Updated @ 13:10, October 21: This morning, Magic Leap confirmed that it has completed a $542 million second round of funding that was led by Google. Qualcomm and Legendary Pictures (the film company) also joined the investment round. This puts Magic Leap, which we still know almost nothing about, at a valuation well north of $1 billion. The original story is below.

Original story, published October 14

Google is getting into virtual reality. It was only a matter of time: With Google still looking for The Next Big Thing — and Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus VR, Sony’s Project Morpheus, and many other companies and startups taking a fresh look at VR over the last couple of years — it was forced to finally wade in. The target of Google’s affection is a startup called Magic Leap, a secretive company that is developing some kind of “cinematic reality” headset, which uses a “digital light field” to project ultra-realistic images into your eyeballs. Google is reportedly leading a $500 million funding round into Magic Leap, with Andreessen Horowitz as another possible investor.

Not a whole lot is known about Magic Leap, which was founded in 2010 by Rony Abovitz — a biomedical engineer who previously created and sold the robotic surgery company Mako Surgical. The website is devoid of any technical details, instead focusing on inspirational imagery and trademarked phrases such as “It’s time to bring magic back into the world.” As far as we’re aware, the New York Times is the only publication that has actually got some hands-on time with Magic Leap — but fortunately, its write-up includes a key phrase that tells us much of what we need to know its mysterious, magical technology: Magic Leap uses a digital light field to create “cinematic reality.”

Current head-mounted VR devices, such as the Oculus Rift or Project Morpheus, use two viewports (i.e. two displays) to create a stereoscopic 3D image. This is a simple, low-tech method that works fairly well, but at the expense of being quite bulky, and in many cases creating an unpleasant experience for the user — nausea, simulator sickness, and other forms of fatigue and discomfort are all associated with near-eye stereoscopic 3D. According to Magic Leap, using a digital light field rather than stereoscopic 3D fixes all of these problems.

Read: Virtual reality, the death of morality, and the perils of making the virtual ever more real

As far as we can tell, this “digital light field” is basically the same tech as used by Lytro or Pelican Imaging. Rather than each eye seeing one image each (as in stereoscopic 3D), an array of microlenses is placed in front of each display, so that each eye actually sees hundreds (or thousands or millions) of individual images. These microlenses, in effect, allow for much more information to be encoded into a scene — such as the direction and scattering of individual rays of light — creating a viewing experience that is much closer to actually looking at the real world. This allows for generally more realistic imagery, better depth cues (i.e. better 3D), and less neurological strain (i.e. less headaches, simulator sickness, etc.)

This video from Nvidia, which demonstrated its own near-eye light field displays back at Siggraph 2013, gives you some idea of how Magic Leap might work:

Clearly, though, Magic Leap is more than just some OLED displays with microlenses in front. Rather than virtual reality, Magic Leap says its technology will provide cinematic reality — or, to cut through the buzzwords, cinematic-quality augmented reality. In other words, while virtual reality creates an entirely new and separate world that is disconnected from reality, Magic Leap will allow for the insertion of high-quality virtual objects into real life. It isn’t clear how Magic Leap will do this. If the company wants to insert images directly into your view of the real world, then the most likely answer isn’t an OLED display, or even a transparent OLED display — it’s probably some kind of projector that beams light straight into your eye.

Unfortunately, Magic Leap hasn’t actually released any videos of what cinematic reality looks like — for now, all we have is a couple of “artistic impressions” of a shark floating in an office and a submarine hovering in a city, and this cute video of a child opening his hands to find a cinematic reality tiny elephant within:

According to Recode, Google is leading a $500 million funding round into Magic Leap. There’s no details on how much of the company Google is expecting to pick up, but $500 million is a very large investment for a second round (Magic Leap raised $50 million in venture capital earlier this year in its first round). When you have about $60 billion in the bank, a few hundred million is a small price to pay for future proofing against novel technological startups that might one day threaten your fat profits — especially when other players, such as Facebook, are getting in on the action as well.

Google has been interested in augmented reality for a few years now, first with Ingress, then Google Glass, and most recently Endgame. Considering Google’s almost unique position as the gatekeeper between the digital world (the world wide web) and reality, it makes a lot of sense for the company to delve deeper into technology that brings those historically immiscible realms closer together. Google is very much the portal to the digital world — and with a compelling augmented reality experience, delivered via some kind of wearable and/or head-mounted computer, we could carry Google with us out into the real world as well.

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