Magic Leap recently announced that Rio Caraeff, former president and CEO of Vevo, has assumed the role of the company’s Chief Content Officer. Like many recent hires at Magic Leap, the first order of business is usually to explode somehow.
Rio Caraeff served as president and CEO of Vevo since he co-founded the premium music video platform back in 2009. He’s now responsible for the development, operations and business management of Magic Leap’s cloud-based ecosystem and media network. Of course, Caraeff had a chance to try out the company’s mysterious lightfield display, a technology that supposedly creates an unparalleled augmented reality view.
Thus far the only thing to come out of the company—beyond a concept video showing an extremely ambitious experience—is an unparalleled level of hype, with newly NDA-clad employees only retaining the ability to gush about how incredible Magic Leap’s technology is.
“My head exploded when I first experienced what the Magic Leap team was working on,” said Caraeff. “It is certainly the most exciting development in media and technology that I’ve ever seen…”
Hype meters are off the charts already, but at least we can take solace in the fact he didn’t say “literally exploded.”
Magic Leap has been stealthily working on the yet unrevealed augmented reality wearable since before its $524 million Series B funding round led by Google back in October 2014. Reports from recent hires such as Snow Crash (1992) author Neal Stephenson, who stepped into the role of chief futurist back in December, called Magic Leap’s lightfield display “mind-blowingly awesome,” while VP of Games Graeme Devine said it was “absolutely incredible.”
An MIT Technology Review encounter with the tech revealed that the smallest of their prototypes displayed “a crude green version of the same four-armed monster that earlier seemed to stomp around on my palm.” This was however 6 months ago, so we don’t know exactly what sort of advances have taken place in the meantime. The company has no less than 100 open job positions on their “Wizards Wanted” page.
