Florida Company Making “Magic Leap” in Virtual Reality

March 24, 2015 – Watch the video put out by Magic Leap and you get a sense of where augmented virtual reality is taking us. This Florida start up has gotten some very big companies interested in its potential led by Google and Qualcomm. Their most recent investment – $542 million U.S. announced back in October.

In a blog posting from October of last year, written by Rony Abovitz, founder and CEO, (seen in image above), he writes about his first experience diving underwater using a snorkeling kit and the incredible sensation he experienced peering through that thin-glass portal at an alien world. This combined with his fascination with computing technology and film became the inspiration behind Magic Leap.

He states the company “was founded on an idea: that computing and technology should bend to us, to our needs, to our humanity, and to our experience.”

In fulfilling that goal the company is designing technology that makes virtual feel real whether playing a video game, learning about a new subject, exploring an alien world, or shopping online.

Abovitz has yet to produce a product but the company is already valued at $2 billion U.S. His team, as he describes it on the web site, consists of story tellers, rocket scientists, artificial intelligence gurus, software ninjas, computing hobbits, movie freaks, mathematical artists, whole-earthers, psychedelic physicists, music lovers and people people, all dedicated to “dreaming big dreams.”

That dream is all about creating a world of augmented and virtual reality, some call it cinematic reality, to create images indistinguishable from real objects. In his words the end products will deliver computing that can “feel like everyday magic….much more human, much more like our world.”

This is not Abovitz first new business. His background is biomedical engineering and he along with partners founded Z-KAT, a company that developed computer-assisted robotic surgical systems. Abovitz and his partners struggled to get the company to stay afloat but stuck to their dream. Eventually Z-KAT was acquired by another company, MAKO who took the technology successfully to market. MAKO was acquired by the med-tech company Stryker in 2013 for $1.65 billion U.S.

It is this past success and the daring to dream the dream that has made Abovitz the darling of Google and Qualcomm and they are betting big on his vision.