Magic Leap’s Mixed Reality Goggles — the main riddle of the VR and AR industry

Ivan Zaytsev
Company VRT
Published in
4 min readJan 30, 2018

There are several heavyweights competitors in VR and AR sphere struggling for the audience — Facebook with the Oculus Rift headset, Sony with PlayStation VR, Microsoft with HoloLens, HTC and Valve with Vive … Someone has achieved significant successes like Sony, which sold over 2 million copies of PS over the year VR. But on the scale of the global gaming market (VR and AR are now mostly used in gaming), this result is not very impressive. However, everything can change dramatically with the advent of Magic Leap — points, thanks to which we will look at the world in a completely different way, as their creators promise.

Startup from Florida and its mysterious product

The company Magic Leap was founded in 2010 in Florida, USA by a successful entrepreneur Roni Abovits — his previous firm, medical startup MAKO Surgical Corp., he sold for $ 1.65 billion. At the moment, Magic Leap attracted from various investors about $ 1.9 billion. Among them — Google (in 2014, invested in the brainchild of Abovitsa $ 542 million), Alibaba, Qualcomm and a number of other “whales” of the IT sector. At the end of 2016, Forbes estimated Magic Leap at $ 4.5 billion. In 2017, $ 3 billion of investments were poured into the VR and AR spheres, half of the huge amount went to four players — Magic Leap ($ 502 million), Unity ($ 400 million ), Improbable ($ 502 million) and Niantic ($ 200). Why such an excitement and so impressive figures?

Magic Leap is working on a device related to virtual and augmented reality and at the same time going beyond their traditional understanding. The startup did not show the invention to the audience until December 2017. Brian Crescente, from Rolling Stone magazine was the one only journalist who got the opportunity to try the headset.

The company is selling device in a set — this is, in fact, Lightwear glasses, a Lightpack mini-computer and a controller with buttons and a touch zone. Lightpack looks like a CD player from the 2000s and is attached to the belt (as an option — hung on the shoulder), and the performance is not inferior to the MacBook Pro and gaming PC. The cable ties it to the headset.

The headset itself is a pure cyberpunk. Compact, light and with a futuristic design — nothing to do with the “well-fed” Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Commands can be given by voice and gestures. Adjustments are allowed in the forehead, temples and nose area, plus a setting for poor vision is available. The glasses are equipped with four microphones, six cameras (at a minimum), built-in speakers and a microcomputer supporting machine learning. The device is constantly being updated, and not the fact that the first buyers will receive it in the same form as on the advertising slides.

Magic Leap distinguishes between real objects and surfaces and remembers the location of virtual objects (if you put a virtual TV in the room — it will remain there, if you wish — at least forever). The scope of the headset is much wider than that of competing products. According to journalist Brian Crescente, meticulously studied the device, Magic Leap can safely not take hours, without experiencing discomfort.

Technical parameters are not disclosed by the authors. In general, they spent more than six years with the show of glasses to the general public, and their capabilities, by and large, are not really known. After the December presentation, the startup planned to come with his creation to the CES 2018 exhibition in Las Vegas, but eventually abandoned the idea. Such secrecy caused the media to suspect bad things — for example, back in 2016 the edition The Information wrote that in the videos demonstrating the work of Magic Leap, special effects are abundantly used. Roni Abovits agreed that not all the declared functions will be introduced into the final product — because of its miniature size.

There are a lot opponents of Magic Leap at the moment. Of those that are on the market today — say, HoloLens from Microsoft worth $ 3 thousand of the upcoming — Rokid Glass from the Chinese company Rokid that will be released this year. Developers Magic Leap keep in mind a price tag in the $ 1.5–2 thousand SDK for content creators with the necessary tools and documents will appear very soon. The consumer version of the headset will be installed in the market in 2019.

Magic Leap can dramatically change the attitude of hundreds of millions of people to virtual / augmented reality, becoming as irreplaceable as a smartphone. Online shopping, surfing Internet, meeting friends from the other side of the world — without taking off the glasses.

A similar revolution, a complete overhaul of the VR market, is being prepared by VRT World Team. We began with the launching of the virtual reality park in Moscow and intend to do the same in the United States, Europe and Asia in the next four years by selling franchise licenses for the parks. The second important goal is to launch blockchain-based marketplace for VR, which will bring together developers, users, cyber sportsmen and investors. To attract the necessary investments, VRT World helds ITO from February 27 until March 27.

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