Startup Magic Leap is developing a wearable display it claims will deliver on the promise of augmented reality: overlaying information or game characters on what we see naturally, without causing eye strain. Instead of transporting you to a virtual world, Magic Leap’s goggles make you see virtual objects in your own world. (See “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2015: Magic Leap.”)
But the company is still keeping its technology largely under wraps, and only a few people, including an MIT Technology Review senior editor, have seen prototypes. Company representatives and people who have experienced the prototypes sound, to the cranky and the uninitiated, like adherents of a cult that practices ritual intake of hallucinogens and whose sacred texts are Star Wars and Snow Crash (whose author, Neal Stephenson, is the company’s chief “futurist”).
Last week on the stage of MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco, Magic Leap executives indulged in the company’s increasingly common hand-waving, talking about “special” photons and wizard-training school. They also let slip a bit of information suggesting challenges ahead as the company moves from prototypes to products.
CEO and founder Rony Abovitz said Magic Leap is making a light-field chip that relies on silicon photonics. Interviewed by MIT Technology Review editor in chief Jason Pontin, Abovitz said that the company has developed novel fabrication techniques and is using them on a pilot manufacturing line in Florida. Abovitz also said that the company is now “out of the R&D phase and in the transition to product introduction.”
They certainly have enough funding behind them. To read more, click here.