You may have seen this jaw-dropping clip around the internet and wondered who created this seamless piece of impressive augmented reality. The answer is a startup named Magic Leap whose technology has got the tech world buzzing.

Magic Leap Technology

Prepare to be wowed.

Founded by President and CEO Rony Abovitz,  Magic Leap is an eclectic group of visionaries, rocket scientists, wizards, and gurus from the fields of film, robotics, visualization, software, computing, and user experience who together specialize in human computing hardware, software, firmware, and development platforms.

They’ve been in the news lately for recently raising another $800 million in funding, which puts their valuation at a total of $4.5 billion as of early February. All this success at raising capital, despite the fact that no one has yet seen their actual product.

above:a demo that was shown last October at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJD technology conference

What they are said to be working on is a piece of technology utilizing their Dynamic Digitized Lightfield Signal™ (seemingly now referred to as Mixed Reality Lightfield), an optical display system incorporating a dynamic light-field display, namely glasses containing a method of projecting 3D images for viewing by the wearer of the glasses.

While we’ve seen ‘reality plus’ products such as Google Glass and Oculus Rift, the startup says they work on technology that differs from virtual reality in that its computer-generated images are layered on top of the real world.

Magic Leap’s marketing chief Brian Wallace told CNET that “Mixed Reality Lightfield is portable and has many multiple applications — including gaming — that are considerably broader. These applications can be applied both inside and outside the home and office.”

On their blog, Abovitz described the company and its philosophy as follows:

The company was founded on an idea that computing and technology should bend to us, to our needs, to our humanity, and to our experience. People should be first. Technology should serve us. Computing should match human experience, it should respect human physiology.

Computing can feel like everyday magic, and it can feel much more human, much more like our world. Magic Leap considers it their mission is to deliver on this dream, so that people can benefit in new ways from the power of computing, from the possibilities of being connected, sharing, and knowing.

Our technology can deliver experiences that are so unique, so unexpected, so never-been-seen-before, they can only be described as magical. It is able to generate images indistinguishable from real objects and then being able to place those images seamlessly into the real world.

Magic Leap is also working hard to make video game experiences in our system really freaking cool and to positively transform the process of education. To change how we design things. To make our communications feel real. How we shop. How we create. How we discover each other, and how we can explore completely new worlds.

The world at times can be hard and cynical. But every generation deserves its chance to dream again, to dare to fly to the moon. The world today can be frightening at times, but the promise of a good life is always there. It takes creative thinking. It takes open minds. That is where we are going. – Rony Abovitz of Magic Leap

I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly looking forward to whatever it is they are going to produce.

Magic Leap
information, stills and videos all courtesy of Magic Leap