Magic Leap: Core Technology and Patent

The new mysterious virtual reality startup Magic Leap, who raised one of the largest VC round in history led by Google.

For the first time, Magic Leap finally spoke out about their core technology, and go-to market strategy in a recent interview by Voice of VR with Magic Leap’s Senior Technical Director, Paul Reynolds. Please click on below image to listen to the full interview.

The company is not yet ready to release a consumer version into the market just yet, and do not have a firm date when they might be releasing their product. Currently they are more focused on recruiting game developers to create highly interactive real-time 3D experiences.

Magic Leap do not consider themselves as either AR or VR company, rather they deliver virtual content into the real-world via the light field. One of their huge strength is in making people feel like a virtual object is really there, rather than teleporting people into a VR experience.

The goal for Magic Leap is to provide a user-friend developer platform, looking to support any game engine available in the ecosystem. There they are not locked into any particular platform, rather they want to support 3rd party development as much as possible.

Below are some highlights from the Podcast interview, you can listen to or read the entire transcription of the Podcast here.

Our ability to put virtual content into the real world. What we firmly believe is that the reality that we see is the function of the model-making function in our the brain!

Our brain is the highest-resolution renderer you’ll ever have. …. Everything our eyes do is they basically scan the light field to create signals for our brain to help it render what we see for us. We feel like that if we can create a digital light field that is similar to how we process the real world, we actually untap the power of the model-making function of the brain, basically tapping into perception.

“Magic Leap is a really interesting place to work in, especially from an engineering perspective because we have incredibly complex and diverse engineering effort. So you’ll see job postings open for optics, opto-mechanical, embedded software, which is like firmware and drivers, mechanical engineering, perception and machine learning, all across the board”

“Because we’re putting virtual content in the real world, everything we do is real-time 3D”

“I think anything AR gets unfairly judged as non-immersive, which I can firsthand testify that there can be extremely immersive experiences in an optical view-through experience.

“One of our strengths is that it’s a really powerful moment when you see virtual content really close, and it feels even more that it’s there instead of getting more blurry or lower resolution.”

“I really like the idea that the best UI is not the one that’s in your face, and that the user interaction only interacts when you’re ready for it. And so one thing we’re pretty — in our design-thought — We don’t want to be this Time Square, heads-up display, head-locked display in your face all the time. Really if you’re not using it, it’s not in your face.”

Mysterious Magic Leap Reveals Latest Patent Drawings

Magic Leap raised one of the largest VC rounds in history, a 542 million round of series B funding led by Google as well as tier-one VCs. Co-investors include Qualcomm, Legendary Pictures, Andreessen Horowitz, Obvious Ventures, and KPCB.

The Company claims to have made a realistic version of virtual and augmented reality, which it calls Cinematic Reality. However, very few details about the technology were revealed.

Here we take a look the most recent patent drawing by the company.

Publication date: 2015-01-29

Patent application number: 20150032823

Patent application title: SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR AUGMENTED AND VIRTUAL REALITY

“One embodiment is directed to a system for enabling two or more users to interact within a virtual world comprising virtual world data, comprising a computer network comprising one or more computing devices, the one or more computing devices comprising memory, processing circuitry, and software stored at least in part in the memory and executable by the processing circuitry to process at least a portion of the virtual world data; wherein at least a first portion of the virtual world data originates from a first user virtual world local to a first user, and wherein the computer network is operable to transmit the first portion to a user device for presentation to a second user, such that the second user may experience the first portion from the location of the second user, such that aspects of the first user virtual world are effectively passed to the second user.”