Magic Leap is a mystery. Parsing through their pre-factual, post-cool ad campaign leaves you with the impression that the brains at the company have created the next be-all and end-all of augmented reality devices thanks to an ingenious light field display technology; and as a curious onlooker, getting a peek of the $4.5 billion startup‘s tech will cost you exactly one non-disclosure agreement. Ok. Probably several. Now founder and CEO Rony Abovitz offers a bit more in his recent blog post entitled Creativity Matters, where he speaks about some of the changes coming to the company in 2017, and for what it’s worth, says it’ll be “a big year for Magic Leap.”
In Abovitz’s last update in late December, he reported the successful conclusion of the company’s first PEQ (Product Equivalent) built to their target form-factor, and says a bigger PEQ run will follow in 2017, which is said to “exercise [Magic Leap’s] supply chain and manufacturing/quality operations.”
Current units built by Magic Leap “are for engineering and manufacturing verification/validation testing, early reliability/quality testing, production line speed, and a bunch of other important parameters,” he says.
If you’re partial to artistic flair, Abovitz is happy to oblige in his latest blog post. I’ve condensed it down some here:
“Our first product is coming,” writes Abovitz. “My office in our new building is right next to a small model home we built, right smack in the middle of everything. A home where we can test how Magic Leap will fit into your life each day.”
“2017 will be a big year for Magic Leap. Enjoy the ride with us – it will be fun. Magic Leap is for the dreamer, the artist, and the wide-eyed kid within us all. But what we are building is no longer just a dream. It is very real, and we are way past the “is it possible stage”. We are not about building cool prototypes. We are scaling up so we can manufacture hundreds of thousands of systems, and then millions. That requires a level of perfection, testing, and attention to detail by determined professionals. We have made something that is small, mobile, powerful, and we think pretty cool.”
“Our photonics may be powered by a novel array of unique nano-structures designed by our otherworldly optics team. Our sensors and computing pack a lot of punch in a small package. But the experience you should have must feel as if it were powered by unicorns and rainbows (and we have had many of those here).”
Magic Leap has only shown video capture of their technology, the most recent of which announcing a partnership with Lucas Films’ ILMxLab to create an AR experience.