Google leads $542 million funding of mysterious augmented reality firm Magic Leap

VR or what we know as Virtual Reality, is become a growing business and startups working in the field keep rising each day like never before.

With Sony and Oculus leading the business, at least in the prototype manner, there is still places for a rising start, that’s what the Mountain View company tries to do.

Google is leading a huge $542 million round of funding for the secretive startup Magic Leap, which is said to be working on augmented reality glasses that can create digital objects that appear to exist in the world around you. Though little is known about what Magic Leap is working on, Google is placing a big bet on it: in addition to the funding, Android and Chrome leader Sundar Pichai will join Magic Leap’s board, as will Google’s corporate development vice-president Don Harrison. The funding is also coming directly from Google itself — not from an investment arm like Google Ventures — all suggesting this is a strategic move to align the two companies and eventually partner when the tech is more mature down the road.

“YOU’RE IN THE ROOM, AND THERE’S A DRAGON FLYING AROUND, IT’S JAW-DROPPING.”

Magic Leap’s technology currently takes the shape of something like a pair of glasses, according to The Wall Street Journal. Rather than displaying images on the glasses or projecting them out into the world, Magic Leap’s glasses reportedly project their image right onto their wearer’s eyes — and apparently to some stunning effects.

“It was incredibly natural and almost jarring — you’re in the room, and there’s a dragon flying around, it’s jaw-dropping and I couldn’t get the smile off of my face,” Thomas Tull, CEO of Legendary Pictures, tells the Journal. Legendary also took part in this round of investment, alongside Qualcomm, Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Obvious Ventures, among others. Qualcomm’s executive chairman, Paul Jacobs, is also joining Magic Leap’s board.

The eclectic mix of companies participating in this investment round speak to how broadly Magic Leap sees its potential. Its founder says that he wants the company to become “a creative hub for gamers, game designers, writers, coders, musicians, filmmakers, and artists.” Legendary, which makes films including Godzilla and The Dark Knight, is interested in its potential for movies. Google likely sees far more ways to put it to use.

The technology sounds like it could be an obvious companion to Google Glass, but for now the Journal reports that they’re not being integrated. Magic Leap declined to commented on what might happen down the road. Nonetheless, the investment in Magic Leap appears to be Google betting on augmented reality as the future of computing, pitting it in a fight against virtual reality competitors. Eventually, it’ll likely be facing off against Facebook’s Oculus Rift — the biggest name in VR right now, and one that Facebook was willing to pay $2 billion for.

Magic Leap also says that it may “positively transform the process of education.”

Magic Leap is run and was founded by Rony Abovitz, who previously founded the medical robotics company Mako Surgical, which was sold for $1.65 billion last year. The Journal reports that Abovitz has a biomedical engineering degree from the University of Miami. He previously made a bizarre, psychedelic TEDx talk involving 2001, green and purple apes, and a punk band. His new company, which has been around since 2011, is headquartered in Florida, so it isn’t exactly the typical tech startup out out of Silicon Valley. Aboitz says the location allows Magic Leap to recruit globally. It currently has over 100 employees.

“WHEN YOU SEE THIS, YOU WILL SEE THAT THIS IS COMPUTING FOR THE NEXT 30 OR 40 YEARS.”

Though Magic Leap’s product sounds like a pair of augmented reality glasses, Abovitz and his company dislike the term. Magic Leap brands its effect as “Cinematic Reality,” which sounds a bit cooler but doesn’t really mean anything just yet. “Those are old terms – virtual reality, augmented reality. They have legacy behind them,” Abovitz told the South Florida Business Journal back in February, after closing an initial round of funding. “They are associated with things that didn’t necessarily deliver on a promise or live up to expectations. We have the term cinematic reality because we are disassociated with those things. … 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.”

This is all something that Google is eager to view the results of. “We are looking forward to Magic Leap’s next stage of growth, and to seeing how it will shape the future of visual computing,” Pichai says in a statement. What exactly Google will do with augmented reality is still unknown, but, much like how Google has managed to control a great deal of mobile computing through Android, it’s been looking ahead to ensure that it doesn’t miss out on the next leap either. It declined to provide further comment on the investment.

Talking to TechCrunch, Abovitz says that Magic Leap should be launching a product for consumers “relatively soon.” There’s no stated target date for now, though, and it sounds like it still has some development to do.

