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Mysterious tech startup has ties to Central Florida [Orlando Sentinel](Orlando Sentinel (FL) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Oct. 31--A new Florida tech company that just received a cash infusion of a half-billion dollars and hopes to be "the size of Apple" has some strong ties to Central Florida. A new Florida tech company that just received a cash infusion of a half-billion dollars and hopes to be "the size of Apple" has some strong ties to Central Florida. Magic Leap, based in Dania just south of Fort Lauderdale, is a bit of a mystery, but it is focused on providing an improved, three-dimensional virtual reality. Three UCF researchers and a former EA Tiburon employee are now working for the company. News releases from Magic Leap have provided glimpses of what it claims its technology will provide: images such as a tiny elephant cupped in the palm of a child's hand, or a yellow submarine floating down a busy street. As the MIT Technology Review recently reported, patents and trademark filings for Magic Leap describe computer-display technology that can trick the human eye better than existing virtual-reality displays into perceiving virtual objects as real. One of the documents showed a drawing of a person wearing goggles connected to a device worn at the hip. The documents describe Magic Leap's technology as "wearable computer hardware, namely, an optical display system incorporating a dynamic light-field display." UCF's College of Optics and Photonics has been developing research along those lines for years, but officials would not discuss Magic Leap. Linkedin profiles for UCF researchers show some of them are now working at Magic Leap. Jie Sun, a current doctoral-research assistant at UCF, now is also a senior optical engineer at Magic Leap. And former Maitland-based EA Tiburon employee Derrick Levy is also at the company. Levy's Linkedin profile identifies him as a game programmer for the tech startup. He was a senior software engineer for EA as recently as 2012. Sun has published numerous articles related to advances in LCD technology (liquid-crystal display). Just this year, in a journal titled Micromachines, she published a paper that discussed how some 3-D-image displays are "too bulky and heavy." She went on to describe lighter-weight alternatives. Magic Leap is no ordinary tech startup, if only because it is very well-funded. Founder Rony Abovitz, who said Magic Leap would be "the size of Apple," sold his previous company, Mako Surgical, for $1.5 billion. Magic Leap now has more than 100 employees and moved its headquarters to the Design Center of the Americas near Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. Google's Sundar Pichai, who oversees Android for the tech giant, was just named to Magic Leap's board. Magic Leap has a presence in other cities, including Santa Cruz, Los Angeles and Mountain View, Calif.; Seattle; Austin, Texas; and New Zealand, but none in Florida outside of its home base in Dania. Florida has struggled for years to attract investment for tech and startup companies. The sudden appearance of a half-billion dollars for a Florida company may help change perceptions of what the state has to offer, said Orrett Davis, executive director of the Orlando Tech Association. Capital for startup companies is watched so closely by the tech industry that states are ranked on a quarterly basis, with California, New York and Massachusetts usually coming out on top. "It's great for the state as it helps move the needle in terms of our rankings for this quarter and year," Davis said. "Hopefully we'll get a few outside groups to take a second look at Florida." Ben Noel, head of UCF's graduate school for video-game design, the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, said any large new tech companies based anywhere in Florida would be welcome. But he added, "The bigger market for animation and computer art is here in Central Florida because of the theme parks and NASA and everything else we have here." [email protected] or 407-420-5660 ___ (c)2014 The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, Fla.) Visit The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, Fla.) at www.OrlandoSentinel.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |