Voices of VR sits down with Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz for two hours to unpack some of the many threads Magic Leap’s behind origin story.

The journey to augmented reality. It really did not start out with this deliberate thought of there’s this field called augmented reality, and I want to go into it because I’m not even sure what the name of the thing was that I wanted to make yet.

But I started asking the question, How does our brain make the pictures that we experience as we move through the everyday world? So I was comparing the idea of like if you look at an Apple II or your current computer, your MacBook, your phone, there’s a display and you know, it’s got glass, it’s OLED or LCD, there’s televisions and movie screens or there’s an external display and you compute stuff to it.

And then when we walk around, we’re not looking at a display. We just have this display that seems to work, which seems like a really weird, obvious question. You wake up. But we don’t really ask the question like, how does that display work? I did biomedical engineering in college and grad school, so I’m sort of wired to ask those questions.

So I was thinking, “Well, how is it that we see all of this?” And like, “Do we see it or are we model building in what’s going on?” So I started asking those questions, which is how does the brain render this rich, detailed volumetric, amazing, you know, retina-resolution world? It seems to be head mounted because we all seem to have a head and whatever’s working, that display is mounted in there.

So I was thinking like, there’s that thing and could that ever be used as a display for computing rather than the external display?

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