In 1992, science fiction author Neal Stephenson introduced the Metaverse, a virtual reality world he created where humans can interact with each other using their avatars.
More than two decades after, Stephenson is on the verge of creating the same fantasy world he created in his most popular work "Snow Crash" as he joins stealthy augmented reality startup Magic Leap as the company's chief futurist.
On Tuesday, the Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based company's eccentric founder and CEO Rony Abovitz announced in a statement that Stephenson will not be developing the technology behind the "cinematic reality" being touted by the company. Instead, he will cook up of ways to bring the advanced and yet little understood technology to the masses.
"Neal is a true visionary and the very first to conceptualize a social, virtual world in a coherent way," says Abovitz. "I am looking forward to his insights as chief futurist for the company, helping the team and I bring Magic Leap's technology to the world."
Despite a physical location that is an entire country away from Silicon Valley, where most technology startups usually crop up, Magic Leap earned for itself a reputation as one of the companies to look out for after a recently reported round of funding led by Google and other major investors that raised $542 million.
Stephenson, whose science fiction epic "Seveneves" will be published by HarperCollins in 2015, says he was wooed by Magic Leap a few months ago when Abovitz and company showed up at his door in Seattle with Orcrist, a mythic sword from J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit."
In a blog post, the "Cryptomicon" author says he was convinced to join the company after the Magic Leap chief gave him the demo in the company's "teeming, overcrowded hardware lab in a South Florida strip mall."
"Yes, I saw something on that optical table I had never seen before-something that only Magic Leap, as far as I know, is capable of doing," says Stephenson. "And it was pretty cool. But what fascinated me wasn't what Magic Leap had done but rather what it was about to start doing."
Stephenson says Magic Leap is developing a new technology that will "produce a synthesized light field that falls upon the retina in the same way as light reflected from real objects in your environment." Magic Leap itself has been vague about what it is working on, beyond showing pictures of a holographic elephant sitting in somebody's hands and pink seahorses flying inside a classroom.
Others have speculated that the company is working on a Google Glass-like technology that combines the physical world with computer-generated graphics, thus explaining Google's interest.
Whatever Magic Leap is working on, it will be for "readers, learners, scientists and artists," but the best place to start is in gaming since, Stephenson says, "creative minds who make games have done about as much as is possible in two dimensions."
"It feels like the right time to give those people a new medium: one in which three-dimensionality is a reality and not just an illusion laboriously cooked up by your brain, and in which it's possible to get up off the couch and move - not only around your living room, but wherever on the face of the earth the story might take you," he says.
Last week, Magic Leap made another notable hire in the person of Scott Henry, the chief financial officer of Beats Electronics before it was purchased by Apple. Scott Henry is joining Magic Leap as the company's new chief financial officer.
