The next question, then, has to be what is Magic Leap exactly? While the company is remaining tight-lipped about the specifics, Abovitz paints it as a sort of real-world augmented reality company.
(Image: Magic Leap)
“If you think about what mobile computing is right now, it’s portable, it’s great, and I call it ‘making your hand happy,’ in that you can hold it and it’s great,” Abovitz told TechCrunch. “Your hand is happy, but your eye is not. What I mean by your eye is not happy, if you step outside your office and look at San Francisco Bay, it’s just this visual feast, and there’s no movie theater, there’s no television display, there’s nothing that will ever match the grandeur of what our own brains can create in terms of visual experience.”At a rudimentary level, Magic Leap could be a device which projects a life-like image onto the users retina, creating the illusion of something being real. It's not clear what form the tech will take is, but Abovitz describes it as “lightweight wearable."
Abovitz goes on to note that Magic Leap isn't like the Oculus Rift, and it's not a VR experience. In the same breath, he also says it's not augmented reality either, since it goes far beyond AR to create a truly 3D object. Abovitz explains comparing Magic Leap to AR to a circ*mstance where someone goes to see the Wright Brothers fly their first airplane in 1903, only to find someone building a jet next-door.
Over on the Magic Leap website, Sci-Fi author and "Chief Futurist" Neal Stephenson explains how - after four men turned up on his doorstep with a mythical sword - he came to be on the project.
"A few months ago, two Irishmen, a Scot, and an American appeared on my doorstep with Orcrist, aka 'Goblin-cleaver,' the ancient sword forged during the First Age of Middle Earth by the High Elves of Gondolin, later retrieved from a troll hoard by Thorin Oakenshield," says Stephenson.
"It’s not every day that someone turns up at your house bearing a mythic sword, and so I did what anyone who has read a lot of fantasy novels would: I let them in and gave them beer. True to form, they invited me on a quest and asked me to sign a contract (well, an NDA actually)."
Stephenson goes to mention that Sir Richard Taylor – founder and head of WETA Workshop – is a member of Magic Leap's board of directors, which as Stephenson puts it, explains the Tolkien-ian swords."Magic Leap is mustering an arsenal of techniques--some tried and true, others unbelievably advanced--to produce a synthesized light field that falls upon the retina in the same way as light reflected from real objects in your environment. Depth perception, in this system, isn’t just a trick played on the brain by showing it two slightly different images.
"Most of the work to be done is in applied physics, with a sizable dollop of biology--for there’s no way to make this happen without an intimate understanding of how the eye sees, and the brain assembles a three-dimensional model of reality. I’m fascinated by the science, but not qualified to work on it. Where I hope I can be of use is in thinking about what to do with this tech once it is available to the general public. "Chief Futurist" runs the risk of being a disembodied brain on a stick. I took the job on the understanding that I would have the opportunity to get a few things done."
Stephenson points out that Magic Leap isn't just designed for gaming. Although he's been a fan of "two-dimensional figments moving around on flat screens," he's also aware of the potential Magic Leap has, and that the tech doesn't need to be pigeonholed to just video games.
"What applies to games applies as well to other things of interest, such as making the world safe for books, doing new things with science and math visualization, and simply creating art for art’s sake."
We'll be sure to keep you updated as more details regarding Magic Leap become available.
Wesley Copeland is a freelance news writer, but you probably already guessed that. For more obvious statements, you should probably follow him on Twitter.