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A doctoral student does the math on where his Wi-Fi is, and isn’t

If WiFi can track a heartbeat through walls, why can’t I get internet in my corner bathroom? Jason Cole was trying to figure that out too, but unlike me, he’s a PhD student in physics. So he mapped his own apartment and assigned refraction values to the walls (shown above), then applied so-called Hemholtz equations to model the electromagnetic waves. As detailed in his (math-drenched) blog, the best spot for his router was where you’d expect: directly in the center. Since that was out of the question, he was still able to get “tendrils” of internet by placing it in the corner of the apartment. His experiment implies that even in a distant room you could eke some connectivity by judiciously shifting around your laptop. Some commenters want him to turn his equations into a WiFi mapping web service — unfortunately, he thinks the idea is “unfeasible” due to the processing time and assumptions made.

 

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Swiss startup creates a wearable chair so you can rest anywhere

Most of the wearable gadgets getting people hot and bothered either strap onto your face or your wrist, but Swiss startup noonee has cooked up a little something that straps to your legs instead. Well, fine, maybe it’s not exactly little: in a bid to keep factory line workers more alert and more comfortable during their shifts, the five person team has developed a locking leg support device they call the Chairless Chair. Once you get strapped in, all it takes is a press of a button to get settled — the aluminum and carbon fiber frame holds whatever position your legs take and essentially becomes, well, an invisible chair.

The secret sauce here is a battery-powered dampening system eases the load on your lower back and legs by supporting the your body weight and directing it down into your heels. Noonee’s curious wearable is still firmly in the prototype phase (though Audi and BMW will soon take the thing for spin on its production lines) but if it works as well as the team says it does, expect every haggard commuter — or frenzied blogger cranking out stories at a trade show — to own one soon enough.

 

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How littleBits’ Lego-like kits might democratize DIY engineering?

What happens when you look to get more out of your engineering knowledge? For littleBits CEO Ayah Bdier, that meant making electronics and programming accessible to everyone, regardless of skill level. The company’s Lego-like smart toys can be used to build any number of things: from a simple blinking LED to a custom-built synthesizer or smart thermostat. And, as we found out, the company plans for its DIY modules to get even smarter. With those endless possibilities in mind, we caught up with the littleBits’ founder to chat “making” made easy, why gender has no role in tech and the future, DIY-connected household.

Before littleBits, you worked as an engineer. So I’m wondering how the idea of the Lego-like kits came about?

I’m an engineer. I have a background in computer engineering and then did my masters at MIT at the Media Lab, but I always wanted more out of engineering. I wanted to use it for creative purposes, to be able to make art or design, invent new products or the next big innovation. So I started to use electronics as a material, and wanted to make it accessible to other people to use the material in the same way, without having to become engineers or programmers themselves.

littleBits is really inspired by other mixed technologies that have started in the hands of experts, but then somebody came along and democratized them and they became accessible. Like 3D printing, for example, democratized manufacturing or object-oriented programming democratized software and game development. I wanted to do the same thing with hardware.

With littleBits, you don’t need any knowledge of building, hacking or programming, and you can make something that works in a matter of minutes. Is that ease of use something that has been a goal from the start, and has that been something you keep in mind as you develop new additions to the littleBits line?

Yeah, absolutely. The goal has always been to make the barrier to entry very, very low, so that it’s really easy to get started. It literally takes you seconds to get started and you can start building simple stuff like a blinking LED or a moving motor. Or very complex stuff like a wireless transmission or a radio frequency or make something programmable[.] But at the same time, after we built up the foundation of the library — the lights and sounds and sensors and motors and stuff — we started to raise the ceiling so that you can make complex things that are really intelligent that have timing and logic and hardware and software relationships. So the newest bit that we launched, the cloudBit, is a very powerful bit — it’s a little computer. And it lets you make anything internet-connected.

What was the spark that led to a collaboration with Korg for a music-making kit?

Since we started the company, we always wanted to make synthesizer bits. … We’ve always wanted to do it, but never got around to it. Then in 2012, I met Reggie Watts for the first time, and showed him littleBits, and he said it would be amazing if you could make little music synthesizer bits that people can make instruments and perform with. We were like: Well, we’ve always wanted to do that; we’ll get in touch with you if we ever do. And then a few months later, also incidentally, Korg emailed us and said we love what you’re doing and we’re huge fans, and we want to make a synthesizer kit with you. So we set up a sort or three-way partnership between us, Reggie Watts and Korg and put the synth kit together.

