“Mixed reality” is hard. It’s one thing to augment what you see on a screen (like a smartphone or a VR display with a feed from exterior cameras).

It’s much harder to augment actual, unfiltered reality coming directly into your eye. To pull off this illusion, the Magic Leap One uses a couple neat pieces of tech:

Waveguide display - Essentially a transparent screen that’s lit invisibly from the side. The waveguide (what Magic Leap calls a "photonic lightfield chip") guides light—in this case, an image—across a thin layer of glass, magnifying it and angling it into your eye.

Focus planes - On a VR display, everything is in focus all the time. Reality is different—some things look crisp while others can look blurry, depending on where your eye is focused. Magic Leap mimics this effect by stacking multiple waveguides to create focus planes—slicing up the image into crisp and blurry areas.