What the hell is Magic Leap doing? 

 Comments about their technology:

“I’m not sure what the category will be called,” Tull says when I ask him, “but it augments and brings you into a world in a completely realistic, immersive way without taxing your eyes or brain.” Jacobs also called Magic Leap “immersive and engaging.”

       “It’s not holography, it’s not stereoscopic 3-D,” he says. “You don’t need a giant robot to hold it over your head, you don’t need to be at home to use it. It’s not made from off-the-shelf parts. It’s not a cellphone in a View-Master.”

       
 “The space program had Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions, and we’re in our Apollo phase,” he says. “We know that space travel is possible. We’re in the middle of full-blown product development and commercialization.” So is there a goal date to land on the moon? “You almost got me there to reveal the date,” Abovitz says with a laugh. “It’s very near term. But although we’re trying to deliver on a certain date, we’re also trying to achieve an ‘Oh my god, I feel like I’m a kid again” experience.'”


  “Holy Crap!” moment with his own technology when they got their first pixel to float in space sometime in late 2011 or early 2012.



 “It’s so badass you can’t believe it, David. It’s one of the few things I’ve ever experienced in my life where I came out and said, ‘This changes everything. This is a marker of the future.'”


comments from qualcomm article:
https://qualcommventures.com/so-badass-you-cant-believe-it-magic-leap-raises-542-million-to-launch-the-future-of-computing/


Rony Abovitz, a biomedical engineer who founded Mako Surgical, a successful robotic surgery company, before creating Magic Leap in 2010, said that his system would even offer a resolution close to the power of the human eye.

from NY Times article  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/science/taking-real-life-sickness-out-of-virtual-reality.html?_r=0

"When you see this, you will see that this is computing for the next 30 or 40 years. To go farther and deeper than we’re going, you would be changing what it means to be human."
Abovitz


"It is going to be transformative technology, there's no doubt about that." 
Prof. Brian Cox TV physicist

The experience will "disturb" audiences and put them "off balance", he predicted. "That's what it did when I saw it demonstrated."

from http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-30056232



"beyond the current perception of mobile computing, augmented reality, and virtual reality".
 "We are transcending all three, and will revolutionise the way people communicate, purchase, learn, share and play."  Abovitz




Rocketship for the mind

“I’ve seen the technology, it does work,” said Poots. “I watched the blood from my tech director’s face drain – he went white. It must be like when people went from radio and suddenly there was television.”




Rony Abovitz' crazy TEDx prophecy

10 reasons why Virtual Retina Contact Lenses would be awesome

1  You wouldn't even notice throughout the whole day that you 

    wearing a device - what makes it officially a brain interface

2  Power consumption would be super low - compared to 

    a 100 Watt TV the lenses would only consume sth like

    100 microWatts. Thats a million times less.

3  AR/VR will be everywhere as long as you carry a mobile

    computing device with a potent battery

4  As they incorporate relatively few electronic components

    and weigh as little as 100milligramm they could in theory

    be very cheap 

5   You could wear them while playing a new fancy AR sports

     game outdoors

6   Virtual illusion is perfect since you don't notice

      anything of a headset 

7   They could  scan your retina for pathogenic abnormalities

     as part of early diagnosis

8   Your brain will receive visual input even if you close 

      your eyes! 

9   If you have a bad sleep they could calm you by projecting
     anti-bad-sleep hypnosis

10  Education will be awesome again!

Virtual Retina Contact Lens Display

This blog is about propagating a new concept of a Virtual Retina Contact Lens Display that might evolve in the not too distant future.
It is a completely visionary concept without being already invented or engineered in any manner.
But it should be pointed out that all technological components of that imaginary design already exist in real reality though need yet to be heavily customized, configured and concerted in an overall engineered product.
Furthermore it has yet to be found out if it could work in that perfect way every VR/AR enthusiast would like to function it.
Namely projecting perfect holographic imagery onto the retina via collimated laser light with the widest field of view possible without the laser itself occluding any part of the perceived FOV the brain receives of the real world.
Therefore the laser that the VRD contact lens would incorporate would need to be very small, in the range of a few microns, much like the size of a single red blood cell (8µm). So would have to be a few micro mirrors that would scan the laser beam in a very fast mode over the entire retina.
But as 8µm+ is also the size of a very small dust particle and normal contact lens wearers have thousands imperceptibles of them nevertheless on the surface of the lens it is to estimate that a device component of a VRCLD that would sit somewhere in the center of the pupil wouldn't be noticeable at all for the brain.
Whereas already proposed concepts of contact lens displays in the past that would make use of tiny LEDs invisibility would be highly questionable once those would contain several million LEDs. It wouldn't serve the user as an AR display in any useful manner because the whole real world FOV would then get occluded.
For VR it could certainly be useful though it would nevertheless not be easy to focus millions of incoherent light sources onto the retina properly.
A contact lens inhabiting one or a few very small sized lasers and micro mirrors instead therefore would be the better solution, also because one wouldn't need to take off the lens once the user decides to leave VR.
Regarding the device in detail, the structure of the VRCLD itself would be fairly simple.
A laser diode with dimensions of 10x10 microns sits somewhre in the center of the lens pointing perpendiculary to the vision axis into the curved plane of the lens.
An optical waveguide leads the light to a micro mirror sitting a few hundred microns next to the diode. The mirror then projects the beam perpendiculary onto the retina in scanning mode.
For power a circle antenna sitting on the outer edge of the contact lens collects
a few hundred microWatts via electromagnetic radiation in the low Ghz band while a nanowire leading from the antenna to the laser transmits them. Also, the nanowire will because of its size be impercepeptible to the brain. Maybe it would need an opac coating as metal tends to be very visible
once it reflects light in the right angle and also because the wire for it length represents yet a very long object.
Besides that there has to be an electro optic modulator between light source and mirror 
that would modulate the desired holographic light fields that get projected onto the photoreceptors of the retina as well as a high bandwidth wireless connection for receiving the image itself from another computational device.


To be continued.....

60 GHz wireless chip from Georgia Institute of Technology

some useful background knowledge to understand how this could work in detail:

How our Retina works