You’ve already touched on the cloudBit, but with that new addition, makers can build their own connected devices or even add internet to non-connected devices. How will that ability to “just add internet” change what littleBits are already capable of?

It means that you can recreate some of the most popular devices. For example, you can make your own Nest, Sonos or SMS-activated door lock. But this means also that you can create things that have never existed before, so you can make the next big idea. We’ve seen people make pet feeders and remote-controlled doorbells, and be able to build prototypes for an invention. We have an ego meter that someone made to display every time you get a like on your Instagram, so you can visualize your ego getting bigger. We see all kinds of things; some that are functional around the home and some that are just playful and inventive.

There are ways for teachers to get their students making things in the classroom. Could you elaborate a bit on how that specific initiative got started?

We have over 2,000 schools that are using littleBits, and to be honest, a lot of it was organic. We didn’t even have an education team. They just started purchasing them and using them as we started seeing it online. They used them in science classes to teach gravity or in math classes, arts and crafts … They used them in problem-solving and design-thinking classes — all sorts of things; it’s really all over the place.

We have these products that are made specifically for teachers. One is called the Workshop Set, which has 100 modules and it’s specifically optimized for running your own workshop with large groups of kids. We also have a Pro Library, which is a wall unit full of electronics that’s perfect for prototyping and workshops. They have it at places like Google X, Techstars, IDEO and a bunch of after-school programs and museums.

A cloudBit-enabled smart thermostat

Last fall, Google announced that they had teamed up with MIT, the Girl Scouts and others for the Made with Code program to inspire more young ladies to code at an early age. With you already lending a hand in the classroom, what’s your advice for young ladies looking to dive into making and programming?

I’m one of the mentors of the program and we did a video series that I was in. My advice really is to never look at any technology or any skill as being gendered. There is no “engineering is for boys and art is for girls.” That’s an obsolete, outdated and wrong statement. Really, I don’t believe that there are gender lines. I believe that everyone is different. Some people like art; some people like math; and some people like both. And disciplines are really dead. It’s really about looking at the intersection of disciplines.

“My advice really is to never look at any technology or any skill as being gendered. There is no ‘engineering is for boys and art is for girls.'”

My advice for young girls that are either afraid or not ready to get into it is just give it a shot. Just give it a shot and you’ll see how quickly you’ll be engaged. With littleBits, you can snap bits together in seconds and suddenly you get a flurry of ideas that come to you and you can’t help but be inspired. There are other tools out there like that as well and it becomes really the beginning of long journey of being creative and inventive.

littleBits aren’t just for the younger folks either. What would you say is a good first project for someone who is a bit older to start with?

There’s a portion of our demographic that’s kids and education, and there’s a large portion that’s adults and professional engineers — people that are using it for prototyping and making their own solutions for their homes. One of the newest, very popular projects that someone came up with using the cloudBit is a remote-controlled feeder for your pet. And another that’s a way to find out whether your cat came through the door or not, things like that. There’s a whole series of pet projects that are fun. And there are also things that are more solutions, like an SMS doorbell, which is popular with people that sometimes work in the garage or sometimes wear headphones. They make a doorbell so when the button is pressed, they receive a text message.

What would you say is the most creative use of littleBits that you’ve seen someone create? Not necessarily someone who works for the company, but maybe that a user has made.

The most creative is difficult to say because new ones are always being made. But recently, there was one that I really loved that was actually something that everybody wanted to make and never did. It’s a notifier that reminds you to take your umbrella. One of our community members, Jeremy Blum, he’s a hacker and a maker, used the cloudBit to make this umbrella stand that connects to IFTTT and listens to the weather to see if it’s raining. At the same time, it detects you’ve left your home, sending you a text message reminding you to take the umbrella with you.

The existing littleBits have touched on elements of space, music making, programming and, most recently, internet connectivity. Is there any chance you could tell us maybe a little bit of what we might see next?

