The enigmatic Magic Leap captivated the tech world’s imaginations when they managed to score huge funding, including an investment from Google, and proceeded to squirrel away to work privately. Details on what they may have been working on have always been incredibly scarce, but recent patent filings and promotional videos have made it clear that their flagship product would have something to do with extremely advanced augmented reality, not unlike Microsoft’s Hololens project. Founder and CEO Rony Abovitz took the stage at Thursday’s Business Wired Conference to announce that the firm’s first production line activities are going to be happening over this summer.
The company’s long-awaited and highly anticipated main product seems to be very close to completion, if the company will be ready to begin production as soon as this summer. While Abovitz did not spill the beans on just when the product may be ready for consumers or how many they plan to make in the initial run, but he did unveil a new video of Star Wars droids C-3Po and R2-D2 interacting in a real-world environment and casting a hologram onto a coffee table, created in conjunction with Lucasfilm and ILMxLab, saying that the three would begin engineering new entertainment experiences together in the future out of a lab in California.
The video is made to showcase Magic Leap’s “mixed reality” technology, and is shot entirely with Magic Leap’s equipment, giving a good idea of what using their first product will be like. In the video, the two “lost droids” walk about a room sharing lamentations and expressions of general panic while paying close attention to the position of objects around them, showing that they were situationally aware. This could be, at least in part, what Magic Leap was working on in relation to A.I. for robotics. In any case, the two extremely realistic hologram bots proceeded to walk up to a nearby coffee table and project a less convincing, movie-accurate hologram of a map onto its surface. The video was short, but did a rather good job of showing off how far Magic Leap’s tech advances the AR field.