Google plans to invest heavily in a secretive company called Magic Leap. The company makes both hardware and software that work together to create a photo-realistic user interface called cinematic reality. According to a recent report, Google is leading what could be a $500 million round of funding. At the moment we know very little about Magic Leap’s forthcoming products and the technology behind them. We don’t know if they’re at the point where it has been productized. It should be pointed out that Nvidia has tried out some of their technology in the past but without any real results so far.
Magic Leap has been around for a few years and this investment suggests that we might finally see an actual product coming from them at some point in the near future. As for the cinematic reality, this technology in fact looks pretty much identical to augmented reality. The CEO of Magic Leap has given a few interviews regarding the technology and in all of them he uses hyperbolic phrases about how this is much superior to everything that has come before. This is the reason why the company coined a brand new term, namely cinematic reality. Still, it does just seem to be a new approach to doing augmented reality with a cinematic quality to it.
The first few people who have experienced demos have reportedly been completely blown away by them. Magic Leap is apparently able to achieve two things that are very interesting, one of them being very high resolution augmented reality imagery and the other is that they are able to place is very precisely. That combination could actually be very powerful and one can imagine some sort of headset that is somewhere between the Oculus Rift and Google Glass. A device such as this would presumably give you a view of the actual reality with something superimposed on it.