Tech giant, Google, has announced an alliance with Augmented Reality (AR) specialist, Magic Leap, to leverage technological infrastructure and boost customers’ experience.
Shahram Izadi, Vice President and General Manager of AR/XR at Google, confirmed the partnership in a media release seen by Newsng on Friday.
The news release continuously highlights Magic Leap’s manufacturing and optical capabilities, claiming that these capabilities enable the company to create “highly-precise eyepieces with incredibly high yield rates and quality at scale.” However, the specifics of the agreement are not at all obvious.
According to Magic Leap, the collaboration would bring together Google’s technology platforms with the optics and device manufacturing skills of Florida-based Magic Leap.
“We look forward to bringing together Magic Leap’s leadership in optics and manufacturing with our technologies to bring a wider range of immersive experiences to market.
“By combining efforts, we can foster the future of the XR ecosystem with unique and innovative product offerings,” Izadi said.
Newsng gathered that A number of well-known investors, including Google, helped Magic Leap reach a $6.4 billion value in 2018.
However, low sales resulted in layoffs and speculation about a possible sale until it was finally reorganised in 2020 to focus on business clients.
Magic Leap Chief Technology Officer, Julie Larson-Green said, “This partnership accelerates the transformative power of AR by combining our extensive optics capabilities with Google’s technologies to continue to advance immersive experiences to the developer ecosystem and for customers.
“We are looking forward to expanding the potential of XR – blending the physical world with valuable, contextually relevant solutions.”
Although the terms of the partnership are unclear, it strengthens the indications that Google may be preparing a comeback to the augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) sector, which it has mainly ceded to competitors Meta and Apple thus far.
We earlier reported that you can now minimise a Chrome custom tab in a Picture-in-Picture window using a newly launched feature, “Minimised Chrome Tabs”, in Google Chrome.
