Within two decades, when you look into a state-of-the-art virtual-reality display, your eye will be fooled into thinking you’re looking through a real window into a real world. It’ll be as bright and crisp as what you see out your window. Once this small display perfects realism, it becomes the one display to rule them all. If a near-eye screen offers sufficient resolution, brightness, breadth, and color richness, it can display any number of virtual screens, of any size, inside it. While I was wearing the photonic spectacles of Magic Leap, I watched an HD movie on a virtual movie screen. It looked as bright and crisp as my 55-inch TV at home. With Microsoft’s HoloLens on, I watched a live football game on a virtual screen hovering next to a web browser window, alongside a few other virtual screens. I could fill my office with as many screens as I wanted, as big (or small) as I desired. I could click for a screen overlaid anywhere in the real world.
The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup | WIRED
One of Microsoft’s ambitions for the HoloLens is to replace all the various screens in a typical office with wearable devices. The company’s demos envision workers moving virtual screens around or clicking to be teleported to a 3-D conference room with a dozen coworkers who live in different cities. I found virtual screens and virtual media within a virtual reality surprisingly natural and practical. At Magic Leap, the development team will soon abandon desktop screens altogether in favor of virtual displays. Meron Gribetz, founder of Meta, says that its new Meta 2 mixed-reality glasses will replace monitors in his company of 100 employees within a year. It’s no great leap to imagine such glasses also replacing the small screens we all keep in our pockets. In other words, this is a technology that can simultaneously upend desktop PCs, laptops, and phones. No wonder Apple, Samsung, and everyone else is paying attention. This is what disruption on a vast scale looks like.
The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup | WIRED
All that said, it was not the reality of artificial reality that surprised me most. It was how social it is. The best experiences I had in VR or MR involved at least one other person. More people made it better. In fact, just a few more people made it exponentially better. It’s a network effect: The joy of VR is proportional to the square of the number of people sharing it. That means VR will be the most social medium yet. More social than social media is today.
The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup | WIRED