Julie Larson-Green, CTO, Magic Leap 
Interviewer: Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE


 Brainstorm Tech 2022: Demo - Magic Leap 2.0

Conferences

 Brainstorm Tech 2022: Demo - Magic Leap 2.0


we are starting off this portion of our main stage conversations with a look at some pretty cool eh, our tech, in contrast to some of its tech titan competitors, A r Trailblazer magic leap is focusing on real world business applications rather than creating alternative universes. Its new lighter goggles magically too, could be a breakthrough product that transforms the ar market we're going to hear from magically chief technical officer, how the goggles are designed for training three D visualization and remote. So in what promises to be an exciting trip, which we will all go on right now, we're going to go inside a wildfire training mission with magic leap to please welcome to the stage julie Larson Green cto of magically welcome julie Jai Mahal. Alright, give us a little bit of a sneak peek, just what's new at magic leap um so much as new magically. But I mean we're really a brand new company in a number of ways. Peggy johnson took over as Ceo almost two years ago and has remade the company recapitalized company, created a new management team. I came on as an advisor. In fact, she and I were texting while she was on stage at M P W a couple of years ago, she asked if I'd come on and help her team learn how to develop enterprise software. So a whole new focus from consumer over to enterprise people that are already wearing things on their face that can really take advantage of having their world augmented and so we're ready to go with a whole new way of thinking about what we're doing. Open platform, all kinds of new developers and connectivity to other technologies. So it's been really exciting time. She convinced me to join full time during the process. It was great. Came out of um okay, and tell us more specifically about magic leap to what does it do, that magic leap one? Well, it's also completely retooled. So the biggest thing you're gonna notice right away is the 70 degree field of view, which is just much bigger than anything out there. Um you know, it's not a race to the numbers, it's really about having you see all the augmented content just as if you were moving around the real world magically won and other competitors. It's like looking through a little porthole That was magically too. You can see a six ft tall person from six ft away. So that digital content is really just in the room with you as part of the natural environment. So different than saying immersive technology when you think of VR where you're going into a separate place, you're immersed in that technology all around you in the room that you're in. So beyond that we have first to market a new technology called dynamic dimming. Dynamic dimming is instead of darkening the whole screen, which you can do with magic leap to, you can also darken portions of that of the content. You put a mask behind the content. So the digital content really stands out, which is really important in high light. Um, uh, scenarios like the operating room or next to a window or other places where bright light is coming in and you can really see white whites and blacks, blacks. And then the other one that a lot of people comment on and our developers are really excited about is the Spatial audio. So 360° audio opens up all kinds of new user experiences. Not everything has to be right there in front of your face because you're really just naturally interacting with the environment around you, both with a controller which you can use behind your back or hands free. So it's a whole new thing and I think you guys are gonna love playing with it and seeing the possibilities. So, um, another question for you, we have, we've all heard about magic leap for a few years now. A lot of money, billions of dollars have gone into the company, we've had Peggy has been on our stage, we had Ronnie, the founder and former Ceo on stage here in Aspen. What makes you confident that this time, this is the right approach, This is the mark, the right market, the right applications and technology for you guys. I think it's a number of reasons, you know, it's not just technology that has to get ready and that's where all that money went is into the state of the art technology that we have today, but also the market has to be ready. That things with the metaverse and people talking about it, the world seems a little more ready for the kinds of scenarios. And then us focusing on enterprise, we're really focused on industrial enterprise, healthcare, uh public sector, which we're gonna show you a public sector, command and control scenario is really the place where people are already using augmentation to get their work done and wearing glasses on their face. So, you know, instead of trying to convince all of you to walk around with glasses on, we're going to places where people are are already working with that. So you actually are trying to convince us to put glasses on here, all of us. But yes, out in the demo average are sure. Um No, I'm just joking but but but another, another quick question, just on sort of the um the evolution of the company, um the previous iteration, everything was very, very secretive for for years, right? Um this is not the same mentality approach at all, so so why why the shift? Yeah, Super open. I mean, we want to make it easy for developers to build applications no matter where they're coming from. So, you know, we work with the latest tools unity, you bring your own cloud, it's this open platform, open Xar as they can make it to make it easy, it also makes it easier for people to deploy it because we have a number of M. D. M. Many folks that are gonna make it easy for people to get the product out into the workforce. So it's much more developing in the open. We started giving it out to developers in november, very early access, working with some of our engine partners to make it easy to develop and we're still quite we're really pleased by the excitement that people have had and the number of people that have asked to be part of our early adopter program. Okay and tell us specifically what exactly are we going to see today during this? Okay so this is super fun. So we're gonna see what we call a command and control scenario. So command and control is basically when you uh need to manage remote sites from afar you want to see the whole thing and kind of do it for training purposes or for managing in real time kind of scenario. So this scenario is a firefighter scenario training people how to fight wildfires. We worked with firefighters for how they do it today which is kind of an old fashioned way of sand table. So they put the sand on the table, they mount it up to look like mountains, they put the trees in, they said people are gonna come from here, the trucks are gonna come from here. The helicopters come from here, we reinvented that to show a demonstration of what you can do with magically and so the data comes from Nasa, the terrain, the wind speed, all of that video and everything is all integrated into one place and you're gonna get to experience it and the audience is going to get to see what my whole sees on these monitors and the screens in front of you. So, so I'm gonna have Jonathan to come out and he's gonna relate us through that demo and have fun. All right. All right, thank you. Well, Michael, thank you very much for hosting us today and we're very excited about this opportunity to share our technology with you and with all of our audience. Um, so before we dive into the demo, I do want to go over a few things about our