itself.
I finally did get to play with one (friend who personally knows an investor had one) and it was pretty disappointing. AR seems likely to be the next computing platform, but the hardware is not ready yet.
Magic Leap reminds me a lot of the General Magic documentary - crazy hype, right general idea, but too early and bad product.
I'm not sure if they have the same talent General Magic had though.
I’m just confused how the press and investors were misled in such a miraculous way.
Usually, Google being willing to give a company hundreds of millions of dollars is enough, because you assume whoever's job it is to give out all that money takes it seriously. Unfortunately, sometimes the more money is involved the harder it is for skeptics to get their own message out, since nobody wants to believe that all the money they've invested has been a poor choice. Just look at Uber. Any company that didn't have so many billions invested in it would have failed because of the internal problems they have long ago.