Op-Ed
October 20, 2014
Welcome to Magic Leap
I remember when I first discovered diving underwater. I was just a kid, pestering my parents to let me dive...
I remember when I first discovered diving underwater. I was just a kid, pestering my parents to let me dive, please please please, until one day I had a mask. It filled with seawater every once in a while, and it was just a child's snorkeling kit – but to me it was a portal to a new world: vivid, alive, so very real and so present.
Tiny jeweled fish would swim right up to me, peering into the thin glass wall that separated me from them. The world was an awesome place to have great adventures (and yes, I did dive with sharks and barracudas, but that is another story for another day).
I also remember a few other places where I found a new place, a deep ocean to discover: in films, in books, in comics, in art, and in computing. Great movies could transport you to whole new worlds and universes. Books, comics, and art meant creative freedom. Computing meant total personal freedom with technology: I could create something new and share it with my friends. Machines had a language. Science and physics could make sense when put into action with computers. Of all these new things, it was always the real world that was the most magical and amazing. An encounter with a horse on a farm, being with an eagle and her nest at Cape Canaveral, and kayaking with a pod of dolphins in the Florida Keys. Fireflies at night bested any display.
I realized what the real world could give in abundance, our past and current technologies lacked: visceral experience. Being with your friends, seeing a tree, watching a butterfly land on your finger – all of these require direct interaction with our senses. Our media and computing today is separate from us. We watch television, we read books to understand the real or imagined experiences of others. Playing videos games can be awesome, but it can also lack the immediacy of playing football in the mud, or of building a snow fort with your friends. I wondered for many years what it would take to close the gap, to integrate and synthesize all of the things I love. Why couldn't visceral experience combine with computing? Why can't I see a dragon? Why can't computing interact us with us more naturally, like the real world?
Magic Leap was founded on an idea: that computing and technology should bend to us, to our needs, to our humanity, and to our experience. People should be first. Technology should serve us. Computing should match human experience, it should respect human physiology.
Computing can feel like everyday magic, and it can feel much more human, much more like our world. Our mission is to deliver on this dream, so that people can benefit in new ways from the power of computing, from the possibilities of being connected, sharing, and knowing.
We are also working hard to make video game experiences in our system really freaking cool. I love working with Graeme Devine – he understands that a new medium requires new thoughts on game design, new SDK tools. I want Magic Leap to become a creative hub for gamers, game designers, writers, coders, musicians, filmmakers, and artists.
We also have the possibility to positively transform the process of education. To change how we design things. To make our communications feel real. How we shop. How we create. How we discover each other, and how we can explore completely new worlds.
Magic Leap is in the very beginning of its journey. We are reaching out to application developers, to artists, and to musicians. We are meeting with major production companies, but we are just as excited when we meet a single developer, dreaming big dreams.
The world at times can be hard and cynical. But every generation deserves its chance to dream again, to dare to fly to the moon. The world today can be frightening at times, but the promise of a good life is always there. It takes creative thinking. It takes open minds. That is where we are going. I hope that you can join us.
—talk to you soon,
Rony
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