海角大神

What if you could transform your office into a steampunk robot shoot-鈥榚m-up video game?

That鈥檚 what mysterious, though buzzworthy, augmented-reality company Magic Leap is proposing via a surprise released Friday. The clip is an intriguing indication of what augmented-reality gaming could soon look like, in what is already a watershed year for the nascent technology.

The clip opens with a hand picking up Gmail and YouTube apps as if they鈥檙e staplers on a desk, and swiping, scrolling, and pinching through e-mails and videos. Those are discarded with the swipe of a hand. Up pops a spinning wheel of entertainment options, and the hand points to a video game called 鈥淒r. Grordbort presents: Victory.鈥� From there, the player selects a ray gun and robots pop out of the floorboards, jump out from behind desks, and even blast through the wall.

"This is a game we鈥檙e playing around the office right now (no robots were harmed in the making of this video)," says the caption below the video.

The tech world first noticed Magic Leap about a year ago, when the small, Hollywood, Fla.-based start-up garnered big money from a huge tech name. After finishing a $50-million round of funding last February, in October, Google sunk $542 million in the company.

The company doesn鈥檛 have a product on the market just yet, but keeps the tech world intrigued with its whimsical creations and ambiguous identity. Employees of the company have described their work as creating 鈥渃inematic reality.鈥� The website describes the company as 鈥渁n idea.鈥�

鈥淎n idea that computing should be shaped and forged to work for us: our life, our physiology, our connected relationships. That exploring human creativity is as great an adventure as exploring space,鈥� reads of its website. 鈥淚t's an idea based in the belief that people should not have to choose between technology or safety, technology or privacy, the virtual world or the real world.鈥�

Sounds like a manifesto of virtual-reality enthusiasts.

So far, however, it isn鈥檛 even clear what Magic Leap鈥檚 actual product is. All we know about the company is that it got a lot of funding, , and now turn your office into an indie video game. The company was supposed to present at the TED conference, but had to cancel for undisclosed reasons (this video was supposed to be debuted during its presentation).

But mystery may not be its case for long. In the section of its website, Magic Leap has a lengthy list of positions open, many of which seem to advertise a need for combining computer learning and biology skills. If they can get the talent that can connect the two, this hyper-reality could be actual reality in the near future.