Today at WIRED Business Conference in New York City, virtual reality (VR) start-up Magic Leap’s founder Rony Abovitz announced that his company would be partnering with Lucasfilm’s ILMxLAB to create immersive experiences for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality platforms. As well as creating these experiences the companies will be working together to create Star Wars-related content for Magic Leap’s own technology, though not much is known about this technology just yet.
It hasn’t been revealed by either company what the experiences they’re creating will involve or when we can expect to see Magic Leap’s technology become available to buy. However, WIRED reports that Abovitz did premier a video at the conference that you can watch below starring iconic Star Wars characters C-3PO and R2D2 that might give some kind of indication as to what kinds of experiences the companies are working on. The video shows the two droids not only interacting with each other but with you the viewer as well, with C-3PO giving you a rundown of the difficulties you’re facing in securing a deal with Jabba the Hut and a stormtrooper horde that’s fast catching up with you as R2 projects a hologram of the situation for you to watch. It’s a surreal but interesting experience.
To keep creating weird and wonderful immersive Star Wars content like this, Abovitz revealed that ILM and Magic Leap would be creating a “semi secret” joint lab based at ILM’s headquarters in San Francisco, where researchers and programmers from both companies will work.
We’re teaming up with #Lucasfilm to bring the force to the real world.https://t.co/ANgvFsVVvI
— Magic Leap (@magicleap) June 16, 2016
The partnership and the experiences that are being worked on are still in their early stages but the ultimate goal is to become a truly great immersive storytelling platform both with the Star Wars universe and other as yet undetailed experiences. Abowitz said “We want to be a medium how to tell stories—and ultimately, maybe the medium.”
There isn’t much more information on when we’ll see more releases from this exciting partnership but VRFocus will follow closely and report developments as they happen.
