Magic Leap — The next big frontier in human+computer revolution
Interaction surfaces have stayed the same since we invented computers. That’s about to change in a major way.
I’m not a futurist, yet I love the field; reading, researching, trying to understand, visualising, playing with ideas and verticals where these future technologies or services could be implemented.
I’m not going to say I’ve spotted hundreds of trends and made a fortune on my trend spotting skills. But I’ve spotted loads of interesting ideas, products and services that made it to the mainstream and have changed the way we navigate our daily lives.
One of the most profound things I was early on spotting was Instagram. As one of the first 50.000 users on the platform and was hooked from day one. So hooked, that I decided to launch my own company capitalising on the soon-to-be enormous ecosystem that now surrounds Instagram.
Long before Apple introduced Health-Kit or Research-Kit, I did some trend spotting on healthcare tech and wrote this article. I’ve been on a constant Apple watch, trying to see trends with stuff like a contextual OS, and I do still believe that this is something that will come sooner rather than later.
I decided to launch my own company solely capitalising on the soon to be enormous ecosystem that now surrounds Instagram.
Now something has been scratching my mind: Ever since the first story came out about a Florida-based company called Magic Leap, I’ve been navigating to their website more than once a week to just maybe spot some new released videos or photos from their stealth augmented reality device, without success.
Here are my thoughts on the next big frontier on human+computer interfaces.
A quantum leap in interaction experience
Shaping the future of human+computer interactions
In Magic Leap’s Florida office there is a bunch of crazy people about to change the world of human+computer interaction and how we experience digital interactions in the future to come. It’s the next big medium revolution — the way we’re going to interact with machines will forever change and take a more immersive route doing so.
Just like its competitor, the HoloLens from Microsoft, Magic Leap is working on a standalone wearable computing device that lets you experience the real world using computer-generated overlays on reality, as holograms or projections.
Why is this important? Well, I see almost unlimited application layers for a device of this sorts. From education to entertainment, industrial applications, daily communications, simulations, gaming, the verticals are almost unlimited. It’s just our imagination that stands in the way. This goes for both the HoloLens and the Magic Leap, the big advantage of the unseen Magic Leap device is the fact that it’s rumoured to have a near 100% field of vision coverage (compared to the HoloLens and it’s somewhat tiny projection area in the middle of your field of view).
It will be the next trillion dollar industry, not limited to single one field.
– Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz
Move away from a lifestyle with screens
We’ll raise our heads and look each other in the eyes
Ever since we invented human+computer interaction surfaces, we’ve used a screen to see what the computer is doing. From Command Line Interfaces (CLI’s) in the beginning, to the last 20 years when we’ve gotten great GUI’s or in common tongue Graphical User Interfaces. These interfaces have mainly been on screens made with glass, in two dimensions. Now we’re entering a new era of GUI’s — augmented reality, virtual reality, real world projections directly on our retinas.
Now we’re entering a new era of GUI’s — augmented reality, virtual reality.
Not only will this change just about everything we know about human+computer interactions, it’s a paradigm shift. Machines that we’ve learnt to love and embrace and work with will soon be outdated. New mind-blowing things like holograms, 3D environments that are mixed with our world, that we can either interact with as a group or in privacy as individuals, without having to share what we’re looking at with anyone else.
The true power of this new technology is currently untapped, but one major interaction shift is we’ll go from a hold-your-head-down-looking-at-a-screen behaviour to a engaging, look-people-in-the-eye behaviour that we’ve been lacking since the introduction of smartphones and tablets.
The true power of this new technology is currently untapped
What we see in this video released on October 14th 2015 is a non-edited video shot, like a teaser of the Magic Leap experience. It shows a small robot hiding under a table, and our solar system suspended in mid air over a desk. Whats absolutely amazing is the fact that there are seemingly no pixels. This is due to the projection technology that Magic Leap is basing their headset on: Direct Retinal Projection.
There are official patent drawings of the Google/Magic Leap patent library out there. Here are some of the more interesting ones.
As we clearly can see from these patents, we’re looking at augmented user interfaces, overlays onto the real world, much like what we’ve seen from the HoloLens demos by Microsoft when the play Minecraft on a table live at E3.
