Photo via Flickr/Bob Lee
Neal Stephenson. (Photo via Flickr/Bob Lee)

How’s this for a great job? Augmented-reality startup Magic Leap has brought on sci-fi writer and game designer Neal Stephenson to be its “Chief Futurist.”

Photo via YouTube/NewsyTech
Photo via YouTube/NewsyTech

“Stephenson will work with the startup in a more theoretical, rather than technical, capacity,” Wired reports. Stephenson, the Seattle-based author of the hit sci-fi book Snow Crash, wrote a blog post for Magic Leap’s website announcing his new role:

In a teeming, overcrowded hardware lab in a South Florida strip mall, I got the demo from Rony [Abovitz], the founder and CEO. Shortly thereafter, I agreed to become Magic Leap’s Chief Futurist. Here’s where you’re probably expecting the sales pitch about how mind-blowingly awesome the demo was. But it’s a little more interesting than that. Yes, I saw something on that optical table I had never seen before–something that only Magic Leap, as far as I know, is capable of doing. And it was pretty cool. But what fascinated me wasn’t what Magic Leap had done but rather what it was about to start doing.

Augmented reality is already one of the most exciting new developments in the tech world, enough so that Magic Leap, or “the company everyone’s talking about and no one quite understands,” according to another Wired piece, recently announced it had $542 million in funding, led by Google. Just how Magic Leap intends to allow people to see 3D objects in the real world is still a mystery. For now, the world is left with images of tiny elephants dancing in our heads.

Here’s a video with more on the company.

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