Magic Leap

Magic Leap
Information
Type	Augmented Reality
Creator	Rony Abovitz
Developer	Magic Leap (Company)
Devices	Magic Leap One, Magic Leap 2

Magic Leap is an augmented reality company founded by Rony Abovitz. It was started in South Florida around 2010 and operated largely in stealth, with the early goal of building a head-worn optical see-through display using light fields. The company raised more than $500 million in its first major rounds from investors including Google, Qualcomm and Andreessen Horowitz, and in total has raised roughly $2.6 billion. It released the Magic Leap One in 2018 and the Magic Leap 2 in 2022. After weak consumer interest, the company pivoted to enterprise customers in 2020, and since 2022 has been majority owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.

The company's headsets are optical see-through head-mounted displays (OST-HMD) that use a projector to direct light through a transparent waveguide lens into the user's eye, overlaying rendered imagery on the real world. Magic Leap promoted this approach, which it branded dynamic digitized lightfield signal, as different from the stereoscopic 3D used in opaque VR headsets such as the Oculus Rift. Like the HoloLens, Magic Leap's products are intended to blend computer-generated content with the physical environment rather than replace it.

Hardware

Magic Leap One

The Magic Leap One Creator Edition shipped on August 8, 2018 for $2,295. It was sold to developers and creators rather than to general consumers, and was initially available only in six United States metropolitan areas: Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle. The system came in three parts: a glasses-like display called the Lightwear, a small wearable computer called the Lightpack, and a handheld controller called the Control. Consumer sales were weak, and the device's cloud services and core functionality were retired at the end of 2024.

Magic Leap 2

The Magic Leap 2 launched on September 30, 2022 as an enterprise augmented reality headset, with a base price of $3,299 and higher Developer Pro and Enterprise editions. It is smaller and lighter than the original and offers a diagonal field of view of about 70 degrees and a per-eye resolution of 1,440 x 1,760, along with hand tracking and eye tracking. The headset was priced to compete with Microsoft's HoloLens 2 for professional and industrial use.

User interface

Totems

In its early concept work, Magic Leap described "totems": ordinary physical objects that its cameras and software could recognise and augment with virtual functions, rather than embedding sensors in the objects themselves. For example, a small block could be tracked and treated as a computer mouse, with its position, speed and acceleration fed to the display. The company also described projecting virtual interfaces, such as a keyboard, onto real surfaces. Computer vision and object recognition were central to these concepts.

Developer

The Magic Leap SDK was announced on June 2, 2015 during the MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital conference, with compatibility for both the Unity and Unreal game engines. Magic Leap built its own operating system for its head-mounted hardware; the Magic Leap 2 later moved to a platform based on the Android Open Source Project.

History

2011: Magic Leap began as Magic Leap Studios, based in Florida, U.S. It initially worked on a graphic novel and a series of feature films. Rony Abovitz attended Comic-Con and released its first Virtual Reality app.

February 5, 2014: Magic Leap raised 50 million dollars in a Series A round.

March 6, 2014: Graeme Devine joined Magic Leap as its Chief Creative Officer and Senior VP Games.

October 21, 2014: Magic Leap raised 542 million dollars in a Series B round from Google, Qualcomm Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Legendary Entertainment and Obvious Ventures.

December 16, 2014: Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, joined Magic Leap as Chief Futurist.

June 1, 2015: Rio Caraeff, co-founder of Vevo, joined Magic Leap as its Chief Content Officer.

June 2, 2015: The Magic Leap SDK was announced and sign-ups became available on its website.

February 2, 2016: Magic Leap raised 793.5 million dollars in a Series C round led by Alibaba. Alibaba founder Jack Ma joined Magic Leap's board of directors.

October 17, 2017: Magic Leap raised $502 million in a Series D round led by Singaporean investment firm Temasek.

August 8, 2018: The Magic Leap One Creator Edition shipped for $2,295 to developers in six U.S. metropolitan areas.

April 22, 2020: Magic Leap announced it would lay off around 1,000 employees, roughly half its workforce, and drop its consumer product plans to refocus on enterprise customers; founder and CEO Rony Abovitz attributed the cuts in part to the COVID-19 crisis.

May 28, 2020: Rony Abovitz announced he would step down as CEO.

July 7, 2020: Magic Leap named Peggy Johnson, formerly Executive Vice President of Business Development at Microsoft, as its new CEO; she began the role on August 1, 2020.

October 2021: Magic Leap raised $500 million from existing investors at a $2 billion valuation, well below its earlier peak valuation.

2022: Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund gained majority control of Magic Leap through a roughly $450 million deal, taking its ownership above 50 percent and the right to appoint four of the company's eight board directors.

September 30, 2022: The Magic Leap 2 launched as an enterprise augmented reality headset, starting at $3,299.

October 25, 2023: Magic Leap named Ross Rosenberg as CEO, effective November 1, 2023, replacing Peggy Johnson after the company's pivot to enterprise.

May 30, 2024: Magic Leap announced a strategic technology partnership with Google to supply transparent optics, eyepieces and manufacturing expertise for augmented reality devices; the collaboration covered display systems and optics and later extended to prototype glasses that serve as a reference design for Google's Android XR ecosystem.