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Magic Leap VP of product marketing, Jeff Gattis, has reportedly left the company “for personal reasons” according to a Recode report citing a company official. His departure is unexpected given that the startup is planning to release the first edition of its mixed reality goggles, i.e., the Magic Leap One: Creator Edition before the end of the summer, though it’s unclear whether this turn of events will have any effect on the product’s launch window.
Prior to his involvement with Magic Leap, Jeff Gattis was the Executive Director for Global Marketing at HTC Vive for over a year. The Vive is a virtual reality headset developed in partnership with Valve, designed primarily for gaming, and was released in mid-2016. Jeff Gattis parted ways with HTC in 2015 and joined Magic Leap where he took the role of Head of Product Marketing. At that time, Magic Leap’s mixed reality headset had roughly four years of development under its belt and the device was being teased by the startup largely through video demonstrations. When Gattis joined Magic Leap he expressed his excitement for the company’s vision, claiming that the startup’s retro-futuristic goggles represent more than a great gaming device and can “potentially change the world.” This may very well still be the case, but regardless, the product’s marketing will no longer be driven by Jeff Gattis moving forward, and only time will tell who will take over his responsibilities.
Magic Leap first unveiled the Magic Leap One: Creator Edition last December, and half a year later, the startup was ready to shed more light on some of the product’s specifications and limited availability. Therefore, developers who want to get on board with the startup’s vision and create content for the device early on should technically be able to acquire the Creator Edition kit in the coming months, although pricing information is presently missing. As for the hardware, there are still plenty of unknowns surrounding battery life and other aspects, but nevertheless, the startup has previously confirmed that the Magic Leap One: Creator Edition will be powered by the NVIDIA Tegra X2 chipset. The Tegra X2 is manufactured by TSMC on a 16nm FinFET process and features two Denver2 CPU cores along with four ARM Cortex-A57 cores clocked at up to 2.0GHz.