Magic Leap, the secretive “cinematic reality” startup that raised $542 million last year, is on a roll with weird PR decisions.
In a Q&A on Reddit last month, CEO Rony Abovitz claimed the company’s 3-D augmented reality technology could one day replace not just smartphones, but all screens in our lives. But then, shortly before a hotly anticipated appearance at the TED conference in Vancouver, Abovitz canceled his talk for unknown reasons.
Today, the company released an odd video of a video game supposedly running on its hardware, but with the name of special effects studio Weta Workshop prominently attached. In other words: This is probably fake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM
I asked the person who sent me the video, Magic Leap PR head Andy Fouché, to clarify if this is a real game, as his email (and the description of the video on YouTube) claimed the company was playing it around the office. So far, I have not heard back, but will update this story if I do.
The whole thing reminds me of the first concept video for another wearable device, Google Glass, which showed a dramatically more advanced product than the one Google unveiled in 2012:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErpNpR3XYUw
The dubious new video comes not long after Gizmodo found Magic Leap’s patent application illustrations to be based directly on prior sci-fi concept art rather than in-house creations. Unlike Google Glass or Microsoft’s competing technology, HoloLens, no Magic Leap hardware has yet been unveiled in public.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