product. This is our second generation product, Magic leap to, we kept the original configuration we had with magic leap one. So we have a compute pack a headset and a controller. We did that so that we could take all of the weight associated with the battery and the computer and take it off of your head. We want you to have a very comfortable experience when you're wearing this device. We don't want any adverse effects, no neck strain, no eye strain. And we've gone out of our way to make sure that this is the lightest headset available on the market. So, um, we, uh, this can be strapped onto a belt, it can be clipped into a pocket. We have a shoulder strap, we have a vest as well. There's a lot of different ways to manage the compute pack. The headset itself is 50% smaller than our previous generation, 20% lighter and we have doubled our field of view. Like Julie was saying earlier, this was actually part of the headset earlier on. You know, we always have this configuration and I think this is very heavy for putting on my head. You wouldn't exactly, you wouldn't want to put this on your head and you want it to be offloaded. We also have a controller, you can think of this as your mouse for your headset, it's optional. We also have full hand tracking for both hands. So there's a lot of different ways to input into the technology. So today we're going to do a demo, you and I will be in the headset. We have a third person that's joining us through the camera over here on the left. So everyone out there, you're going to see what my hall and I are seeing just from a different perspective. And with that we'll go ahead and get started so to put it on and grab it with both hands, pull it apart and slide it over your head. Great, All right. Uh, so if you look over here, we're gonna step back, just take one step back and two, you can pick that up. There you go. We have a map that we developed for uh, our our demo into at the world Economic forum in May. So like julie mentioned earlier, this is a firefighting scenario. One of the first things I want you to notice is that you can still see me when we're talking. So this isn't virtual reality, this is augmented reality and virtual reality. You put a headset on that blocks out the real world and you enter a virtual world in augmented reality. We are bringing and adding the virtual world to the real world. So we'll go ahead and zoom in on the western us over here on the left and you'll see a map up here in front of us on the table. So go ahead and guide your attention to the table. We have a wildfire developing over here on the left side of our map and we're learning how to manage this fire. Maybe we're new uh firefighters and we want to look at some historical data and understand how to properly manage this fire. So we're notice that we're combining three dimensional data. We can bring in some two dimensional data that can be a video feed from the ground and we have the context of the terrain, uh and that video combined. So we know exactly where that's being recorded. This can be a training scenario, could also be a live command and control scenario. Uh and this can apply to a lot of different industries. It doesn't have to be just firefighting. So think about your business, what type of data you have, How can you combine that in a way that's intuitive and enables your employees to better understand your, your data. If you look up here, we also have some two dimensional information. So you're a firefighter, you're going to want to know about the wind and the smoke, the weather conditions that there are taking place right now. Well, notice that the wind is starting to shift. There's a city over here on the left, so we go ahead and give an evacuation order to the city and they begin to evacuate. The fire is progressing. We have a couple of helicopters that we can instruct on where to uh drop some water and they'll go ahead and they will drop that right at the last second and uh, and stop the fire from reaching the city. Uh, so I want you to uh realize that what you're looking through is 32 different layers of materials are optics piece is what makes magically unique. We manufacture all of our optics inside of florida. And uh julie had mentioned earlier that we have an additional layer called they're dimming layer. Um, so the audience will be able to see this if you want to see it, please go to our demo, but I'm gonna turn it on for you also, you have to sell it for me, Does everybody try to, I feel like such an idiot, but I just want to touch it every everyone wants to do that. So I went ahead and turned that dimmer on. So if you look at me now, you you really can't see me because we're blocking up to 99% of the light, and then I'll turn that off. So the firefighters dropped the water, they saved the day, uh and uh and we learned how to how to manage a fire. Um This is really just a taste of what's possible with magic leap, we're just beginning to scratch the surface on how we can use this technology. If you'd like more information, please visit our website at dot com and thank you very much. My whole for hosting. Thank you. I gotta like fluff my hair back. Um Do I do I have a r R. It's really cool. It's interesting because um every time I've tried VR I just feel kind of woozy and maybe I'm just haven't done it enough. Um And with with this, maybe it's a control thing, I really don't know what it is, but like I I like that, that feeling a lot more um the audio is is pretty wild, like it's really you feel like you're there. Um What, so is this is this particular application in use currently, or this is just a demo application has been created, but we're working with a lot of different developers that are developing tools to be able to create these kinds of scenarios. Both no bs as well as individual enterprises there putting stuff together. And it's nice because you know, VR your occluded. So you can't take a cell phone call or an emergency call that you could you could see the audience, you could interact with the real world at the same time that you're seeing that content. It's world box. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't it doesn't move with you. I don't have to worry about falling off stage, which is okay. Real quick um other applications that you think are really going to be definitely things in the operating room. Lots happening there. Uh there are already used to using robots and things on their face to help them augment surgeries. There's lots there. Industrial enterprise, we have several companies have been working with that are doing training, both, capturing the knowledge of people that are going out of the workforce into the magically scenario and the headset and don't really training people on the hands on way and saving waste and saving costs in training and also bringing tech to some places that aren't technology forward and attracting new kinds of talents, all kinds of stuff. Okay. And Julia. I know you've got some news to share. So what what is this gonna what is it gonna cost? When is it available? Tell us Well, we're gonna be available starting september 30th. And we have three editions are base edition is 32 99. Our developer pro is 40 99 then the enterprise edition is 49 99. So go to magic leap dot com and all the details will be there and see who we can buy from our partners. And really excited. We've already got so many developers working on being ready when we deliver on september. So check out outside how many of you have already tried it out in the booth, A few people. All right. Try it out if you have a chance. Thank you so much for for being here. And we look forward to Magic Leap three. Right. Thank you very much julie.