If you are inter­est­ed in vir­tu­al real­i­ty, then Mag­ic Leap may be the com­pa­ny for you. Non-shock­ing, non-spoil­er alert of the day: vir­tu­al real­i­ty is the next big thing. Yawn, of course it is. We’re just sit­ting here wait­ing for the prod­uct that’s going to rock our world. It’s com­ing, we know it is, every­one knows it is… and it’s get­ting clos­er every day. So they say.

While you may have been inun­dat­ed with vir­tu­al real­i­ty news and promis­es in recent years, you may not be as famil­iar with the term mixed real­i­ty. And if not, then you prob­a­bly aren’t famil­iar with the most famous, and infa­mous, name in mixed real­i­ty — Mag­ic Leap.

Magic Leap is in NOT Silicon Valley

If it’s a big deal in tech, then it’s got to be in Sil­i­con Val­ley, or Wash­ing­ton State, or based out of MIT, right? Sure­ly no one would guess that what some are call­ing the tech that will next change the world would come out of sub­ur­ban Flori­da, but that is indeed where Mag­ic Leap can be found. Except that it’s real­ly hard to find, in a knowl­edge kind of way. Let me start over a bit.

Vir­tu­al real­i­ty is immers­ing your self in a world or expe­ri­ence that isn’t there. It’s sit­ting on your couch in the real world but expe­ri­enc­ing the Great Pyra­mid visu­al­ly and, in many cas­es, using oth­er sens­es as well. Aug­ment­ed real­i­ty is sit­ting on your couch and see­ing your liv­ing room, but being able to visu­al­ly access infor­ma­tion about what you’re see­ing — com­pa­ny infor­ma­tion about Sam­sung when you look at your TV, an Ama­zon page when you look at your book­shelf, the dis­tance from your liv­ing room to Egypt when you look at a pic­ture of the Great Pyramid.

Mixed real­i­ty is sit­ting on your couch and see­ing your liv­ing room, but also see­ing a mum­my sit­ting on the couch with you. Or see­ing a dol­phin jump out of the water that sud­den­ly makes up your car­pet. You’re still in your liv­ing room, but so is the dol­phin… and the mum­my… and they both seem real. Very real. As real as your couch. That’s what Mag­ic Leap’s tech­nol­o­gy does, or will do, or might not do, depend­ing on who you believe.

He Said, She Said

If you believe Mash­able and oth­er sources, Mag­ic Leap appears to be the ever elu­sive promise (to out it polite­ly) or a big scam (to put it not so polite­ly). They’ve been around since 2010 or 2011, they’ve col­lect­ed over $1 bil­lion in invest­ments from the likes of Google and oth­ers, and they have yet to show the pub­lic any­thing… except a video that was report­ed­ly “aspi­ra­tional” and did­n’t actu­al­ly rep­re­sent their tech­nol­o­gy in any real way. If you believe Bey­once, what they do have isn’t all that impressive.

How­ev­er if you choose to believe Ricky Ger­vais or NBA star Andre Iguo­dala over Bey­once, it’s life chang­ing — even world chang­ing. If you trust Wired con­trib­u­tor Peter Yang (who claims to have expe­ri­enced it), it’s sim­ply incred­i­ble. Like, real­l­ly incred­i­ble. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it’s impos­si­ble for us to know what’s true and what’s hype at this point because the com­pa­ny is so secre­tive. But for those of us who can apply a lit­tle com­mon sense, it seems like the good claims are more plau­si­ble than the scam claims.

For one, their last invest­ment round may have been the largest C‑level round in his­to­ry, at well over $700 mil­lion. And there are major play­ers invest­ing. Mon­ey talks, always. You’ll have to decide for your­self what to believe, but Media Jobs is going with ‘fol­low the mon­ey’ on this one. It would appear that to score a job with Mag­ic Leap would be a career coup to boast about for decades. Chang­ing the way the entire world works through tech­nol­o­gy? We know a few peo­ple who would sign up for that.