Magic Leap Inc, a startup backed by technology powerhouses including Google and Alibaba Inc that has raised more than US$1.4 billion, has hired more than 600 employees and is close to starting production of its first “mixed reality” products.
Speaking at the Fortune magazine technology conference in Aspen, Colorado, Magic Leap chief executive Rony Abovitz said the company was debugging its production line in Florida and would launch the products soon.
He declined to give a date.
Magic Leap has developed a technology that allows computer generated images to be fully integrated into a real-world landscape. It is akin to how the Pokemon Go game combines computer images and reality, though Magic Leap promises fully realistic, 3D computer images.
“In Magic Leap, I would see Pokemon just like I see real people,” Abovitz said. “We love what they’re doing. It’s a gateway to a whole new future.”
The company is one of the most ambitious tech startups of recent years.
“We’re a full-stack tech company,” Abovitz said. “We do the hardware, the software, electronics, chip design and sensors. We want to deliver something that never existed before.”
The company is working with several outside developers and is to open a developer laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area, Abovitz said.
Consumer applications will come first, he said, but the company is already working on business and medical uses for the product.
Magic Leap’s efforts come after privacy concerns forced Alphabet to stop producing Google Glass, which overlays computer images onto the field of vision. Microsoft Corp is focusing on business applications for its HoloLens smartglasses launched earlier this year.
Timothy Carone, a professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business in Indiana, said the success of Pokemon Go on smartphones could spur faster development from hardware makers — Microsoft with its HoloLens, the secretive startup Magic Leap, or Google, which could still revive its failed Glass headgear.
“The reaction [to Pokemon Go] is a quick of vote of: ‘Yeah, they got this right,’” Carone said. “My guess is that a lot of developers have gone back to figure out how to take this approach.”
Additional reporting by AP
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS