Magic Leap: mysterious virtual reality company releases video demo

YouTube film shows software that turns an office into an interactive alien landscape

Magic Leap, the secretive virtual reality company, has released a video of its product which shows it converting a real office into a sci-fi environment populated by aliens.

The company — which has revealed very little about its plans but is said to have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to finance them — gave a glimpse at what it is working on with a short YouTube video.

The company was planning to speak at TED, the conference organisation, this week but pulled out. It said that the video was “one of the things that we’d planned to share at the talk”.

The video showed a “game we’re playing around the office right now”, according to the video’s description. It is the first video uploaded to the company’s YouTube channel, and the first proper glimpse at what the company could be working on.

Google said in October that it had invested $524 million in the virtual reality company, despite the fact that nobody really knows what it does. Since then, it has occasionally offered glimpses at its work, though revealed very little about what it’s actually doing — in December, it announced that it had hired sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson to help it predict the future.

Google is just one of the many companies attempting to get into virtual reality, which some have warned is a bubble and others have said is the future. Samsung, for instance, has made headsets of its own, and Facebook bought virtual reality firm Oculus Rift for $2 billion last year.