Could secretive augmented reality startup Magic Leap be working on artificial intelligence for robotics, too?
A brief mention in a lawsuit the company filed this week against two former employees indicates as much. In the suit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Magic Leap alleges that Gary Bradski—who had been Magic Leap’s senior vice president of advanced perception and intelligence and has long worked in robotics and AI—worked on proprietary technologies for the company and “was aware of and involved in projects and plans that involved deep-learning techniques for robotics.”
Magic Leap has raised over a billion dollars thus far for its technology, which mixes sharp-looking digital imagery with the real world around you, and has said it will be building this technology into a headset (it hasn’t yet released any details about when this might be available or how much it will cost, but Wired recently got to try out such a headset—see “Magic Leap Has a Headset but Its Technology Is Still Mysterious”). The company has said it’s creating a new optical chip that relies on silicon photonics in order to make its augmented-reality images work, so the idea that it’s also poking around in robotics, or at least robotics-related AI, would fit in with its efforts to explore a range of technologies.
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