Thanks to Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm, Star Wars will now always be everywhere forever. There are going to be new movies, new TV shows, new games, and new tchotchkes to buy for as long as Mickey can find new ideas to wring out of the 30 year-old space opera franchise. And now, Lucasfilm’s special effects division, Industrial Light and Magic, has partnered with a company rumored to be just as magical—Magic Leap—to bring Star Wars even closer to your eyeballs. Wired reported today that the two companies will be creating a “semi-secret” lab to develop Star Wars-centric augmented reality technology.
While little is known about Magic Leap’s actual technology yet, other than it’s a headset that creates some sort of virtual overlay on the real world, just about everyone in Silicon Valley has invested in the Florida-based company. It’s now valued at over $4.5 billion, according to TechCrunch, although it hasn’t set any sort of timeline for when it’ll release a commercial product. Regardless, Magic Leap and Lucasfilm released a short clip to show what a life lived under a Star Wars filter might look like.
The clip, which seems to be an odd truncation of story lines from A New Hope and Return of the Jedi, shows droids C-3PO and R2-D2 overlaid onto what appears to be someone’s living room, with C-3PO complaining that the two of them are about to be blown up by a squad of stormtroopers. “We have not yet completed the mission,” C-3PO says, either talking about his orders from Luke Skywalker, or the fact that Magic Leap has still not shown off what it’s building. “How did we get into this mess?” C-3PO adds, “I really don’t know how.”
In the words of Death Vader: “Search your feelings—you know it to be true.”