In November 2018, we were invited to visit Magic Leap headquarters in south Florida. There we spoke to the company's colorful CEO, Rony Abovitz, and top executives about the origins of the company, and its expansive views about the future of spatial computing. Part one of three in a series.
According to his college classmates, Abovitz was a combination of semi-serious alternative artist , and part serious engineer. He got his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and his M.S. in Biomedical Engineering. Abovitz left the Ph.D. program at U. Miami to start Z-Kat, an R&D think tank he created in his now-wife’s grad student apartment. Perhaps most unexpectedly, Abovitz was also a college athlete at Miami, which is a highly competitive Division I school.
“When I was at Mako, we did robotic surgery, really serious stuff. FDA-level. But to me, it was like I was doing Star Wars droids. So my mindset was really different from all the other people in the field,” Abovitz explained. “I’m making Star Wars droids, and I’m inside the med-tech world, trying to mentally integrate where I’m coming from. I would go from SIGGRAPH, to bone and joint meetings, and neuroscience meetings.
As the Magic Leap idea began to coalesce, Abovitz undertook a quixotic journey, iterating his ideas about spatial computing with artists, filmmakers, authors, engineers, and geeky friends who spent hours with him on the phone and in the divey restaurants he prefers for their anonymity. As he refined his vision, Abovitz carefully broke the problems into pieces, and looked for solutions and workarounds, and the people who could help figure it out. When pressed about this… well, magic leap...
Macnamara was already working on Magic Leap’s first patents when Abovitz connected with a NASA scientist, Sam Miller. There emerged a white paper that “pulled together all the ideas about spatial computing that have been science fiction stuff for years and turned it into a product,” said Macnamara. After a year of working on the initial technical patents as a contractor, he became one of Magic Leap’s first twenty-five employees.
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