AR gets its big moment in the spotlight | Magic Leap CEO

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Apple CEO Tim Cook is likely talking about his mixed reality headset today. But Peggy Johnson, CEO of Magic Leap, upstaged him last week during a talk at Augmented World Expo, a trade show attended by thousands of XR industry followers.

Johnson did something that Cook is not likely to do. Before a crowd of hundreds, she was very transparent. She showed off an MRI of her torso, as viewed via a Magic Leap 2 augmented reality headset. It showed with precision what her liver looked like — her CTO Daniel Diez said it was looking good — as a way of showing the kind of advances that XR headsets can bring to healthcare.

Johnson believes that the precision you can get from enterprise technology that overlays AR animated images on the real world is something that consumer devices are very unlikely to do. And she thinks that will be an edge that her company will have for a while.

After the keynote last week, I spoke with Johnson and Diez. Johnson said she welcomed the attention that Apple would bring to the XR market. In a conversation with Nvidia healthcare vice president Kimberly Powell, she said Magic Leap will focus on applications that can make healthcare much more efficient.

“Magic Leap has been doing this for over a decade,” she said, regarding Apple. “It feels good to have more entrants. It will help grow the ecosystem. It gets the developers in the audience excited about this medium and the programming in it. And we’re excited about the coming announcement. Apple doesn’t typically jump into a market too early. So that’s very validating if they’re coming into the market.”

Here’s an edited transcript of our