A rapidly growing name in tech, Magic Leap, has broken ground on a new facility in Plantation, Florida. Much less cramped than its current digs, it is expected to house the company’s 200-plus Florida-based workforce with plenty of space to spare. This groundbreaking was made possible by donations from Google and a veritable who ‘s who of tech venture capitalists, reaching into the hundreds of millions.
Magic Leap has been notoriously secretive about its operations, but details have begun to surface over the past few months. The focus will be on wide-utility augmented reality, with use cases ranging from gaming to medicine and even shopping. The product has no release date yet but has been said to not be too far off. The fledgling company and its exuberant CEO, Rony Abovitz, are looking to revolutionize personal computing and have even claimed that their product should eclipse the smartphone as a concept, if not shift it into outright obsolescence. These ambitious words seem too big to fulfill, but the same has been said of many emerging technologies over the years.
Reading the company’s roster, one could be forgiven for thinking their ambitious claims are more than mere showmanship. The secretive assembly of minds contains individuals of just about every background, including game designers, coders, and artists. Most everybody on the team has an above average track record of excellence in their field. Suddenly, the notion of tons of large corporations and venture funds throwing insane amounts of cash at Magic Leap doesn’t seem so far-fetched.
At the moment, it’s difficult to tell what the future may hold for Magic Leap and its backers, let alone what their product approach will be and what degree of success, if any, they may be met with. The company’s closely-guarded secrets have been coming to light little by little and will presumably continue to do so in the months leading up to the release of the product. Obviously, the backers are likely to know things that the public does not. If Google sees a reason to back Magic Leap, it’s not hard to imagine the reasons they’ve found are very compelling.