News is aflutter about Magic Leap, a Florida-based startup that is developing a mixed reality device after receiving half a million dollars in funding from investors that include Google and Qualcomm. The company has been working on its head mounted device since 2010, but details about Magic Leap’s “cinematic-reality technology” have only slowly trickled out to the public since 2014. The firm has exploded across the internet this past week when its founder, Rony Abovitz, told an audience at the WSJD conference in Laguna Beach, CA, “We’re actually gearing up to build millions of things. We’re not ready to announce when we’re shipping, but it gives you a signal that we’re not far.”
The most detailed description of how the technology works comes from MIT’s Technology Review, where Rachel Metz describes her experience wearing the headset. The biggest, and most futuristic, differentiating aspect of the device is that, rather than using a Google Glass or HoloLens-style display, the HMD projects the screen directly into the wearer’s retina, allowing digital images to appear as though they’re right in the room of the device’s wearers. Wikipedia describes the technology behind this (potentially dangerous?) retinal projection as relying on “a light-field chip using silicon photonics” and “stacked silicon waveguides”. Metz illustrates her experience wearing the prototype by saying:
I’m sitting behind a workbench in a white-walled room in Dania Beach, Florida, in the office of a secretive startup called Magic Leap. I’m staring wide-eyed through a pair of lenses attached to what looks like metal scaffolding that towers over my head and contains a bunch of electronics and lenses. It’s an early prototype of the company’s so-called cinematic-reality technology, which makes it possible for me to believe that the muscular beast with the gruff expression and two sets of swinging arms is actually in the room with me, hovering about seven feet in front of my face.
He’s not just visible at a set distance. I’m holding a video-game controller that’s connected to the demo station, and at the press of a button I can make the monster smaller or larger, move him right or left, bring him closer, or push him farther away.
Also at the conference, Abovitz said that the firm holds regular hackathons at their offices, housed in what was once a Motorola factory, where teams of developers are invited to work on the device. As they work on their software development kit, they’ve developed apps that involve fetch and cooking mac and cheese. Magic Leap Chief Content Officer says of the device that, “Anything you can do on a smartphone, you can do with Magic Leap. Where the world is your screen, describing it as “a broad-based platform for visual computing.”
The product from Magic Leap, which does not yet have a release date, is just one among many mixed reality, or reality computing, devices that are in the larger tech pipeline. In addition to the HoloLens, Canon is developing its MREAL headset, and there are plenty of VR headsets on the way, all of which may be used to more intuitively design 3D objects that can be reproduced in the physical world with 3D printing.
