What It Will Take for Augmented Reality to Become Our Reality
Peggy Johnson, CEO of AR goggle maker Magic Leap, talks about the real metaverse, how the tech is used on the job, and the innovation needed for non-nerdy glasses.
4 min
Metaverse. Metaverse. Metaverse.
Say it three times fast, and you’ll still be confused about the promise of this much-hyped digital world where we’ll apparently work, hang out and more.
Yet Peggy Johnson, chief executive of Magic Leap, can see it clearly. She doesn’t even have to put on the company’s high-tech headset.
Ms. Johnson, who took over the reins of the embattled startup in 2020, sees a future where we put on augmented-reality glasses and view digital information projected within our real world. No more would we be constantly sucked out of the world to stare at a screen in our hand or on our desk or wall.
(Reminder: While a virtual-reality headset blocks out the world so you can escape, augmented-reality goggles add a layer onto it. Think of the windshield heads-up display found in many cars today.)
After 25 years at Qualcomm, Inc. and then six more at Microsoft Corp. as its chief deal maker, the 60-year-old CEO redirected Magic Leap to focus on enterprise customers and business-use customers for its still nascent technology. The Magic Leap 2 headset, expected to ship later this year, is designed to be lighter than its predecessor, with better optics and audio.
The Wall Street Journal spoke to Ms. Johnson about the industries already making AR a reality and what it will take to get glasses that don’t look like a total nerd helmet.
Our lives are dominated by screens. Why do we need augmented-reality glasses?
Right now, we sit in a stationary spot, and we interact through a keyboard with a PC. Augmented reality is going to change that whole paradigm. You’ll be able to look at your physical world and interact with digital content that sits in your physical world. The opportunity is to have a heads-up view and be able to have useful tools embedded in your physical world that will help you get your job done. It’ll help you do things in shorter amounts of time because you’ll have these digital cues helping you.
Magic Leap headsets are already being used on the job. What industries are benefiting from AR?
We have a number of healthcare companies using it because it very precisely and accurately can place digital content in front of their eyes.
For instance, we have a company named Brainlab who’s using it. They scan an image of your brain, and a 3-D image of your brain is now in front of your eyes and it can be used as a pre-surgical planning tool. You can draw the surgical pathway that you want to take.
Another company called SentiAR creates live, interactive 3-D visuals of patient’s hearts during cardiac-ablation procedures, which are performed to correct heart-rhythm problems. Typically, that’s done with a surgeon feeding the tube in but looking at a 2-D screen. Now, they have the ability to map your heart—the actual live heart—in front of your eyes while they’re inserting the catheter, and that just improves accuracy, navigation abilities.
Beyond that, we have a variety of manufacturing scenarios. We think it’s going to be a real tool for the factory worker. You can almost think of it as a computer on their eyes. Their hands are still free to do their job but, for instance, the worker can walk up to a physical machine. Above it can be displayed digitally the statistics of the machine: The up time, the down time, there can be a red flag that says it’s time for maintenance.
With Magic Leap 2, you’ve made hardware improvements but it still requires you to wear a headset that’s attached to a mini-computer on your waist. What are the biggest roadblocks to getting to sleek-looking glasses?
To some degree, we think of this as an advantage. We’ve taken the heat and the weight and put it down on your waistband or your pocket. That has allowed us to make the headset only about 250 grams, about 20% lighter than our Magic Leap 1.
You can draw an analogy between AR and mobile phones. When they first came out, they were big and they got smaller over time. A lot of that was component reduction and silicon integration. So those two things have to happen. It’ll be a few years before we can get to an eyeglasses format. But clearly, that’ll open up a consumer market in a big way and that’s definitely what we’re focused on.
Speaking of consumers, what will be the killer app that gets us all wanting to put these types of devices on our faces?
Enterprise customers were really the first users of mobile phones. I was in that industry back then, and they wanted longer battery life, smaller, lighter, all of those things. So we’ll take all that feedback in and use it as we begin to design Magic Leap 3.
I do think—and particularly because we’re coming out of a pandemic and we’re living in a hybrid world—this idea of 3-D collaboration with others who may be in the room or maybe a continent away is going to be an application that drives consumer use. It could be talking to your grandma on the other coast or it could be talking to your co-workers. To make meetings come to life seems to be the thing that will really drive usage into a consumer format.
We’re hearing a lot about the promise of the metaverse. What’s your outlook on it all?
There are great use cases for virtual reality. A lot of them are around entertainment, training, that sort of thing. It’s somewhat limited because when you’re fully occluded, you’re limited and you can’t move around as easily.
When you can see your physical world and interact with the digital content, that’s the true promise of the metaverse. The technology should just blend in. I think the pandemic will push us more toward that because we have been heads-down for two years and on these little screens.
It’s 2030. What do your job and industry look like?
