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The talk starts at 5:02 / 21:30 for a Strange Loop
Rony Abovitz "Beyond the Event Horizon: There’s No Turning Back, So You May As Well Join in on the Fun"
at The Congress on the Future of Engineering Software, COFES 2011
Among the participants of COFES 2011 was Sam Miller. At the time at NASA's Langley Research Center where he invented a photogrammetry system:
The congress took place on April 15 and 16. On May 5 2011 Magic Leap Inc. was founded by Rony Abovitz, Sam Miller and others and the photogrammetry system was licensed by Magic Leap in early 2012.
Rony Abovitz probably saw Sam Miller at COFES 2009 for the first time where Miller gave a talk:
Rony later mentioned that - among others - there was a "thought leader" from NASA at the congress.
He also noted another idea after the congress: "Overall a great conference on the future of technology, software, and engineering. Unresolved questions as to how to integrate or possibly change/blur what it means to be a developer. Users may become developers on a mass scale - but no one has figured out how to do this yet. The wide net of collaborative development, concurrent engineering, and searching the long tail for good thoughts has been thrown - lots of strange fish to sift through."
Compare that with the VB interview in Dec 2018: »We call Magic Leap One a “creator edition.” I think there’s a sea change happening in the idea of what is a creator and what is a consumer. In Magic Leap, you’re really actively creating with the computer. It’s not so much for passivity, the idea of just being a passive consumer of stuff. I think you’re going to see a blend with most people – not just people who are developers or artists, but a lot of people will become co-creators in some way. I think it actively inspires you to be part creator and part consumer.
That’s the blend for us, for all time. We’re trying to make a device that inspires people to be creative and become part of a much wider creative community. Every person has creative potential. We’re not releasing a dev kit. We want to inspire people who are creative, whether you’re a writer, a poet, an artist, a hardcore coder. We want to move people out of being passive consumers.«
Brad Holtz, one of the founders of COFES, went so far as to say that "Magic Leap was conceived at COFES". Well, it definitely is one of the important parts of the company's history.
In 2013 Randall Hand, another co-founder of Magic Leap, who worked with Rony at Z-KAT and in the early days of MAKO, went to the congress and in 2016 Sam Miller who participated in and helped put on COFES for many years, gave another talk: