By most measures, Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz is eccentric. He once gave a TEDx talk in which he dressed up as an astronaut and came onstage with two fighting apes and a human-sized candy bar labeled “Thwaxo’s Strangely Demented Space Fudge.” He recently backed out of the main TED event, the most prestigious tech and design conference in the world, at the last minute, without explanation. And he compares his publicity strategy for Magic Leap’s secret augmented reality device to the Lord of the Rings films, saying, “In the beginning of The Hobbit, you saw Smaug’s eye, and then maybe you saw a tail at some point, but you didn’t see Smaug until you entered the second movie.”
Many believe that the technology Abovitz is working on—along with a handful of competing virtual reality rigs—could usher in the next big change in how we use computers. (Abovitz calls it “cinematic reality—a complete shift in visual computing.”) The ability to place sensors everywhere and process the volume of data they produce, coupled with advances in computer vision, makes it possible to create better immersive environments (as we saw with the debut of the Oculus Rift last year) and believable layers of digital images on top of the physical world (demo’d earlier this year by Microsoft with its Project HoloLens). Facebook and Microsoft have chosen to make their headset prototypes available as they engineer them, inviting outside developers to experiment with creating software for them. But Magic Leap, which claims to be using a different technology to achieve its effect, is keeping its efforts secret, releasing only the occasional short concept video to tease enthusiasts. “A little bit of reveal is important, but it’s also important for us to preserve the ability to perfect the device,” Abovitz says.
He pauses, then adds: “When we launch it, it is going to be huge.”
How does he know? Well, you’ll just have to trust him. And plenty of people who have seen the technology do. New Zealand design studio Weta Workshops has partnered with Magic Leap to build games (again, in secret). Science fiction superstar Neal Stephenson has signed on as the company’s chief futurist. And last fall, Google led a $542 million investment in the company, bringing its total funding to $592 million. That’s enough cash to recruit some of the best engineers in the field. Google’s powerful senior vice president of products joined the board.
It’s not clear when Magic Leap’s technology will be available for consumers, but Abovitz has some big ideas about how they’ll use it. He believes that one of the early uses of Magic Leap will be games. Eventually, though, the tech will infuse itself into every experience. “Imagine you are walking in China and all the billboards are in English. And at the restaurants, as the people are talking to you, there are live subtitles,” he says, explaining what the device will enable. “You don’t even realize you are in a computer; it’s just happening.”
The son of an artist and an inventor, Abovitz grew up on Atari and got his first computer, an early Mac, at age 8. In college at the University of Miami, he was a cartoonist who also threw the javelin and wanted to build rocket ships. “My dad and my mom convinced me to go into biomedical engineering, because they said astronauts going to Mars will need life support systems,” he says, describing his major as “accelerated med school plus electrical software computing and all different kinds of engineering.”
Abovitz plays music on the side and has an affinity for fantasy, especially sci-fi. “I grew up with Star Wars, not Star Trek,” he says, drawing a definitive distinction between types of geekdom. He was heavily influenced by the movie and has said the robotic surgical arms his first startup produced were like bringing the movie’s droids to life. In 2013, he sold the company, Mako Surgical, for $1.65 billion, turning his attention to the passion project he and his high school friend John Graham Macnamara, a trained physicist, had been batting about for a couple of years. That, of course, became Magic Leap.
Today, the company has offices in New Zealand, where Weta Workshops is based, as well as in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Mountain View, California, and Abovitz is hiring at a fast pace. Now he must make good on the concept videos he has sent whizzing about the web. While Abovitz may love fantasy, investors prefer reality.
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