Aside from potential investors and advisers, few people have been allowed to see the gear in action, and the combination of funding and mystery has fueled rampant curiosity.
That astounding sum is especially noteworthy because Magic Leap has not released a beta version of its product, not even to developers. To date, investors have funneled $1.4 billion into it. At the beginning of this year, the company completed what may be the largest C-round of financing in history: $793.5 million. In the past year, executives from most major media and tech companies have made the pilgrimage to Magic Leap’s office park to experience for themselves its futuristic synthetic reality. Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and others followed. Because of this lead, money is pouring into this Florida office park. Magic Leap is not the only company creating mixed-reality technology, but right now the quality of its virtual visions exceeds all others. (The goggles are semitransparent, allowing you to see your actual surroundings.) It is more difficult to achieve than the classic fully immersive virtual reality, or VR, where all you see are synthetic images, and in many ways MR is the more powerful of the two technologies. Virtual reality overlaid on the real world in this manner is called mixed reality, or MR. Subscribe to WIRED Sebastian Kim for WIRED These tiny people were obviously not real, despite their photographic realism, but they were really present-in a way that didn’t seem to reside in my eyes alone I almost felt their presence. I watched miniature humans wrestle each other on a real tabletop, almost like a Star Wars holographic chess game. I could shoot them with power blasts from a prop gun I really held in my hands. I saw human-sized robots walk through the actual walls of the room. I saw other things with these magical goggles. And in this prototype headset, created by the much speculated about, ultrasecretive company called Magic Leap, this alien drone certainly does seem to be transported to this office in Florida-and its reality is stronger than I thought possible. This, of course, is one of the great promises of artificial reality-either you get teleported to magical places or magical things get teleported to you. If I reposition my head just so, I can get the virtual drone to line up in front of a bright office lamp and perceive that it is faintly transparent, but that hint does not impede the strong sense of it being present. It is a virtual object, but there is no evidence of pixels or digital artifacts in its three-dimensional fullness. Intellectually, I know this drone is an elaborate simulation, but as far as my eyes are concerned it’s really there, in that ordinary office. I’m seeing all this through a synthetic-reality headset. It looks as real as the lamps and computer monitors around it. All the while it hums and slowly rotates above a desk. I step back across the room to view it from afar. I can see polishing swirls where the metallic surface was “milled.” When I raise a hand, it approaches and extends a glowing appendage to touch my fingertip. Bending closer, I bring my face to within inches of it to inspect its tiny pipes and protruding armatures.
I can squat to look at its ornate underside. I can walk around it and examine it from any angle. Inside, amid the low gray cubicles, clustered desks, and empty swivel chairs, an impossible 8-inch robot drone from an alien planet hovers chest-high in front of a row of potted plants. There is something special happening in a generic office park in an uninspiring suburb near Fort Lauderdale, Florida.