Magic Leap is one of the most mysterious companies in the market. Only a few privileged people have gained direct access to its technology, and everything the outside world knows has been revealed through small YouTube videos. Its spokespeople prefer to talk in terms of “mixed reality” blending the virtual and augmented with the real, and its latest video points exactly in that direction. If everything goes well, its content could become “our” future... assuming we are willing to wait.
What We Know About Magic Leap
The first time we talked about Magic Leap was last March, and we crossed paths again last October. What is known with precision? Well, its general data has been confirmed for a long time: it is located in Florida, not Silicon Valley. It received more than two billion dollars in funding, and the most recent calculations assign it a value of about $4.5 billion. Google, Warner Bros., Alibaba, Qualcomm... big names involved, and they are not the only ones. But the most striking detail about Magic Leap is this: it has released absolutely nothing to the market. At this moment, it is a bet. A very attractive number on the canvas that somehow managed to separate itself from the rest. The term most associated with Magic Leap is “augmented reality,” though its representatives lean toward “mixed reality.” Now, the $4.5 billion question is: what are they working on? Something like this:
The Demo
https://www.youtube.com/embed/GmdXJy_IdNwAccording to a brief text entry at the bottom of the image, there is no alteration or post-processing in the video (with the exception of the text itself, of course). Many graphics, a notification system, an interactive presentation about a school project dedicated to Mount Everest, a miniature 3D representation of the mountain itself, an online shopping application with an appearance very similar to a traditional browser (with the corresponding 3D model of the product), many references to Interstellar, and what appear to be jellyfish, floating above the user's head like... animated wallpaper? Screensaver? Something in between?
The Headset
Probably the biggest novelty about Magic Leap is that a headset with semitransparent glass exists. The light source, and by extension the content, is projected from the edge of the glass toward the user's eyes thanks to a series of nanometric “wrinkles,” effectively doing away with the use of pixels... but the technical details end there. There are no dates, no prices. Magic Leap uses robots to calibrate its prototypes, which gives us an idea of how far this technology is from store shelves. The rest comes down to one word: patience.
