Magic Leap Acquiring Dacuda's 3D Scanning Assets

Update, 2/19/17, 5:36am PT: Dacuda now has an official (but rather short) statement confirming the acquisition. There are still almost no details, but a new tidbit is that the departing Dacuda team will apparently remain in Switzerland and will be led by Alexander Ilic, whose new role is GM Switzerland & Senior Director SW Engineering at Magic Leap. Current Dacuda CEO Peter Weigand will remain in his current role, leading the remaining productivity solutions wing of the company. Here is the statement in full:

Dacuda successfully sold its 3D division to mixed reality leader Magic Leap. The complete Dacuda 3D team joins Magic Leap to form its first European presence. The office in Zurich allows Magic Leap to further extend its leadership role in computer vision and deep learning technologies. Magic Leap Switzerland is led by Dacuda founder Alexander Ilic.Under the lead of Peter Weigand and Michael Born, Dacuda refocuses its activities on its successful productivity solutions with leading customers such as Sunrise, Crealogix, Unisys, and SITA.

Original article, published 2/17/17, 7:50am PT:

Magic Leap, the secretive MR startup with a sky-high valuation, is acquiring computer vision software company Dacuda. Or at least, parts of it.

According to a cryptic Dacuda blog post, the company is divesting its 3D scanning assets and refocusing on its other projects. “Dacuda is refocusing its product portfolio on their well known Productivity Solutions,” reads the blog post in part. “Dacuda boasts a successful eight year track record in B2B solutions, with products such as the world’s first Scanner Mouse and the world’s fastest mobile ID Reader.”

A look through the LinkedIn profiles of several Dacuda employees show that they’re now employees of Magic Leap. These include Sven Johner, former Dacuda finance head; Martin Zahnert, senior manager of software engineering; Quim Sanchez and Benjamin Langmann, senior software engineers; Daniel Donatsch and João Faro, software engineers; and Executive Admin “Charizze W.”

A source confirmed that the above personnel moves are part of the acquisition, not a departure en masse from Dacuda, and that Magic Leap is indeed the acquirer.

YouTube

Watch On

Magic Leap is the great gamble of the XR world. Although it’s shown its mixed reality demos to only a chosen few, it has shown nothing publicly and almost nothing privately to the media. Even so, the company, which does not yet sell a product, has enjoyed an eye-popping $1.3 billion investment, including a cool half a billion from Google. The company has published demos of its tech in action, but it appears that some aspects of those have been faked. There’s also been essentially no mention of the company’s hardware.

All of the above makes Magic Leap a candidate for vaporware of the decade, yet those who have seen the demos continue to be sufficiently impressed that they’re throwing money and acclaim at the startup. We know, at least, that Dacuda’s technology works because we’ve seen in in action.

We can extrapolate a bit about how it may play into Magic Leap’s larger plans. Dacuda uses its SLAM Scan software and a technique called sensor fusion to perform inside-out, 6DoF, room scale tracking. We saw the tech in action on an otherwise unaltered iPhone--which is to say, any device with the requisite internal sensors and this software on board can perform this same room scale tracking. It’s plausible that Magic Leap will incorporate the software into its hardware and software stack to help enable world-scale 6DoF tracking.

Presently, Magic Leap’s acquisition of Dacuda has not been officially announced, so we don’t know any terms or conditions, including the price tag. It’s also unclear what will happen to the remaining Dacuda assets and employees, but we expect to learn more about it all within days or weeks.