Sci-Fi Author Neal Stephenson Joins Mystery Startup Magic Leap as ‘Chief Futurist’
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Neal Stephenson. 
Bob Lee/Flickr
Bob Lee/Flickr
If nothing else, Magic Leap knows how to capture the imagination.
Silicon Valley is already abuzz over this stealthy augmented-reality startup, mainly due to some funding from Google and a brief glimpse of the company’s technology that shows a 3-D virtual elephant floating above someone’s hands. And now, the company has raised its cachet even higher by teaming up with big-name science fiction writer and game designer Neal Stephenson, author of such sci-fi classics asSnow Crash and Cryptonomicon.
Stephenson will hold the title of “Chief Futurist” at the mysterious Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based company, which recently announced a $542 million round of funding led by Google. The sci-fi writer revealed his new title with a blog post, saying he’d been swayed to join Magic Leap after receiving a demonstration of the company’s technology.
“Magic Leap is mustering an arsenal of techniques…to produce a synthesized light field that falls upon the retina in the same way as light reflected from real objects in your environment,” he writes, saying it’s a tool that will serve not only gamers but “readers, learners, scientists, and artists.”
As one of the company’s visionaries, Stephenson will work with the startup in a more theoretical, rather than technical, capacity. “Where I hope I can be of use is in thinking about what to do with this tech once it is available to the general public,” he writes. He’ll join other notable names at the company, including founders Rony Abovitz, the former head of a medical robotics company MAKO Surgical, which was sold for $1.65 billion, and Richard Taylor of WETA Workshop, the company that created the props and creatures seen in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
Thus far, the startup has been extremely tight-lipped on what its final product will be. Publicly, it released little more than a GIF of a tiny elephant appearing in an open pair of hands as a puzzling hint of what it would eventually debut. But somehave speculated that the company could be making a Google Glass-like wearable that realistically blends computer-generated graphics with real world.
In this manner, Magic Leap adds to a wealth of efforts by others—notably Google Glass and the Oculus Rift—to bring augmented reality and virtual reality into the mainstream. When the company landed that $542-million pile of cash, the investment didn’t come from Google Ventures, Google Capital, or any of the search giant’s other investment arms—but rather Google Inc. itself.
Additionally, Magic Leap nabbed senior vice president Sundar Pichai, the man in charge of Google’s core products, as a member of the startup’s board. And other investors carry their own cachet, including Qualcomm, Legendary Pictures, and venture capitalist bigwigs Andreessen Horowitz, Obvious Ventures, and KPCB.
