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Magic Leap appears to be so focused on "cinematic reality" and the impressive demos that it enables that there is no effort being spent on the kind of practical

Magic Leap appears to be so focused on "cinematic reality" and the impressive demos that it enables that there is no effort being spent on the kind of practical applications that would actually give a shipping product value beyond a tech demo. Worse, even ML's occasional stabs at something "practical" are all art and no design: Witness their conceptual Gmail interface, which transforms the web UI into a Rube Goldberg-esque mechanical device, giving scroll views a third dimension that adds zero utility while requiring new gestures to do the exact same things everyone already knows how to do in a web browser. Microsoft may still have yet to deliver on any of the content creation and collaboration ideas proposed in the Hololens demos, but at least it was the start of a coherent vision.

yodon 9y ago
It's very hard to tell, and ML's UX work certainly could be as intellectually bankrupt as you suggest but my read is they are doing a lot of detailed explorations around specific use cases in hopes of informing a larger/broader interaction design suite that can scale across a very wide range of interaction needs, essentially trying to reanalyze the problem space in much the way that led to the distillation of the Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer schema at Xerox Parc. Microsoft seems to be keeping its sights much smaller and making much more tactical delta off of existing concepts (eg. much of Windows MR interactions really is just floating traditional windows with traditional mouse and keyboard interactions).