A reprint of 2012’s Magic Leapers: Welcome to the Experience Magic Leap
Secretive augmented-reality start-up Magic Leap is partnering with online comic book publisher Madefire to deliver mixed reality comics to Magic Leap’s devices when they launch.
Includes controllers, built-in mic and headphones
The news sort of snuck out during a Friday night New York Comic-Con panel with a deliberately vague name: “The Future of Comics in New Realities.”
The venue and its low-key, late night setting isn’t too surprising given Magic Leap’s love of secrecy and mysterious history with the tech it has been quietly working on for more than half a decade. Despite having not launched, or really shown publicly, any form of its technology, Magic Leap continues to plug away at reinventing the way the world will one day view reality and is currently said to be valued north of $4 billion.
In an unusually public move this week, the executive creative director of Magic Leap and the senior vice president of Magic Leap Studios traveled to New York City to host a panel on the new partnership with Madefire and what that new partnership means for comics, story-telling and Magic Leap.
While the news didn’t include any new word on when Magic Leap will finally unveil or release its technology to the public, what form that tech will take, or how much it might cost, it does offer a sense that perhaps the company is preparing to pull back the veil, even a little bit. Or as one Magic Leap executive told Glixel, “We’re on the launchpad and there’s a rocket.”
Madefire
Founded in 2011 by Ben Wolstenholme, Liam Sharp and Eugene Walden, Madefire’s history with Magic Leap is almost as old as is the company.
Where today Madefire is the highest rated app for viewing comics and a service that empowers creators to not just port their comics over to a digital space, but add motion and sound, in 2012 the company was still establishing itself.
An important stop on that journey was New York Comic-Con and, it would later turn out, that 2012’s New York Comic Con was important stopping point for Magic Leap too.
The tech company was at the show that year, testing the waters for what would become its deep investment in mixed reality, but doing some from behind a smokescreen of colorful mascots, a comic book and an embarrassingly stark booth.
The idea, Andy Lanning, Magic Leap’s executive creative director, tells Glixel was to see what people would want to experience in mixed reality and to see what people were thinking about that sort of technology.
So Magic Leap descended on New York Comic-Con without an office, product or anything to publish. They set up a booth, free of the show’s ubiquitous bring-your-own carpet, lined the walls with posters and piled up t-shirts and a run of a one-off comic entitled “Magic Leapers: Welcome to the Experience.” They told the curious that they were working on a secret tech that would change the world and dazzled them with furry mascots and the offer of “space fudge.”
During their time at the show Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz happened to make made his way over to Madefire, drawn by both the company’s approach to reimagining comics and its hunt for modern mythology.
Where Magic Leap is working to create a technology that hopes to seamless blend virtual reality and reality in a scene mixed into a person’s real world, Madefire was working to give life to the static page of the comic book and discover new story-tellers.
It helped that Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz was already a big fan of comics, he even tapped the comic book industry for two key roles in his growing company: DC and Marvel writer and inker Andy Lanning and Marvel freelancer illustrator Ant Williams.
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The Magic Leap booth at NYCC 2012 Magic Leap
“Rony sat down with me one day, told me what Magic Leap was and what he wanted to do and I said, ‘Why do you want a comic book guy?’” Lanning told Glixel during a meeting at the Madefire booth prior to the Friday night panel. “And he said, ‘You create worlds and characters and I want worlds and characters that people want to see.’ People don’t buy devices because of the graphics cards and electronics it has. They buy Nintendo because they want to play Mario Kart and Mario has a universe that lives beyond that device.”
Abovitz was so taken with Madefire’s vision that he invited Ben Wolstenholme, Madefire’s co-founder and CEO, down to Florida to check out Magic Leap’s technology first hand. The results lead to a partnership and Friday night’s surprising announcement.
Magic Leap
“We started hanging out with Rony in 2012 after we had launched,” Wolstenholme tells Glixel. “These guys were cooking up this idea for Magic Leap and we thought they were mildly insane.”
Wolstenhold says he was cynical about the pitch, the idea of a sort of technology that could essentially weave created images into the fabric of reality.
“I was politely cynical, I am British,” Wolstenholme says. “My co-founder Liam Sharp has known these guys for his whole career and he convinced me to make the trip to Florida to see Magic Leap.”
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Mono Madefire
It was 2013.
When I ask Wolstenholme what he remembers of that first experience with Magic Leap he says that the prototype rig, the device itself, was much bigger than he expected and that the experience was “already coming through.”
The visuals were surprisingly solid, “unghosted” as he puts it. “My brain was rendering what I saw as real,” he says. “It was just in the room. I was expecting a lot less, a ghosted image that would not feel very convincing, but it was very convincing.”
The device, he said, was about the size of a double refrigerator and to use it Wolstenholme had to put his head inside the device.
Once he did and experienced what Magic Leap had to offer, Wolstenholme was immediately won over. “We’ve been working together ever since,” he says.
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In March, Wolstenholme had a chance to return to Magic Leap’s headquarters in Florida and show Abovitz what Madefire-powered comics look like inside Magic Leap.
The experience so impressed Abovitz that he later tweeted about how surprising it was.
“There’s something about hanging out with comics and being able to experience them at your own pace that is very hypnotic,” Wolstenholme says.
Elephant
To just about every journalist covering technology, virtual reality and augmented reality, Magic Leap sounds like it could a classic long con, an endless development-cycle powered by increasing large investments by the likes of Google and Alibaba. Even its official description – Magic Leap is said to use the same lightfields that a person’s brain uses to understand reality, which makes its own virtual creations indiscernible from the real world – seems like both magic and that believing in it requires a leap of faith.
Except.
Except, for the people who have quietly come and gone from Magic Leap’s Florida offices, each impressed with tech demos they can’t talk about. Except for the people the secretive company has managed to hire. And there are a lot of them, close to 1,500 today, according to Ant Williams, senior vice president of Magic Leap Studios.
“We started with 12 people,” Williams says. “Now we’re heading toward 1,500, with about 800 in Florida and the rest in Santa Monica, Sunnyvale, Boston, Texas, Israel, the UK and Belgium.”
The idea that 1,500 people, among them notable artists, developers, game makers, NASA physicists and holographers are all in on the con, seems unlikely.
The company simply won’t show the tech publicly, even while acknowledging that simply explaining what it can do doesn’t do Magic Leap any justice.
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Source: Rolling Stone