Virtual and Augmented Reality: The Next Age of Computing?

Tim Bradshaw via the Financial Times:

Despite the potential competition, Magic Leap (the augmented reality startup already valued at $4.5 billion with massive investments from Google, Warner Bros and Alibaba, among others) likes to use Apple as a yardstick.

“We think of this as the birth of a new medium, like Apple computers in the late 1970s and early 80s,” Rony Abovitz, who founded Magic Leap in 2011, told the FT this week. “We are really opening up the surface area of human experience with computing. A text feed is not my normal interaction with the world. The computer needs to bend itself to you.”

This is very ambitious but extremely exciting, potentially opening new paradigms for computing and experiencing the world around us. Here’s the latest demo from Magic Leap:

This part of the article intrigued me further:

That uncertainty provides fertile ground for entrepreneurs. “There will be billion-dollar companies started by college students because someone gave them a Rift as a present and they solved a very specific problem,” says Anjney Midha, a partner at KPCB Edge.

The most legendary of technologies not only create value from what it produces but also allows others to create value and new technologies on top of its platform. Picture Apple with the iPhone and the App Store, Google with the Play Store, Amazon with AWS—that’s essentially what Magic Leap wants to be with its augemented reality, but on a playing field completely different because it’s beyond software we interact with on screens.

Bonus: Here’s a more in-depth article on Magic Leap from MIT Technology Review. Pretty mind-blowing so I won’t spoil it.