The next thing is gonna be really big, so I’m not quite ready to talk about it yet. It’s definitely worth holding for.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Love Child review: The human cost of Internet addiction reveals the dark side of Korea’s tech and Internet boom

 

 

The premise of Love Child, HBO’s latest feature-length documentary, doesn’t leave much room for moral questions or shades of grey. It opens with the 2010 story of a South Korean couple who met through an online video game, had a child, then neglected it in favor of playing said game. The baby girl died three months later of malnutrition; the couple found her the morning after they’d spent 10 hours (their typical session length) at a “PC Bang” gamer café.

The aftermath of that story, especially as it’s presented in this film, is pretty cut and dry: babies good, game addiction bad. Thus, this documentary (named after the baby in question, whose name, Sarang, translates to “Love Child”) doesn’t offer many surprises in perspective. It casts a particularly negative light on the gaming world and the rapid expansion of Internet access throughout South Korea.

As a result, the film’s attempts to humanize its subjects—Kim Jae-beom and his wife Kim Yun-jeong—are uneven and hard to swallow. To the filmmakers’ credit, that choice comes off as wholly intentional. Love Child paints the couple’s story in pity and sadness as it tries to make sense of how gaming, technology, and depression combined in a story that, tragically, has become a cornerstone in conversations about its nation.

Gold farmer’s daughter

The film, which debuted on HBO on Monday, July 28, opened with interview footage of the father, filmed shortly after his initial arrest. Kim said he was being held because his baby had died, but when asked why that happened, he didn’t take responsibility. “I’m not sure. She was a premature baby from the beginning.”

Viewers learn more about the death in fits and starts—some TV newsreels, a distraught police officer, the sole journalist at the hearings, the couple’s public defender—and the details got worse every step of the way. The wife, denounced by her family for her choice of a much older husband, had to leave home to stay in the relationship. The couple fell into “gold farming,” meaning they mostly played MMO games for a living (gathering virtual coins in games and selling them for real-world currency).

In many ways, the couple’s sad story boiled down to poverty, like the mother’s malnutrition and inability to go to the hospital at any time during the pregnancy. In others, the issue was sheer negligence, proven by disgusting discoveries like rancid milk bottles.

The Kim story was frequently interspersed with a crash course in South Korea’s progressive Internet infrastructure. Experts and locals alike spoke at great length about a heavy investment in nationwide broadband and the establishment of CDMA networks, but Love Child didn’t poke through the history section with any talk of leaders or political regimes pushing for that investment. As far as Love Child was concerned, someone waved a magic wand and poof: Internet!

But where other news reports and movies tend to film South Korea’s most tech-loaded cityscapes, shining and glistening in a sea of screens and neon, Love Child pulled the camera back with a stress on long, slow shots. Empty hallways, PC Bang lobbies, shopping malls, skyscrapers, and other scenes filled the screen with a stress on inactivity and even desolation. (Lots of blurry, slow-motion security cam footage appeared, as well, including a disturbing shot of Sarang found in her parents’ apartment. While it was blurred, it was still incredibly troubling.)

Sometimes, a blast of upbeat K-Pop music played in contrast to a quiet or somber scene, but for the most part, the soundtrack sounded as dystopian as the scenes looked—especially the film’s odd, semi-animated sequences in which people are rendered as messy bursts of polygons. Assumedly, these were meant to contrast with frequent shots of Prius, the MMORPG that the Kim couple met through and played endlessly.

Reports in 2010 wasted no time in pointing out the central irony of their gaming addiction—namely, that Prius’s quests revolved around taking care of a childlike companion, called Anima, whose powers and skills would change based on how people played the game. To drive this point home, Love Child includes a few lengthy, unedited game sequences. The most troubling one sees the Anima sacrificing itself to keep heroes alive, shouting, “I cannot watch you suffer!” (Minutes later, the Anima returns to assure players that she’ll come back to life “if you earn enough experience points.”)

A different kind of shaman

No case like this had come before South Korean courts, and the Kim family’s lawyer managed to successfully argue that this “involuntary manslaughter” was the result of “gaming addiction,” thus reducing the couple’s sentences.

According to Love Child, the Kims were far from alone in their affliction, counting over two million gaming addicts in the nation. After telling us this—and showing news reports about other deaths attributed to games like Starcraft—the film walked into a gaming addiction therapy center, where one patient wore 3D glasses while watching footage that alternated between nature scenes, gaming videos, and “aversive” content full of screams and glass-shattering sounds. “This makes patients have a more negative attitude toward video games,” a doctor said, but the whole thing looked like a half-baked imitation of Clockwork Orange.

