TL;DR :

Magic Leap is a secretive startup based in Florida.

The author describes his experience interacting with, among other things, an 8-inch robot drone, which seems, but is not real - it's rather a simulation made visible by a VR kit. VR overlaid on the real world is called mixed reality (MR).

He saw other things with these magical goggles, and they looked very real.

Magic Leap is not the only company creating MR technology, but it's the most advanced, as proven by several notable investors, including Google, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, which poured 1.4 billion dollars into it so far, while the company has not released a beta version of its product yet.

All major tech players have whole groups dedicated to artificial reality, as well as 230 other companies, working on hardware and content. The author has seen most of them.

The expectations of Virtual Reality are very high - the Matrix, the Metaverse, the Oasis. The author experienced VR first in 1989 with Jaron Lanier in California, exploring a virtual world with him through a special glove. He named it Virtual Reality, and all the elements were there: head-mounted display, glove tracking, multiperson social immersion.

Mass market VR was not imminent, though, mostly because of high costs. Thank to smartphones, the cost of many components - gyroscopes, screens, CPUs - has shrunk now. In fact, in 2012, Oculus Rift launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund a VR headset prototype, and was then acquired by Facebook for 2 billion dollars in 2014.

Lanier estimates that you would have needed a million dollar in 1990 to achieve what you can achieve today with a smartphone.

Virtual reality is creating the next evolution of the Internet, an internet of experiences - experiences that feel genuine, even if they are simulated, because of two things: "presence" (objects seem to be real), and (a personal feeling of living an) "experience".

This will lead to a Wikipedia of experiences, such as traveling, or terror at the edge of an erupting volcano, or shared experiences. Kent Bye, founder of the podcast "Voices of VR", says that VR talks to our subconscious mind.

The author mentions a great subconscious experience with "the Void" at the 2016 TED conference. The three co-founders have experiences with stage magic, a theme park, and a haunted house, and mixed them to create "the Void".

You wear a 12-pound vest, you roam free in a large room, and navigate an Indiana Jones-like adventure. You have the illusion of a larger space in which to move around thank to a trick called "redirected walking" and redirected touching. Stairs, as an example, can be made to feel endless if they drop down as you walk upward.

Most VR headsets today also include "dynamic binaural" - 3D audio, which is more than stereo, which is fixed in space. This also helps prevent motion sickness.

Good VR also includes touch, as Jason Jerald, author of what people call the VR book, says. Most VR kit use controllers, as gloves are not sufficiently advanced yet.

Magic Leap is the most impressive on the visual front.

Founder Rony Abovitz was a misfit enthralled by science fiction and robots, with a career in biomedical engineering. He is warm, casual, full of ideas.

In 2008 his company, Mako, went public, and sold in 2013 for 1.65 billion dollars.

He then invented a whole fictional world on another planet, called Hour Blue, and hired Weta Workshop, a special effects house, to build it, and in 2012 he did setup a company to develop this immersive world: Magic Leap.

Abovitz saw Artificial Reality as part machine, part flesh, tricking the brain to created a "chain of persuasion". He then proceeded to build a display to realize it. Displays put at 1 inch from your eyes don't offer a good illusion of focus; Magic Leap's solution creates the illusion of depth in a convincing way.

Still, competition for Magic Leap is formidable, such as Hololens by Microsoft, or Meta.
All three project images onto a semitransparent material; for Magic Leap, pixels disappear - for example when watching a movie in it. You can have browsers flouting around as well: Hololens, in fact, wants to replace the various screens in a typical office. At Magic Leap, instead, they will soon abandon desktop screens altogether in favor of virtual displays, even at the company itself, within a year. Famoous movie director Peter Jackson agrees: VR can be a virgin territory to tell stories, and he finds Mixed Reality more exciting than VR.

It could be a form of education, entertainment, and tourism, and in ten years MR devices can be used more than smartphones.

Blockbuster MR and VR worlds will require the highest level of world-building. Weta is working with Magic Leap to develop a small virtual world called Dr. Grordbort’s, based on sculpted ray guns, an effort led by Richard Taylor.

Artificial Reality will need world builders like Taylor and Jackson to invent the grammar of VR and MR.
In tests with volunteers, Microsoft's Minecraft developers discovered that performing the same role in VR - the so-called "you-person view" - feels far more intimate than it does in first-person on a flatscreen, and emotionally taxing. A break is often needed within an hour.

The best experiences for the author had a strong social element.

The "bat-flinch" test tells you the quality of VR: If you stood next to someone who was holding a virtual baseball bat and they swung the bat at you, would you duck?

But a better test for VR is the poker game test: do you feel sufficient subtle eye contact, body language, and social presence that you can tell if they’re bluffing?

The author visited an Oculus demo at Facebook’s campus, and Palmer Luckey, Oculus’ creator, joined in, and his avatar had the same body language in a demo called Toybox.

Very soon, perhaps in five years, the bounded worlds within virtual reality will begin to be networked together into distributed virtual worlds. Magic Leap (among others) is working on protocols that save a mapped "real" place in the cloud so it doesn’t have to be remapped for each encounter.

The computing needs for this should not be underestimated.

Every virtual world is potentially a total surveillance state.

This comprehensive tracking of your behavior inside these worlds could be used to sell you things, to redirect your attention, to track your interests.

The familiar puzzles of this data collection will occupy us as a society in the near future.

The creation of a global artificial reality is an enormous project, and its adoption will start slowly.

Chris Dixon, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz who led his company’s early investment in Magic Leap, thinks VR will follow the flywheel effect: sluggish to start, then nearly unstoppable.

There’s no getting around the fact that everyone looks like a dork wearing a head-mounted display - same problem that Google Glass and the Segway had.

Physical safety for VR headsets is also a concern, while MR can mitigate the problem.

The VR industry is waiting for its Doug Engelbart to invent the equivalent of the mouse.

Nearly all of the non-movie VR experiences uploaded to date were created using a computer-game engine from either Unity or Unreal - both of which have demoed a VR version that permits users to make VR in VR.

The author had a lot of fun in VR using an app called Tilt Brush, purchased by Google, with which you can paint in 3D and view it with your headset.

His aha was that at its root, VR is as much a creation tool as a consumption tool.

Fame awaits the genius who figures out the elegant VR interface for VR creation.

Right now the field of view in mixed-reality devices is too narrow.

All mixed-reality systems labor under a second challenge that VR systems don’t: lighting should keep the illusion that a given object is real - a weak link in the chain of persuasion.

It’s hard to overstate the benefit of wearing a lightweight device that is not tethered to a fixed location.

Most engineers working on VR mention one of two books: Snow Crash or Ready Player One.

At Magic Leap, Abovitz hired Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, as chief futurist because “he has an engineer’s mind fused with that of a great writer.”

Stephenson compared the challenge of VR to crossing a treacherous valley to reach new heights. He admires Abovitz because he is willing to “slog through that valley.”

It’s too early to know what virtual reality is or what it will be. The real way to the future might be biology.

Not immediately, but within 15 years, the bulk of our work and play time will touch the virtual to some degree.

Only a few companies will dominate the VR networks because, as is so common in networks, success is self-reinforcing.

After a long gestation, VR is good enough to improve quickly. It’s real.

end of TL;DR.

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