Magic Leap

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Magic Leap logo

Magic Leap is a company that sells augmented reality headsets, mainly the Magic Leap 2, and previously sold the Magic Leap One. It was founded by Rony Abovitz.

Magic Leap became a foreign agent owned by companies outside of the U.S.A. It is majority owned by Saudi Arabia's government.[1]

Magic leap switched from light field to standard waveguide displays for the Magic Leap 1.

Magic Leap's address is 7500 West Sunrise Boulevard, Plantation, Florida.[2]

Magic Leap originally started as a music recording studio.[3]

Products[edit]

Manufacturing[edit]

Magic Leap partnered with Jabil to create a manufacturing plant in Guadalajara, Mexico.[4]

User Interface[edit]

Totems[edit]

A totem is a real-world physical item that can be identified using computer vision and used in an application.

Different types of objects would be identified differently and have different uses and projections based on their identities. For example small, rectangular blocks of wood, metal or plastic could be identified as "computer mouse". A user can move the object while Magic Leap tracks its position, speed and acceleration and feeds the information to its display.

Magic Leap could also project a virtual keyboard onto various surfaces.

Business[edit]

Rony Abovitz is founder of Magic Leap.

2011: Magic Leap began as Magic Leap Studios based in Flordia, U.S. It was initially making a graphic novel and a series of featured films. Rony Abovitz attended Comic-Con and released its first Virtual Reality app.

2014: Richard Taylor, co-founder of Weta Workshop, along with Neal Stephenson, science fiction writer, is working for Magic Leap.

February 5, 2014: Magic Leap raised 50 million dollars in Series A round.

March 6, 2014: Graeme Devine joined Magic Leap as its Chief Creative Officer & Senior VP Games.

October 21, 2014: Magic Leap raised 542 million dollars in Series B round from Google, Qualcomm Ventures, Andressen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Legendary Entertainment and Obvious Ventures.

December 16, 2014: Neal Stephenson, writer of Snow Crash, joined Magic Leap as the Chief Futurist.

June 1, 2015: Rio Caraeff, co-founder of Vevo, joined Magic Leap as its Chief Content Officer.

June 2, 2015: The Magic Leap SDK was announced and sign-ups became available on its website.

The Magic Leap headset was announced to utilize its own operating system built specifically for the headset.[5]

February 2, 2016: Magic Leap raised 793.5 million dollars in Series C round led by Alibaba. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, joined Magic Leap on its board of directors.

October 18, 2017: Magic Leap raised $502 million dollars in Series D round led by Singaporean investment firm Temasek.

Magic leap was developing in stealth mode starting in the year G2011. Magic Leap's goal was to create a near eye display system using light fields. The company has raised over 590 million dollars from Google, Qualcomm, Andressen Horowitz and other investors. On December 9, 2015, it was revealed that Magic Leap was raising $827 million dollars in a new round of venture funding.

Magic Leap generated a lot of buzz in the tech community.[6] Expectations peaked when it was announced that they had received a large amount of funding from Alibaba, Google, and others.

Trivia[edit]

A Magic Leap slide deck uses a photo of a PowerBook G3 "PDQ" model from Wikipedia.[7][8]

References[edit]