The multi-billion dollar super-secretive AR startup, Magic Leap, seems to be stumbling upon one embarrassing problem after another. The company is now staring square at a new lawsuit, which has been filed by a former employee Tannen Campbell. She has alleged the company of maintaining a hostile and sexist working environment for women, which led to numerous missed internal timelines.
Tannen Campbell, who was employed as the VP of strategic marketing and brand identity at Magic Leap, has filed a lawsuit in a federal court in the Southern District of Florida. In the lawsuit, she mentions that her services were hired by the company back in 2015 to help solve their “pink/blue problem” — a term for lack of female leadership. She was tasked with making the company feel like less of a “boys club”.
But, Campbell alleges that she was shown the exit door for confronting Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz about the sexist environment in their Florida-based headquarters. She says that Abovitz refused to acknowledge the depth of misogyny in his company’s culture after she tried her hardest to correct the gender imbalance. She further adds that it was the primary deterrent which “renders it [Magic Leap] so dysfunctional it continues to delay the launch of a product that attracted billions of investment dollars”.
Talking about the same, the lawsuit against the company reads as under:
The macho bullying atmosphere at Magic Leap fosters a dysfunctional culture which creates chaos and lack of process and structure, hinders the company from achieving key product deadlines (including launch, which has shifted back at least 4 times in Campbell’s 1.5 years at the company) and, literally, prevented Campbell from doing the job she was hired to do or achieving the goals she and Abovitz had discussed during her initial interview: helping with the ‘pink/blue problem’ or making Magic Leap less of a ‘boys club’.
Also, she alleges Magic Leap for using false marketing materials to inaccurately depict their product’s capabilities. Campbell further adds her raising concerns over the use of such misleading marketing tactics also made her the target for dismissal. The lawsuit also mentions that her warnings regarding the same were “ignored in favor of her male colleagues’ assertions that the images and videos presented on Magic Leap’s website and on YouTube were aspirational, and not Magic Leap’s version of alternate facts”.
This is similar to another claim which has previously been made by The Information. A report released last year revealed that the company’s product was far from completion and its capabilities were sub-par compared to the HoloLens. The report also alleged the company of using graphics to completely alter the real-world experience and create hype using this footage. And now, the former employee has corroborated these claims, so they might actually be true.
The aforementioned development comes on the heels of an image of the company’s toy-like prototype leaking on the interwebs. In the said prototype, one can see the engineer carrying the internals of the portable AR gear within a yellow backpack along with a battery pack in his hand. The other component of the setup — the headgear — can also be seen in this image. And this shows that the product isn’t ready yet and it is also not as portable as expected. But, Abovitz has clarified hubbub surrounding the leaked image through a message on Twitter said,
btw – the photo (which we did not release) is of an R&D test rig we use to gather test data (and run various algorithm tests) for our machine vision/perception systems. MxRL (Mixed Reality Lightfield) lives in the real world. What we are preparing to ship is much cooler and smaller.
Since we haven’t interacted with the prototype ourselves, we are not the best judge for the said technology’s competence. But, the cohort of individuals who’re rebuking the company for producing a less-than-worthy product can also not be ignored and put on the sidelines. Some sources are now suggesting that the company is using its recent capital raise for “doing 1,000 things badly. They should be doing three or four things really well.” No more comments! What about you?
