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Startup Magic Leap Hires Sci-Fi Writer Neal Stephenson As Chief Futurist
First time accepted submitter giulioprisco writes Magic Leap, a secretive Florida augmented reality startup that raised $542 million in October, hired renowned science fiction writer Neal Stephenson as its "Chief Futurist." Stephenson offers hints at the company's technology and philosophy: "Magic Leap is bringing physics, biology, code, and design together to build a system that is going to blow doors open for people who create things." According to the Magic Leap website, their Dynamic Digitized Lightfield Signal technology permits generating images indistinguishable from real objects.
Yes, actually to be honest that doesn't sound like you uncovered a secret meaning, that sounds like the top shelf, most obvious understanding of exactly what they literally said, which turns out to mean just what it sounds like.
If you've ever seen big-budget films with CGI, and low-budget films with CGI, then you can understand that current technology does not include a system that automatically includes generated images that look real. Or as you put it, that look like "simulated JPEGs." Using current tech, the systems just don't do that. You have generate the objects, and then fiddle with every frame and if you spend millions of dollars per scene, you can finally make it close to seamless. They're talking about doing it without extra post-CGI processing and prettying. In that world, the low-budget films would have perfect generated objects because it would be a basic tool capability and not a human-intensive artistic process.
They have showed the product, just not publicly.