Author Neal Stephenson Joins Augmented Reality Project

A company working on augmented and virtual reality tech has appointed sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson as its “Chief Futurist.” Exactly what the company is up to remains something of a mystery though.

Magic Leap recently received $542 million in start-up funding from investors led by Google, two of whose executives have joined Magic Leap’s board.

There’s not a great deal of specifics from Magic Leap, but reportedly it’s working on a pair of virtual/augmented reality glasses that project an image directly into the user’s eyes, creating a particularly realistic effect. (At the moment it appears Google has no plans to merge the technology with Google Glass.)

The few people who’ve seen Magic Leap in action and talked about it describe the effect as almost jarring when it involves an image such as a dragon that you perceive as real but simultaneously know has to be a creation because of the subject.

Stephenson, writing on the company’s blog, suggests the key is that the retina isn’t part of the brain but does perform some brain-like functions in the way it processes light: “What it feeds down the optic nerve to the brain proper isn’t so much an image as it is the beginnings of an idea.” The idea of Magic Leap is not to create traditional optical illusions but “to produce a synthesized light field that falls upon the retina in the same way as light reflected from real objects in your environment.”

Fans of Stephenson’s work will understand why he’s an appropriate choice for the role, particularly from his book Snow Crash. In that he coined the term “metaverse” to cover a world made up of physical space, virtual reality and the Internet.

Stephenson’s role appears to be less about the technology itself and more about coming up with ideas of how it could be used.