I'd wager they have something which is just enough to get people with deep pockets to give them a pile of cash on the premise of "imagine what it could be with only another billion dollars!" but is utterly underwhelming for a mass-market consumer product.
There is absolute hard evidence that they have faked videos that do not represent the reality of their product. They have a video where they show 100 people watching the Magic Leap effects without wearing any googles. With today's announcement that video is a very clear fake without any attempt to make it resemble a final or even in-development product.
Their videos are fake and do not show what they are building. The product might be neat, I don't know. We do know that they lie in their videos to get attention.
I have been an avid Magic Leap supporter for years. I told everyone I know about them and showed all my friends their videos. I've been gushing about them for years. All based on a lie. All my love and attention for them has been because they told us they were building a system for you to have AR without goggles. LIES. ALL LIES.
It's difficult to do marketing for things that aren't yet in productized form without them being aspirational to some extent or another.
Case in point, the public unveilings for the Kinect and original Mac were combinations of stuff that worked at the time of the demo and stuff they hoped to finish by the time they sold. The former didn't deliver, the latter did.
It's clearly bad to overhype a product, but you have to try and reach for what you think you can do even if you're not done yet. And for new product categories you're even more dependent on marketing than for established ones.