Maybe I don’t come to work. Maybe I put on my glasses and have meetings. We’re all sort of doing that now since the pandemic but the experience would just be a lot more natural, as if I’m actually in the room with people. The technology is headed there.
Hopefully that is the world we’ll be in in 2030 and we will be back to a heads-up world and not looking down at a little screen in our hands. Our hands will be free to interact with that digital content in our physical world.
Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: May 6, 2022.
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Competitive pressure and creativity have made Chinese-designed and -built electric cars formidable competitors
4 min
China rocked the auto world twice this year. First, its electric vehicles stunned Western rivals at the Shanghai auto show with their quality, features and price. Then came reports that in the first quarter of 2023 it dethroned Japan as the world’s largest auto exporter.
How is China in contention to lead the world’s most lucrative and prestigious consumer goods market, one long dominated by American, European, Japanese and South Korean nameplates? The answer is a unique combination of industrial policy, protectionism and homegrown competitive dynamism. Western policy makers and business leaders are better prepared for the first two than the third.
Start with industrial policy—the use of government resources to help favoured sectors. China has practiced industrial policy for decades. While it’s finding increased favour even in the U.S., the concept remains controversial. Governments have a poor record of identifying winning technologies and often end up subsidising inferior and wasteful capacity, including in China.
But in the case of EVs, Chinese industrial policy had a couple of things going for it. First, governments around the world saw climate change as an enduring threat that would require decade-long interventions to transition away from fossil fuels. China bet correctly that in transportation, the transition would favour electric vehicles.
In 2009, China started handing out generous subsidies to buyers of EVs. Public procurement of taxis and buses was targeted to electric vehicles, rechargers were subsidised, and provincial governments stumped up capital for lithium mining and refining for EV batteries. In 2020 NIO, at the time an aspiring challenger to Tesla, avoided bankruptcy thanks to a government-led bailout.
While industrial policy guaranteed a demand for EVs, protectionism ensured those EVs would be made in China, by Chinese companies. To qualify for subsidies, cars had to be domestically made, although foreign brands did qualify. They also had to have batteries made by Chinese companies, giving Chinese national champions like Contemporary Amperex Technology and BYD an advantage over then-market leaders from Japan and South Korea.
To sell in China, foreign automakers had to abide by conditions intended to upgrade the local industry’s skills. State-owned Guangzhou Automobile Group developed the manufacturing know-how necessary to become a player in EVs thanks to joint ventures with Toyota and Honda, said Gregor Sebastian, an analyst at Germany’s Mercator Institute for China Studies.
Despite all that government support, sales of EVs remained weak until 2019, when China let Tesla open a wholly owned factory in Shanghai. “It took this catalyst…to boost interest and increase the level of competitiveness of the local Chinese makers,” said Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, a research service specialising in the Chinese auto industry.
Back in 2011 Pony Ma, the founder of Tencent, explained what set Chinese capitalism apart from its American counterpart. “In America, when you bring an idea to market you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share,” he said, according to Fast Company, a technology magazine. “In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China—execution is.”
Thanks to that competition and focus on execution, the EV industry went from a niche industrial-policy project to a sprawling ecosystem of predominantly private companies. Much of this happened below the Western radar while China was cut off from the world because of Covid-19 restrictions.
When Western auto executives flew in for April’s Shanghai auto show, “they saw a sea of green plates, a sea of Chinese brands,” said Le, referring to the green license plates assigned to clean-energy vehicles in China. “They hear the sounds of the door closing, sit inside and look at the quality of the materials, the fabric or the plastic on the console, that’s the other holy s— moment—they’ve caught up to us.”
Manufacturers of gasoline cars are product-oriented, whereas EV manufacturers, like tech companies, are user-oriented, Le said. Chinese EVs feature at least two, often three, display screens, one suitable for watching movies from the back seat, multiple lidars (laser-based sensors) for driver assistance, and even a microphone for karaoke (quickly copied by Tesla). Meanwhile, Chinese suppliers such as CATL have gone from laggard to leader.
Chinese dominance of EVs isn’t preordained. The low barriers to entry exploited by Chinese brands also open the door to future non-Chinese competitors. Nor does China’s success in EVs necessarily translate to other sectors where industrial policy matters less and creativity, privacy and deeply woven technological capability—such as software, cloud computing and semiconductors—matter more.
Still, the threat to Western auto market share posed by Chinese EVs is one for which Western policy makers have no obvious answer. “You can shut off your own market and to a certain extent that will shield production for your domestic needs,” said Sebastian. “The question really is, what are you going to do for the global south, countries that are still very happily trading with China?”
Western companies themselves are likely to respond by deepening their presence in China—not to sell cars, but for proximity to the most sophisticated customers and suppliers. Jörg Wuttke, the past president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, calls China a “fitness centre.” Even as conditions there become steadily more difficult, Western multinationals “have to be there. It keeps you fit.”
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