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The former humanitarian aid worker Malka Older’s 2016 science fiction novel Infomocracy and its two sequels tell the story of a democratic future still rife with natural disasters and conflict. The books feature a next-generation search engine called The Information that has annotated the world with information thanks to ubiquitous augmented reality technology.
By happy coincidence, I had just finished Infomocracy before heading to CES, where I spent some time with Magic Leap. The well-funded startup is making augmented-reality gear, though they prefer to call AR “spatial computing.” In an intentionally dimly lit suite in the Cosmopolitan Hotel, I tried on Magic Leap’s latest projection glasses, which connected to a hockey puck-sized computer that clips to your waist.
It was all good fun when a game of shooting alien robots emerged from a “door” in the wall, but the second demo got me thinking back to Older’s books.
As I looked down at the floor of the room through the glasses, a 3-D projection of downtown Los Angeles appeared. Using a hand controller, I could point and click at bits of the city and get information about traffic and pollution measurements, among other metropolitan data points. I could also walk around the room to see the city from different angles as the projection shifted perspective seamlessly in real-time. It was all very smooth and very cool. I had already started imagining whether Google or some other entity would end up as the “search engine” of an Infomocracy-like future when it was time to go.
As I made my way downstairs at the Cosmo and back through the bright lights and loud noise of the casino, I realized that I had seen a technology that surely will arrive eventually. But pioneers don’t always end up as winners–who remembers the otherwise trailblazing Xerox Alto or GridPad tablet? Magic Leap has had its own struggles. Jessica Lessin’s tech newsletter The Information (hey, there’s that name again) this week put the startup on its 2020 list of troubled tech companies.
Whether Magic Leap develops into an amazing business is yet to be seen, but in the meantime, it has developed some amazing technology.
Aaron Pressman
Twitter: @ampressman
Email: aaron.pressman@fortune.com
