Everything we know about Magic Leap's mysterious new headset that cost $1.9 billion and 6 years to create

After six years of hype videos and nearly $2 billion in funding, the secretive Florida startup that's backed by the likes of Google and Alibaba finally unveiled its first product this week: Magic Leap One.

It looks nuts.

Magic Leap One

But, uh, what is it?

Magic Leap One is a futuristic-looking augmented reality headset that's powered by a small, circular computer that hooks onto your belt. All the stuff that your smartphone does? It does that stuff, but it does it within your field of view. Instead of looking at your phone for email, you can project your email right into the world in front of you (where only you can see it).

After this week's big unveiling, we learned a ton about what Magic Leap is making. Here's everything we know so far.

First things first: This is an example of augmented reality, powered by Magic Leap's new device.

The idea is simple: Magic Leap intends to bring your online life into your real life.

In the image above, for instance, you can see a user scrolling through their Gmail account. In the lower right, you can see the time and date, and a battery meter for the headset.

Rather than looking down at your phone, or at your laptop (or whatever other computer device), you can straight up project that stuff into your field of view.

This entire setup — the glasses, and the circular thing on the left, and the controller on the right — is "Magic Leap One." It's an all-in-one augmented reality system.

At some point in 2018, Magic Leap plans to release the Magic Leap One augmented reality system. There's no price yet, nor is there a more specific release window than the entire year of 2018. We don't even know the specs of this thing yet.

What we do know is this: Magic Leap One combines a headset with a computer and a controller to enable augmented reality.

Sounds similar to Microsoft's HoloLens headset, right? That's because it's very similar to Microsoft's HoloLens headset.

The headset is called "Lightwear."

The Lightwear headset uses a mess of sensors and cameras to "see" the world around its user, thus enabling interaction with the augmented reality projected through the headset's lenses.

As the Magic Leap website says, the headset merges, "environment mapping, precision tracking and soundfield audio." What that means in practice is whatever you see in the world through the glasses can be interacted with.

For example:

Magic Leap

In the example above (from Magic Leap), a user has our solar system projected in the world in front of them. The glasses have sensors and cameras that see the user's hands interacting with the projection.

It's not actually clear if the Lightwear headset can track hands, but this example certainly gives that impression.

(Of note: Since the other user in this example isn't wearing a headset, she wouldn't be able to see what the user here is seeing. She'd just see a person wearing glasses while waving their hands in the air.)

See the rest of the story at Business Insider