Magic Leap
A Leap Into the Future

What is augmented reality? New generation gamers would think of Pokemon Go, an augmented reality (AR) mobile game of collectible imaginary critters that blends AR with real-world scenarios. AR is especially popular in filmmaking, having helped Hollywood storytellers recount adventures for a very long time and will probably continue to do so in the future. Steven Spielberg, one of the founding pioneers of the new Hollywood era, showed us Tom Cruise embracing AR in the future with aplomb in 2002’s Minority Report. In the movie, the Golden Globe-winning actor had information delivered to him in a three-dimensional computerized space in mid-air and AR adverts on shops offering him choice items. While the sci-fi flick was set in the year 2054, AR elements shown in the movie are happening much quicker than Spielberg envisioned.

In a bid to display tantalizing glimpses of the near future, Magic Leap, an innovative AR startup, unveiled Magic Leap One, a premium augmented reality headset that seamlessly blends the digital and physical worlds, allowing digital content to coexist with real-world objects and the people around. The futuristic headset combines a user’s inherent visual ability with mobile computing – giving visual output equivalent to real-world experience but powered by mobile tech. The technology that sets Magic Leap apart is their Dynamic Digitized Lightfield Signal (Digital Lightfield), which generates images indistinguishable from real objects and places those images seamlessly into the real world.

One of the biggest names in augmented reality hardware, Magic Leap burst onto the scene with some of the most dramatic demonstrations of the possibilities for augmented reality technology several years ago. Based in the U.S., Magic Leap creates new hardware and software to present its users with a never-before-seen AR experience, redefining how they access screens and visualize data. Magic Leap’s proprietary wearable technology of the same name enables users to interact with digital devices in a completely visually cinematic way.

More than What Meets Eye

Magic Leap is the future of wearables, smartphones, and computing, all fashioned into the Magic Leap One. Magic Leap One’s unique design and technology lets in natural light waves together with softly layered synthetic lightfields. Both the real world and virtual light rays initiate neural signals that pass from the retina to the visual part of the brain, creating unbelievably believable experiences. Inspired by human physiology, Magic Leap One makes the unreal feel real.

 

There is more to the Magic Leap One prototype than meets the eye. The company’s Lightwear glasses, a LightPack computing platform with a dedicated hand remote, is touted as a portal into worlds within a world. Its cameras, sensors, speakers, and optical relay work in unison with the superpowered processor in the Lightpack to provide unique input to a user’s visual system for unparalleled experiences. Magic Leap One is a brush that paints on the canvas of retinas with light as the medium.

Behind the Scenes

Rony Abovitz, CEO of Magic Leap, had his light bulb moment when, as a grad student, he would haunt SIGGRAPH, a computer graphics convention in the early 90s. The SIGGRAPH conference is an annual gathering that showcases projects from the world’s leading professionals, academics, and creative minds at the forefront of computer graphics and interactive techniques. Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, visual artist, and composer famous for creating the “data glove,” and Bran Ferren, Disney’s then- VR guru, were pushing the edge of what could be accomplished with the bulky technology of the time, and they showed it off at SIGGRAPH.

In the following decade, Abovitz ventured deeply into the world of VR, exploring every VR system in reach as a possible robotic surgery visualization solution. His vision was for Magic Leap to be an amazing solution for healthcare systems to put to rest the long suffered problem of screen pollution, where physicians are forced to look away from the patient to check for pertinent information on a monitor.

It was after Stryker Surgical’s acquisition of Mako Surgical, Abovitz’ surgical robotics firm, when his idea for Magic Leap began to coalesce. Having always been more interested in the movie world, Abovitz iterated his ideas about spatial computing with artists, filmmakers, authors, engineers, and friends, as he refined his vision into reality. Magic Leap’s staff includes names in the likes of Neal Stephenson, American writer known for his works of speculative fiction such as Snow Crash, and John Gaeta, the brains behind the mind-bending visuals of The Matrix, both huge inspirations for Abovitz.

Into the Magicverse

A major concept of Abovitz’ visionary manifesto, other than the Magic Leap One, is the Magicverse, a “real city that would never cease to be a blueprint of the future.”

 
“The Magicverse is an “emergent system of systems” bridging the physical with the digital, in a large scale, persistent manner within a community of people,” says Abovit z. One of the conditions to enable the Magicverse is the hundreds of billions of dollars of new infrastructure to create high-speed network and edge computing zones in modern cities across many countries. 5G, and what follows it, are major components of what feels like a new, spatial internet.

Magicverse is proposed as an open platform that is device agnostic, XR compliant, and IoT interoperable. Within the Magicverse, vehicles, devices, IOT, sensing, and spatial computing will combine to form ever-changing and growing capabilities and experiences for the inhabitants of a Magicverse – including those who may only appear as a digitally co-present. The Magicverse can provide massive economic amplifiers to communities around the world, erode space and time boundaries, and enable communication and work to occur in completely new ways, at fractions of the cost of current physical systems.

For the fulfillment of the dream of building Magicverse, Magic Leap has established and continues to establish strategic partnerships and alliances around the world. “We are leveraging what is being built, but by partnering deeply with others,” says Abovitz .

On Magicverse’s science fiction-like concept, Abovitz comments, “It’s like engineers who planned for us to go to the moon. Their imagination was captured by people who envisioned it years before.”

Bringing the Sea to Life

There is no real limit to what augmented reality can do to enhance existing forms of entertainment. Magic Leap is no different. With each Magic Leap Studios project on Magic Leap One, the company expands the ever-evolving potential of immersive experiences. Magic Leap premiered Undersea, an all-new room-scale, spatial computing experience for Magic Leap One, at SIGGRAPH 2019 in LA. Undersea brings a room to life with breathtaking, interactive underwater landscapes allowing users to relax and observe underwater life in a dynamically generated, coral reed biome. Distinct vistas and creatures, presented in a photo-real art style, provide an opportunity to feel a sense of presence and connection between the creatures, the environment, and the user.

With Undersea, one of Magic Leap’s goals was to use the capabilities of Unreal Engine 4 and Vulkan 3.1 mobile on Magic Leap One to create a visually compelling and immersive experience that pushes the graphical boundaries of spatial computing. The opportunity to work at the bleeding edge of what’s possible and pioneer on a brand-new platform is what motivates the Magic Leap team, and they wish to inspire other creatives to push the boundaries and explore alongside them.