Magic Leap has announced they are acquiring Computes, a decentralized mesh computing startup. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

From Magic Leap’s blog post:

From the beginning, Chris Matthieu and Jade Meskill started Computes, Inc. based on the principle of enabling the next generation of computing. We believe Magic Leap is the perfect home to achieve this vision

Why would Magic Leap want to get their hands on this company? Well, it’s no secret that building a “digital layer” on top of the real world is more than a little compute-heavy; mesh computing offers an attractive future for leveraging the power of grouped systems to push resources to the devices that need it most.

The company’s website does a not-so-great job of explaining what exactly they do, but here’s a blip from one of the company’s whitepapers:

The Lattice protocol allows authorized computers to self-organize into a mesh computer, limited only by the number and power of the members. Lattice will intelligently allocate work to the best members of the mesh, based on the requirements of the task.

This is an interesting idea for AR headset systems, where eventually most of them may be in standby on average and could theoretically push their compute power to another system. Perhaps more likely is offsite PCs with beefy internals offering the headsets a punch. On the far less sexy side, this could also just be a play for the startup to drill down some of its backend services.

If you’re still curious about what they do and are interested in some even more mildly dubious explaining, check out this video from Computes’ CEO, which only mildly resembles a video from the Dharma Initiative.