Google May Lead $500M Round in Magic Leap Virtual Reality Tech

They got awarded $150k from DOD for:<p>Ultra-High Resolution Scanning Fiber Display for HMDs<p><a href="http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/415788" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sbir.gov&#x2F;sbirsearch&#x2F;detail&#x2F;415788</a><p><i>...Magic Leap is working to commercialize low cost, compact, high field of view, high resolution consumer wearable display systems.</i><p>A quick search for &quot;Fiber Scanned Display&quot; explains the technology:<p><a href="http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/mfabfiber/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hitl.washington.edu&#x2F;projects&#x2F;mfabfiber&#x2F;</a><p>If they are building a new kind of 3d display then this may explain why they need a lot of money. They cannot just buy an already massmanufactured display like Oculus is buying it from Samsung.

Here&#x27;s the video associated with the Nvidia paper on Near-Eye Light Field Displays linked elsewhere in the comments.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uwCwtBxZM7g</a><p>It gives a very clear overview of the concept and prototypes.

Best article I&#x27;ve seen so far talking about the technology: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/science/taking-real-life-sickness-out-of-virtual-reality.html?smid=tw-share&amp;_r=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;15&#x2F;science&#x2F;taking-real-life-s...</a>

A whole lot of money for a whole lot of buzzword but no information in sight... Magic Leap&#x27;s own website has even less information.<p>&quot;On Oculus Rift and pretty much every other virtual and augmented reality experience, what the viewer sees is flat and floating in space at a set distance.&quot;<p>I was under the impression that the Oculus Rift had full stereoscopic 3d? Either I&#x27;m wrong or this article is wrong.

I will be very surprised if this is true. I could see Google buying out something like TechnicalIllusions but my experience with super secretive folks is that the lack of additional eyeballs on the technology results in big gaps are discovered right when folks think it should be &quot;done.&quot;

To have realistic 3D technology you need to have 3 things:<p>1. Stereopsis - different image for both eyes.<p>2. Accommodation - ability of eye lense to focus on different distances.<p>3. vergence - eyes rotate slightly inward or outward so that the projection of an image is always in the center of both retinas<p>Modern 3d technology (movies, VR) provides only sereopsis without accommodation or vergence and vergence-accommodation conflict can cause headaches. You also notice that if you look at different part of the screen from where the movie camera is focused on, the image is blurry.<p>Conventional lens-screen technology (like Olucus Rift) can&#x27;t solve these problems. You need something new like light field technology or hologram technology. This is why hundreds of millions if not several billions are needed to develop this technology.

A more technical overview of what the article suggests they are building:<p><a href="https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications/NVIDIA-NELD_0.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.nvidia.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;publications...</a>

$500M sounds like a typo. That is absolutely unheard of for a stealth company. For reference, Oculus had a $75M round last December, and they had ignited an entire VR developer community. Uber had a record setting round earlier this year and raised $1.2 billion. But Uber is... well, Uber.

I&#x27;ve been following this company for about a month now, and following this technology (light field displays) for a few years. I think this technology will basically replace all forms of screens eventually; it&#x27;s just a question of timing. I&#x27;m annoyed I didn&#x27;t hear about this company earlier, because they&#x27;re based in my home town, but I just moved to California.

At $500M it isn&#x27;t an investment expecting a return, it&#x27;s money to block other companies buying it.

Anyone have anything concrete on what this is, how it works, whether it&#x27;s more than vapourware? On the basis of publicly available information it sounds a lot like ... nothing. Expensive nothing, for that matter.

From the looks of the website this may in fact be a next-generation hallucinogenic drug :). Seriously though, the technology looks interesting but I would be careful getting too excited about this. When lots of credible people put tons of money and hype into things....we get stuff like Clinkle and Segway and Color.

Seems like the next evolution step in VR. But developers are already struggling to constantly hit 70FPS for the Oculus, where they have to render two scenes. Rendering 35×35 different images per eye (albeit not the whole scene) will increase computation power significantly - so I guess it will take some time until this becomes possible with consumer hardware. In their paper they mention rendering the video with FPS ranging between 15-70, using a NVIDIA Quadro K5000 graphics card (which is a beast, selling for about 1&#x27;900$).

Right. Because as Clinkle has shown us, stealth companies raising massive rounds at gigantic valuations without any major traction works out well for everyone involved.

They have some very serious talent on their payroll. I noticed Yann LeCun (inventor of convolutional neural networks and head of Facebook&#x27;s new AI lab) congratulated Gary Bradski on the funding. If you&#x27;re not familiar with him, here&#x27;s his LinkedIn profile. <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/garybradski" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;garybradski</a>

Cool, but I&#x27;m very skeptical (at least if they purport to deliver the picture in the article).<p>Here&#x27;s an article discussing the pros&#x2F;cons of hard ar&#x2F;see-through ar:<p><a href="http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-ar-anytime-soon/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.valvesoftware.com&#x2F;abrash&#x2F;why-you-wont-see-hard-...</a><p>It seems like it&#x27;s still a very, very hard problem to solve.

Disappointed Google is going into AR (ok, ok - &quot;cinematic reality&quot;) rather than VR. AR is much more limiting than VR. With VR you can be &quot;anywhere&quot;. With AR, you&#x27;re in the same place - just with some stuff added on top. I&#x27;m sure AR will find its own killer apps, but I think VR has much more potential.

The list of Trademarks they have filed for is pretty informative.<p><a href="http://trademarks.justia.com/owners/magic-leap-inc-2603519/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;trademarks.justia.com&#x2F;owners&#x2F;magic-leap-inc-2603519&#x2F;</a><p>A lot of virtual reality comic book mash-up type stuff.

This might be some really cool technology, but $500 million rounds for pre-revenue, pre-real product, pre-publicly known companies is what happens when you&#x27;re at the end of the line for a funding bubble.

Wow, $500M is a huge investment. How many people work there right now and how many hundreds&#x2F;thousands do they expect to hire with that much money?

This story has the best and worst of the current SV environment in one.<p>On one hand, it&#x27;s amazing to see that the boundaries of technology are moving so fast that someone could come along a year after Oculus makes big news with something that might blow them out of the water (according to marketing hype).<p>On the other hand, $500M for an unlaunched startup with no users is crazy. That money could be stretched so far in so many ways and it&#x27;s being dumped into a company without a dime in revenue. There is clearly no attempt to be &#x27;lean&#x27;. It&#x27;s hard to believe that they really &#x27;need&#x27; $500M to develop this new tech, they&#x27;re not flying to space and they&#x27;re not pushing a medical device through FDA trials.<p>I guess the best thing to do is sit back and watch.

I read the article and watched the videos at the end. Is this just one elaborate troll?