Magic Leap: the five billion-dollar company that hasn’t manufactured a single product yet & is about to disrupt what we call reality. Unicorns anyone?

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• Our limbs are ours because we can feel them.
• We can feel WITH and THROUGH them.
• We can sense the sand and the water embracing our toes in the warm summer surf.
• We can touch the sleek texture of the screen as we frantically scroll down through myriad messages on our inseparable mobile devices.
• We can control our limbs big and small to do what we want them to do.
• Your index finger is you.
• Or at the very least, a part of you.
• As are your eyelids or the earlobes sheltering the inner workings of your auditory organs.
• That much we know, right?
• It is self-evident.
• Our very minds tell us so.
• In the case of organs we don’t control on a conscious level, it is safe to say that they are part of our “selves” because they are a part of our body.
• They carry our DNA.
• They grow with us and from us.
• They are born with us and they die with us.
• So to speak.
• Now, say you receive a kidney or a heart transplant from someone else.
• To what extent are you still 100% you?
• If as conventional wisdom has it we actually replace all the cells in our bodies every seven to ten years, to what extent are we one and the same self throughout our entire lifespans?
• Moreover, various out-there theories proclaim that a human is not a singular being but a seamless combination of multiple intertwined biologic entities functioning in unison.
• A product of billions of years of evolutionary synergy.
• Ok.
• Fringe theories aside…
• What exactly is the self then?
• Consciousness?
• Awareness?
• Control?
• All of the above?
• The self is the mind, right?
• What if the mind could be seamlessly expanded, extended and integrated with software to operate hardware?
• As in remote limbs and organs.
• There’s a company attempting to do this.
• And it seems to be very close to achieving it.
• It is not in Silicon Valley, for a change.
• It established itself in subtropical everglades of Southern Florida.
• Its name: Magic Leap.
• Here’s a company that has yet to manufacture, let alone launch, a tangible, marketable product.
• Which hasn’t stopped some seasoned tech analysts from valuing it at north of five billion dollars.
• Yup.
• That’d be a unicorn times five.
• Five thousand million dollars and it hasn’t sold a single item yet.
• The select few who have experienced Magic Leap’s soon-to-be-unveiled technology claim that the experience is so mind-blowing that it far exceeds the so-called “mixed reality” description: it is something like augmented reality, but richer and deeper.
• Only renderings of its soon-to-be launched device, christened to go to market as Magic Leap One, have circulated in the press.
• For those in the know, a better denomination for Magic Leap’s upcoming product is the more apt “spatial computing powered by a digital lightfield” which will allow the user to experience the world, real or otherwise, in a disconcertingly natural and intuitive manner, possibly blurring the lines forever between what’s real and what’s a figment of pure, unadulterated digital thin air.
• Just to give you perspective: MagicLeap has barely created a few prototypes of the contraption they expect to bring to every household in America and it has received over one point three billion dollars in funding from Alphabet and Chinese ecommerce behemoth AliBaba.
• Alphabet, should you ask, is the parent company who owns and manages Google, YouTube and the Android operating system for mobile devices.
• You can rest assured that these folks know a promising gadget when they see it.
• More so if they are willing to sink that kind of money into helping it come to fruition.
• Hey, Magic Leap does employ a sizable workforce, should you ask.
• Suffice it to say that it keeps close to a thousand employees crazy busy in two nondescript yet fiercely guarded locations.
• MagicLeap, by the way, happens to be the brainchild of engineering wunderkind Rony Abovitz, who, unlike Elon Musk, is famous for his secretive, reclusive and some say paranoid ways.
• Mr. Abovitz’s prior endeavor was Mako Surgical a company he founded and sold for a cool one point six billion in 2013 and is known for having had revolutionized orthopedic surgery through robotization.
• Started in 2004 and fully operational to this day, the company is a world leader in the manufacture and marketing of surgical robotic arm assistance platforms, most notably the RIO (Robotic Arm Interactive Orthopedic System) as well as orthopedic implants used by orthopedic surgeons for use in partial knee and total hip arthroplasty.
• Mako has over 300 U.S. and foreign patents and patent applications.
• The goal of using robots in medicine is to provide improved diagnostic abilities, a less invasive and more comfortable experience for the patient, and the ability to do smaller and more precise interventions. Robots are currently utilized for prostate surgery, hysterectomies, removal of fibroids, joint replacements, open-heart surgery and kidney interventions. They can be used along with MRIs to obtain minimally invasive biopsies. Since the physician can see images of the patient and control the robot through a computer, he/she does not even need to be in the room, or even at the same location as the patient. This means that a specialist can operate on a patient without either of them having to travel. It can also provide a better work environment for the physician by reducing strain and fatigue. Surgeries that last for hours can cause even the best surgeons to experience hand fatigue and tremors, whereas robots are much steadier and smoother.
• Anyhoo.
• Our reality is about to be disrupted.
• Again.
• Stay tuned.