Imagine for a moment glancing at the world around you, and seeing virtual images projected onto what already exists in front of your eyes. Imagine a completely interactive virtual world interspersed over your day to day life. This is a notion that belongs to the future, but the future is right now. The augmented reality platform known as “Magic Leap” announced Tuesday that they will be assembling a development kit, so that developers interested in pushing the development of their product can do so before it hits the market for consumers.
The magic behind the scenes of Magic Leap
Augmented reality is not a relatively new concept, nor is it a widely accepted one. Google Glass is an example of an augmented reality platform that never got to market before consumers became weary of being saturated with its premise. Essentially the user places the device (a pair of glasses) over their eyes, and the world around them becomes “augmented” with digital displays and overlaid graphics. This differs from Virtual reality such as the Oculus Rift platform which is completely immersive. Users can play games, view graphics, and interact with a separate virtual world around them without ever sequestering themselves from the real world. Magic Leap explains the idea behind Magic Leap and how it functions, “With our founding principles our team dug deep into the physics of the visual world, and dug deep into the physics and processes of our visual and sensory perception. We created something new. We call it a Dynamic Digitized Lightfield Signal™ (you can call it a Digital Lightfield™). It is biomimetic, meaning it respects how we function naturally as humans (we are humans after all, not machines). Magic Leap wants to move away from the rift created between human and the outside world due to technology, and hopes to enhance the experience of the world which already exists around us every day.
Why release something that isn’t ready for consumers?
In order to ensure that this augmented reality platform is the best possible product for consumers before it goes to market, the company has decided it would be best to release it through what is known as a development kit. This way there are already developers working with the product and creating usable mediums with which consumers will interact, and build the best possible community ahead of any potential release date. It’s not uncommon for a company like this to release a development kit ahead of the release date. Virtual Reality platform Oculus Rift released a similar development kit ahead of their release to market. Although the product will now be in the hands of developers, Magic Leap has nothing to worry about financially. They have already received more than 540 million dollars in funding from companies like Google, Kleiner Perkins, Qualcomm, and Andreessen Horowitz. The Magic Leap is large step forward in the way that we compute the company states, “It’s an idea based in the belief that people should not have to choose between technology or safety, technology or privacy, the virtual world or the real world.
Magic Leap wants to bring the elements of humanity into computing, and save us from the rift technology is creating in everyday life, but the first in doing so is putting the tools in the hands of developers who will determine just how far it will go.
"Magic Leap" Takes a Giant Step and Begins to Offer Development Kits
No comments:
Post a Comment