A new breed of designers are needed
Transforming the 2D designers of today to the 3D wizards of tomorrow
The future looks really bright for 3D artists, game designers and level designers, but how can we transition the current breed of web and app designers to leverage and move into the augmented reality and virtual reality fields? The challenges that stand before the creative community with this new paradigm shift are unprecedented in the history of computer interface design.
The speed in which these new technologies will have to be adapted to in the creative and public domain is going to be incredible. To reference the introduction of the iPhone in June 2007, when most of us never had bought an app, compared to today when 2 year olds navigate iPads with ease. We all need to be prepared to embrace this new technology.
Facebook is one of the players betting strong in this area with its 2 billion dollar acquisition of Oculus last year. That sort of heavy investment currently being placed on the VR space is a strong indicator that the field will grow at an unprecedented rate.
The early companies in the augmented reality and virtual reality fields will be the ones that need to come up with the toolset for creators working with these new platforms and mediums, by creating easy-to-adapt, simple SDK, UDKs and visual tools that leverage on all this new technology. Reality Recognition is going to be one of the things that will be truly important for AR to functional hassle free.
Looking at the future interfaces of a new computing experience, an experience that will be fully immersive and take up your full field of view, we must draw a resemblance to HUD design principles. Similar to the HUD of a star-fighting game or racing game in first-person view, the PVUI “Projected Visual User Interface” of tomorrow will put everyone in the driver’s seat, with the real world as the ever-changing display environment for the digital things we want to interact with, whether it’s games or emails. This is truly a Human-First Experience, that will open up a lot of new job titles, PhD and RnD opportunities.
A closer look at futuristic user interfaces
abstract, beautiful, functional and three dimensional
Here is a video reel with a clear example of a super futuristic 2D/3D interface from the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron — the studio Territory, is responsible for the work in a lot of recent sci-fi movies that made the big screens like The Martian, Jupiter Ascending, Ex Machina and Prometheus. These UI’s are very futuristic and somewhat abstract, but still we get a clear sense of what they are doing and what they are portraying.
I’ve linked to the different reels so you can look at them on Territory’s website. (Trying to keep this article lean.)
Here is another UI reel from the very beautiful sci-fi movie Oblivion, that was recorded on Iceland, mainly with real natural light (midnight sun). This is one of the few recent sci-fi movies that has a very light and bright feel to it; the entire graphical appearance of the movie is toned in grey, white and blue.
In a not-so-distant future, these HUD inspired PVUI’s will have a big impact in our daily lives, and not just for flight sim games or entertainment. But for real life duties such as riding your bike, or working in an office.
What’s important to remember is that we’ll go from a screen-based interface, an interface where we are locked by the rules of the screen’s canvas, to a FPV interface, where everything is going to gravitate around us as humans. The experience will either be completely private or collaborative.
The designers of tomorrow will have to deal with a lot of interesting problems. Interaction patterns that so far have just been in science fiction. This, together with new hardware, contextual operating systems and a human-centred approach will reshape and redefine the next era in human+computer interfaces.
The future of digital experiences might not be as far away as this short film made by the ESA to celebrate the “Rosetta mission” depicts.
The future is almost here, it’s time to prepare
The tools are not defined, but the systems are not yet public
If you are a designer of sorts or are studying to become one, my recommendations would be to get into HUD, game design, interactive design. Identify things that you believe in—design practices, patterns and UI elements that would work great in a holographic environment. You’ll need to think outside the traditional keyboard+mouse+screen box.
I’m super excited about what the future has in store for us, and to start moving away from staring at small screens and being isolated in an ever more open world. It’s the creative minds of today and tomorrow that will shape the next paradigm of connected device interaction design and furthermore, human behaviour. When you do, please think, Human-First.
If you like this article, please recommend it, share it or just give me a ping on Twitter.
I’m not native in english writing, that’s why there can be lots of spelling mistakes, I’ll do my best to correct, please give me feedback.
Follow me on:
Twitter — @LinusEkenstam
Facebook — fb.com/linusekenstam
Instagram — instagram.com/linusekenstam
Email me at linus@typeform.com
