Rony Abovitz's office at Magic Leap's headquarters is filled with stuff that gives off a playful vibe.
There's a Willy Wonka lunch box (Gene Wilder edition), a 3D stereoscope from 1901, a shiny ray gun crafted by Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop and collectibles that pay homage to Star Trek and Star Wars, including a lightsaber and a Porg plushie. There are comics and books, including Art of Atari and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
And in the bottom corner of a whiteboard against one wall, there's a sketch of a jellyfish-shaped spacecraft labeled "Mothership," signed by Steven Spielberg.
But the thing that really stands out is the big unicorn head. It's impossible to ignore. I'm talking to the head of one of tech's most notable unicorns -- defined as a rare startup valued at over $1 billion -- and there's a giant mask of the mythical creature staring at me from a few feet away. It feels like a scene out of HBO's Silicon Valley, except we're on the other side of the country in Plantation, Florida.
Magic Leap, if you're not up to speed on who's trying to invent the future, is an eight-year-old company that's been working on an "experiential and spatial computer" that hopes to break new ground in what it means to be a "person plus computer." We're talking sci-fi, next-level, let's-change-the-world thinking. Its ambitious vision, set out by co-founder and CEO Abovitz, is centered around a slick, lightweight, mixed-reality system that promises to immerse you in "experiences" that meld computer-generated imagery with the physical world in a way that's designed to convince you those 3D objects and characters are there. In the room with you.
