After months of intensive speculation, some information has finally come around about the mysterious company Magic Leap, and exactly what it is they intend to produce. The answer is pretty incredible.
Magic Leap first hit the technology news world when word came of a huge capital raise seemingly out of nowhere. The company was able to secure $542 million in funding, based on a concept no one had any clear ideas about. What were they going to do with that money? Why were investors so interested?
Gizmodo journalist Sean Hollister managed to get to the bottom of (some of) it. Magic Leap is a collaborative effort run by Rony Abovitz, who is well known for his medical robots (which he just sold for more than a billion dollars), and movie prop making legend Richard Taylor, who you probably know for his work on films like the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Along with a growing team of experts who were at the top of their field, Magic Leap was growing fast. But to do what? That was where the speculation came in, because they have been ridiculously hush-hush about the whole thing. And I do mean the whole thing…even whispers about what they were making was suppressed.
Now we know. They are developing a wearable technology similar to Google Glass. Only it creates an augmented reality that produces realistic pictures out of thin air. You will be interacting with those images through super lightweight wearable frames.
Other than that, not much is known. Abovitz has been teasing people by stating that this is not 3-D or holographic imagery, insinuating that it will be something much newer, and much better. It works by projecting digital light into the retina of the viewer, producing realistic images in front of their face.
This has been seen in action by very few people, and that is the problem. Gizmodo has a breakdown of how the tech works, but unless you are trained in the cutting edge field of optical augmented reality, it is probably going to go a bit beyond what can be understood. This is a completely new frontier, after all.
However, the little bits and pieces that can be glean offer a promise of something exciting on the horizon, which could for the first time take us out of the realm of theoretical sci-fi holograms, and into a conceivable world of interactive technology we can start to build on.
Source: Gizmodo, Magic Leap
