Magic Leap debuted some footage of their mysterious tech at WSJDLive today, a yearly conference held by The Wall Street Journal featuring some of the biggest names in tech.
Update: A much better quality video was posted by Magic Leap after publishing this piece. It’s embedded at the top of this article – the original is kept here for context.
A video taken by Engadget senior editor Nicole Lee shows a robot hiding under a desk, which according to some imprinted text was “shot directly through Magic Leap technology on October 14, 2015. No special effects or compositing were used in the making of this video.” CEO and founder Rony Abovitz narrates.
Magic Leap has attracted over a half billion dollars in funding this time last year, and has since snapped up the likes of sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, former VEVO CEO Rio Caraeff, and programming legend Graeme Devine to name a few.
The company is currently building a digital light field projection display that according to everyone who gets to see it (and signs the required NDA), is the greatest thing since sliced bread. With their technology largely still under wraps up until now, we only had few concept videos that allude what could be possible with the company’s future AR headset.
In the video, we see a few interactions that may cue us into how far Magic Leap is on their journey to a consumer AR wearable. The little robot is accurately occluded by the table leg, which means machine vision is correctly ‘guessing’ where the real world object is in physical space, but the solar system presented in the next portion of the demo is clearly much less able to ‘stick in place’. The question still remains of how large the device itself is, and whether it can be worn like Microsoft’s HoloLens AR headset.
All these questions and more are sure to be answered in time, but just how long is still a matter of speculation. Abovtiz told Engadget that “We’re not ready to announce when we’re shipping, but it gives you a signal that we’re not far.”