How Magic Leap Is Secretly Creating a New Alternate Reality
...if you're already firing light down a vibrating optical fiber in a spiral pattern to form an image, that exact same system can double as a fiber optic projector. And that's where things get interesting.
Seibel's team was working on just such a projector. They even tried it out in some prototype head-mounted displays. They found that it could be way more practical and cheaper than tiny LCD or OLED panels, with the added benefit that you can run the fibers down to a pocket-sized pack instead of wearing them on your head. They theorized that it could even get small enough to fit inside a pair of glasses.
Which is probably why Magic Leap hired Seibel's research partner Brian Schowengerdt. And also probably why Schowengerdt helped Magic Leap win a $150,000 grant from the Department of Defense to create an ultra high-res 4K version of the fiber-scanning display tech. And lastly, it's almost definitely why many of Magic Leap's patent applications are about how to bounce the light from those fibers into your eyes in a convincing way.
Because you need to see the real world, you obviously can't have a projector covering the front of the glasses: that light has to be bounced in from the side, which generally results in a narrow field of view.
And of course, you need some way to track your head and your surroundings so that CG objects appear to occupy a real place in the world, instead of looking like a flat image...
Magic Leap's patent applications cover potential solutions for all these issues. This one explains how the company could use an LCD "occlusion mask" to block light from the real world at exactly the same places as the CG objects, so those objects won't appear ghostly. This one is for a waveguide which can allegedly bounce light across nice big eyeglass-sized lenses, letting you theoretically see those CG animals anywhere in your field of view.
This one, licensed from NASA, is all about letting the software know where you are in the real world with only a pair of externally mounted cameras, and this one is about changing how the CG objects look depending on where they are in your field of view. So if Magic Leap shows you a shark floating in midair, you might be able to walk around it and view it from any angle without the software losing track of you.
This one describes how Magic Leap could use a pair of cameras inside the glasses to track your eyes and figure out where they're focusing, which could help enable the most important thing Magic Leap wants to do: use digital light field technology to make CG objects appear to take up real depth inside the real world.
Using fancy optical hardware like microreflectors or diffraction patterning devices or perhaps deformable membrane mirrors—which Schowengerdt had been successfully experimenting with for some time—Magic Leap apparently believes it can let you focus your eyes on a virtual 3D object the same way they focus on objects in real life. Seemingly, it'll do so by cutting its 3D objects into slices corresponding to the depth of your gaze, and showing the appropriate one based on where your eyes are actually looking.
Last but not least, there's also this patent application for a "tactile glove" which lets you literally rub two fingers together to steer a pair of robots while using the headgear, which could more generally be a way to let you interact with the things Magic Leap lets you see. Among Magic Leap's patent filings, this one is especially intriguing; it admits that the company has actually already built and tested this glove in a research study. Plus, it mentions how the headgear can transition between a see-through augmented reality mode and an opaque one for virtual reality. We could be looking at Google Glass and Oculus Rift competitors in a single device.
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