The film’s perspective on games was far removed from the likes of Video Games: The Movie, showing no rowdy, laugh-filled sessions (with the exception of one congratulatory tournament starring Korea’s most popular competitive game, Starcraft). Instead, stone-faced PC Bang customers stared into monitors while doctors commented on the hobby. One doctor said that video games were comforting for the depressed and those who “lack vigor. They become like a hermit, because they do not come from a supportive environment.”

In fact, only one time were games talked about in a decidedly positive light, when a researcher compared Korea’s love of gaming with its religious origins as a shamanistic society, as both invoke the notion of avatars going on great quests against evil-doers. This was followed by the story of a tranquil, peaceful online game designed to cheer the parents of children killed at a school’s fire: “The game’s makers gave all the parents affected by this tragedy an avatar of their child. They could take these avatars for walks around these forever peaceful landscapes.”

The film didn’t have any answers for what Korea could, or should, do in light of continued gaming-addiction stories. Beyond an official designation of gaming as an addictive hobby equivalent to vices like tobacco and alcohol, and a curfew restricting children from playing games between the hours of midnight and 6am, most of the film’s talking heads had no substantial answers to the problem. The consensus was that more research is necessary. (In a striking moment, staffers at a gaming addiction facility admitted to playing hours of games themselves.)

That fit Love Child’s “show, don’t tell” take on the subject, which meant in spite of the generally sad and somber tone, none of the film’s major speakers ever denounced online gaming outright. One PC Bang staffer even became misty-eyed when he recalled the Kim couple falling in love at his shop: “They were so happy lost in this game together.”

That willingness to detach and avoid preachiness—and aim a humble, sad camera on Korea’s tech boom, as opposed to a wide-eyed one—was Love Child’s saving grace. Its biggest stumble, truly, was that by telling a 2010 story of online gaming, the rise of smartphone games has already changed the nature of how players can consume or get addicted to the hobby. Even so, the film’s tight focus on South Korea’s rapid tech explosion, and the culture that has awkwardly grown through it, was timeless enough

Daily Roundup: Android Wear, the Moto 360 smartwatch, Sony’s ‘Project Morpheus and more!

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology new. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point.

This is the Daily Roundup on AkibaTech provided by @DSM_Corp, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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GOOGLE ANNOUNCES THE ANDROID WEAR PLATFORM

Earlier Yesterday, Google unveiled Android Wear: a Nexus-like platform designed to power wearables, featuring contextual updates similar to Now and the same always-listening feature found on the Moto X. This mobile OS will focus on the smartwatch form factor for now, but Google says that’s just the beginning.

 

APPLE’S NEW 8GB IPHONE 5C NOW AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE, BUT NOT YET IN THE US

It looks like the rumors were true. An 8GB version of Apple’s iPhone 5c is available from several European carriers on multi-year contracts. And though the colorful handset has also arrived for Australia and China via Apple’s online store, we’ve yet to hear word of US availability.

MEET THE MOTOROLA’S NEW ANDROID WEAR SMARTWATCH: MOTO 360

Motorola’s new wearable, the Moto 360, takes smartwatch form factor back in time (har), boasting a seriously eye-catching design and circular watchface. Powered by Google’s Android Wear, owners can utilize the power of Now from their wrists. What’s more, this isn’t the Moto 360’s only design. It’ll come in a variety of styles once it launches this summer.

 

SONY ANNOUNCES PROJECT MORPHEUS A VIRTUAL REALITY HEADSET FOR THE PLAYSTATION 4

Sony’s officially jumping into the VR realm with “Project Morpheus.” Now just a prototype, the two-part headset has a 1080p display and packs a 90-degree field of view. And though it’s still unclear how the device will work with consoles, the hardware you see above will double as a developer kit.

 

You can also check more:

GDC 2014: Unity 5 game engine brings advanced realistic lighting and shadows, physics and audio effects to mobile, PC and now the web

GDC 2014: Epic Games is now working on a new unannounced IP, after selling Gears of War to Microsoft earlier this year (update)

 

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