Magic Leap wants you to hang out with droids.
Today, the mixed reality company announced a partnership with Lucasfilm and ILMxLAB to work on creating and researching ways of telling stories in mixed reality. The companies are building a joint research lab, the “Collab Lab,” at Lucasfilm’s San Francisco campus.
This morning at the WIRED Business Conference in New York, Magic Leap showed off one of the Star Wars-branded experiences that the partnership has already led to. It’s a far cry from the hologram dreams of the original Star Wars and shows off a level of sophistication and spatial awareness that’s wild to see be executed so well.
“We are pushing into an era of experiential, persistent and perceptual storytelling. We want people to step inside our stories, and we want those stories to react back to people in deeply compelling ways,” ILMxLAB Executive Creative Director John Gaeta said in a statement. “However, before magical realism becomes a seamless part of everyday life, it needs some advanced prototyping. Our ‘Collab Lab’ is a focal point of practical problem solving, concrete groundwork, sweat and hyper innovation.”
One thing that’s been clear from the latest wind of VR headsets is that a lack of content directly reflects on the hardware makers themselves. Magic Leap is putting some early efforts into looking at how mixed reality storytelling will take shape.
Obligatory reminder that we’re still talking about a consumer tech company that has raised boatloads of money and almost no one knows what their product looks like.
