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

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

Johnson did something Cook probably won't. In front of a crowd of hundreds of people, she was very transparent. She showed an MRI of her torso, seen through a Magic Leap 2 augmented reality headset. It showed exactly what her liver looked like — her CTO Daniel Diez said it looked fine — as a way to showcasing the kind of advances XR headsets can bring to healthcare.

Johnson thinks the precision you can get from enterprise technology that overlays moving augmented reality images onto the real world is something consumer devices are highly unlikely to achieve. And she thinks it will be an advantage her business will have for a while.

After last week's keynote, I spoke with Johnson and Diez. Johnson said she welcomes the attention Apple will bring to the XR market. In a conversation with Kimberly Powell, VP of Healthcare at Nvidia, she said Magic Leap will focus on apps that can make healthcare much more efficient.

“Magic Leap has been doing this for over a decade,” she said of Apple. "It feels good to have more participants. It will help the ecosystem grow. It gets developers in the audience excited about this medium and its programming. And we're excited for the upcoming announcement. Apple don't usually jump into a market too early, so it's very rewarding if they hit the market."

Here is an edited transcript of our interview.

Peggy Johnson is CEO of Magic Leap. She spoke on AWE USA last week.

VentureBeat: I guess the most striking thing about the keynote was that you put your innards on display.

Peggy Johnson: I knew people were going to write about this. We're so transparent at Magic Leap now! A completely different company.

The problem is that every time you show this, you need someone's permission. I'm like, "Take mine! Show what you want!" But I've only ever seen it in my doctor's office, in black and white on a television screen. I hadn't seen it until yesterday when you showed it to me, all lit up with color. All my organs. "Did I say you could…?" But it's out there now in the wild. It is also in our stand, in our meeting room. You can go in and slice down to the bone, or go back and add all the organs.

VentureBeat: Was there anything you didn't want to know? Or did you really want to see it all?

Johnson: That's a good question. But first of all, I can't really read it very well. Daniel actually went to medical school. He says, "Yeah, there's your liver." But it will be useful. Nvidia's holoscan thing, Clara, is amazing. It really is. The power it offers our developers, because we have integrated it, is exaggerated. It's awesome.

VentureBeat: It also seems to make it known to more people. You can watch this and understand it. Doctors will understand even more because they know what to look for, but ordinary people can now look at these things.

Johnson: One of the companies we worked with on Magic Leap One, BrainLab, said that not only doctors use it for pre-surgical plans...