The Reality of the Situation
Our Reality, as we perceive it, is quintillions of different interrelated chemical reactions per second that occur in the brain. These interactions are the biological process behind our senses. We are at a point now where Augmented Reality is able to overlay images on our phones with the real world locations, like Yelp’s Monocle. However, without Yelp, the restaurant is still there regardless if you are a Yelp user. What if you could interact with objects that weren’t really there? What is the next step in our interaction with our reality in the digital age? Enter Magic Leap.
CEO Rony Abovitz founded Magic Leap in Israel, before establishing its headquarters in the US. It still maintains offices in Herzliya and came into the world with a promise in the form of MR spectacles, which are a combination of VR (virtual reality) spectacles and AR (augmented reality) spectacles that can add entities to existing reality.
One Small Step for Man, One Magic Leap for Man Kind
Magic Leap is a South Florida Mixed Reality company that is the best-kept secret in Tech. CEO and founder Rony Abovitz says, “We are trying to blow away our inner eleven years old.” This technology is the merger of fact and fiction. Turning a blank wall into a movie theatre or turning an office breakroom into a dungeon full of monsters is just the tip of the iceberg.
Since 2011, this company has been working to change every facet of society. On their youtube channel, you can see footage of virtual planets orbiting our sun in an office space, and C-3PO and R2D2 walking around.
The mixed reality or augmented reality system could be seen in its elementary stages with Niantic’s PokémonGO. Where users could walk around their cities’ landmarks and see computer-generated creatures walking around on their smartphone screens. Magic Leap is taking this type of overlay to the next level.
Rony Abovitz and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver can be seen here discussing the future of viewing sports using this device. It would allow for a courtside experience from the comfort of a fan’s living room.
NBA Legend Shaquille ‘Shaq’ O’Neal wearing the Magic Leap Headset.
This level of disruption from a startup is groundbreaking. It’s no surprise that the shrouded company has raised $1.9 billion from the likes of Google, Alibaba, and Axel Springer. Advisory board members include Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, and Paul Jacobs from Qualcomm.
More recently Magic Leap has raised $794 million this past February, reportedly the largest C round in history. Their total raised so far is about $4.5 Billion.
Israeli Impact
In 2015, Magic Leap opened an R&D center in Israel to assist with the production of the photo-and in 2016 it acquired the Israeli company NorthBit, a software research company. CEO Gil Dabah and CTO Ariel Shiftan founded NorthBit in 2012. In March 2016, North bit announced that they had successfully hacked Android’s OS using the Stagefright exploit. This highlighted the risk of remote hacks on over 95% of devices running the software. This is Magic Leap’s first acquisition of an Israeli startup.
What’s Next for Magic Leap?
From Twitter, Rony Abovitz says he is ready to ship this year, but further down the line, the product will be changed dramatically.
In the coming years, magic leap will be able to use the high-speed 5G network that will allow for faster, more reliable, internet speeds that can hold larger amounts of data. This will allow Magic Leap to reach its true purpose. By harnessing the infinite power of the human imagination, Magic Leap will fuel the innovation for the next generation.