This technology will change everything! A look into Magic Leap
What is Magic Leap?
If you haven’t been paying attention to tech news or investor news for the past year plus, this will be an exciting development for you. If you have, you’re well aware of the powerful new technology that will very soon be available to us as consumers, customers and also to designers and developers. The technology I’m talking about is currently being developed by a company called Magic Leap. The company name stems from the concept of creating the leap from reality into virtual reality, augmented reality and a term coined by the founder of the company called mixed reality. From the Magic Leap website, in their first blog post, they say:
Magic Leap 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. Our 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.
The company has raised $1.9 Billion and there has been a lot of hype and expectation for what they create. A week or so ago they unveiled their first product, Magic Leap One, which is a set of goggles and small computer that allow “digital and physical to come together and make life better.”
Mixed Reality
This term is new to most of us following tech news, but it is a very important one. The company Magic Leap has the goal of bringing mixed reality to all of us in the most fun, creative, useful and important ways in the future. The main difference between augmented reality and mixed reality seems to be that augmented reality can be perceived to be fake, different, juxtaposed, while mixed reality attempts to fuze the technology into reality so seamlessly that it looks real and feels natural. According to our very trustworthy Wikipedia source, mixed reality is:
the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time.
How this really works
Instead of a typical virtual reality headset, which hides the real world from the viewer in order to create a new world, the mixed reality of Magic Leap One allows the viewer to see the actual world around them through the glasses, but it allows for the digital world to be superimposed in very interesting ways within the world we can see. This is done through what Magic Leap calls the “Digital Lightfield”. The Lightfield attempts to camouflage the technology behind it so that the brain interprets what it sees as reality and nothing short of that. There is a real science behind how we perceive the outside world through sight that Magic Leap is attempting to understand, capture and utilize:
Lightfield is “[…] the photon wavefront and particle light field everywhere in the universe. It’s like this gigantic ocean; it’s everywhere. It’s an infinite signal and it contains a massive amount of information.”
The diagram above documents how Magic Leap uses an LCD "occlusion mask" to block light in the real world exactly where light from the goggles will be displayed. This will minimize the visual effects looking superimposed, instead they should look more realistic.
Here’s a quick demo
Source
Why it’s Important for the future
There are numerous applications for this technology, some seem to be pure entertainment (as virtual reality seems to have been limited to) and others seems to be very useful. The augmented reality and mixed reality aspects of Magic Leap start to become incredibly inspiring when you start thinking about how it might “make life better”.
This means that we can have 3d products that we can view by spinning them around in our bedroom before making the purchase from an ecommerce stores. Or we can have working models of the solar system floating in our living room or used to teach in a classroom. Or we can tour an unbuilt building by looking at a 3d model of the building and of the interior, while also receiving data about the square footage, amenities and fixtures on screens that float next to us.
The technology will improve the experience, understanding and information gathering of many different industries, even those that don’t seem very much connected to tech. Imagine walking around at the zoo, seeing an elephant and being able to get more information about the particular animal you’re looking at by pulling up species history and you could even have the ability to see that animal again in your yard or even in the palm of your hand later, moving in 3d.
Source
I can’t wait to use this technology with personal projects and with clients. I know it’s been extremely hyped for a long time, making Magic Leap very controversial with investors and skeptics, but I’m going to try to sign up for the developer account as soon as it’s available. There are so many great uses for this, I think it will easily pay for itself relatively quickly if it’s built as advertised and accessible to us normal people.
What do you think? Would you use this? For what?
Ciao for now, Steemians.
- Weston (aka @design-guy)
I'm still unsure whether magicleap will really live up to its expectations. In particular, believable head tracking is really really hard and suspension of disbelief drops very quickly when stuff starts floating or jumping around unnaturally.
On the other hand - if they're all they claim to be, this will be pretty fabulous to use, and very fun to develop for, like back when 3D graphics rendering on regular PCs started getting really good.
Yeah I agree with everything you said. If it works as advertised it’ll be huge
ufff .. mamma mia
it seems like they used somethin like it, with michael jackson concert
Honestly so excited about Magic Leap. I've been following since they started receiving massive amounts of investments. It's going to be a complete game changer if it is as good as the sources say. It makes me (and I guess everyone) skeptical because of how secretive they are, if it was working as intended wouldn't they shout it from the rooftops?
It looked totally different than I was expecting. I guess I had a super minimal version of this in my head was probably wishful thinking. Hopefully, the first version will be released on time earlyish in 2018 and not be any more expensive than the VR rigs.
Thanks for the post, new here on Steemit and looking around for interesting people to follow.
Yeah, I completely agree. We can only hope for so much futuristic tech at one time. But I'm hoping that this proves to be a primarily useful technology that can be adopted by normal people and not just some expensive toy that doesn't help anyone. I'd hope that with all of their talk about improving our daily lives that this will be taken seriously. I'm really excited to try it and start brainstorming applications for the technology though.
Welcome to steemit by the way! I'll check out your stuff.
Great article about this new technology. Too impressive to be true ?
I actually don't think so. I think it will exist and be very utilized in the next year or two.
Can this make me an imaginary friend that I can actually see?
Hahaha yes! We can make an app for that
Hi @design-guy,
Just came by to show some support. Yeah, I've been following magic leap since it was hush-hush over a year ago and all the big players came in to invest 1 Billion.
I didn't know investment went upto 1.9B. The buy behind it is some sort of genius inventor, will be impressive to see if this can dominate the market in the next 5 years.
I wonder what would be the biggest social draw for this besides games (and porn I suppose), any thoughts on that?
I don't think social will be the big impact if there is a big impact. I think it will be lots of little things like I described. Teaching in schools could be a huge one - spinning around the solar system or even looking into the human body from circulatory system to organs to bone structure. It could be with simulating trying on clothing for ecommerce stores or swapping out different colors and material finishes in a build your own car website. And also just for information gathering when walking down the street and wanting to know more about the empire state building or if a store has any sales in your size, etc. These are all things that people have talked about and I don't know if this first model will be even close to accomplishing any of this, but I think that at some point this is where the technology will be heading and how it will be useful.
I think I'm.... scared and excited in roughly equal measure!
Augmented reality is definitely the future. Can't wait for it to be mainstream
So I played a little with the Hololens, the MR headset from Microsoft (without a little computer on a wire). And it is fun but still pretty useless. As long as these lenses aren't build into normal glasses or contacts, it won't become mainstream and useful. Can't wait till that happens though.
I think that’s one of the biggest issues. In reality people aren’t going to be wearing things things and carrying around a mini computer. But we already do carry around a little computer, so when you think ahead a few years it’s not crazy to think that there could be Bluetooth connected contacts that are operated by a smartphone or something like that.
Sure, calculating power on your phone, visualisation on the glasses/lenses. That would work. But speed of bluetooth could currently be an issue here. The video stream has to be send & analysed and the overlay had to be send back. If here is some sort of delay that that the human notices...it's a no go ;) But it will happen...some day!
Hi!
Just wondering, has it met your expectations? Now, that it is available, it seems to me, that Magic Leap is quite a disappointment...
What do you think?