Paul Reynolds (Torch 3D) on Making AR Simple to Create and the Early Days at Magic Leap

The Guest

Paul Reynolds is the co-founder and CEO of Torch, a tool for designing and prototyping Augmented Reality experiences. After a career in game development, working on projects for EA, Atari, Apple, and many others, Paul joined Magic Leap prior to their first outside round of funding. There he spent a few years leading the effort to create software development tools and resources for content developers.

Paul helped to lay the groundwork for the Magic Leap SDK, and got a good look at the future of spatial computing in a world where we’re all wearing smartglasses. He’s brought that perspective back to the realities of the present and is helping us all create that future with Torch.

There Paul joined with two other co-founders to create a tool to make it dramatically easier to design, develop, and deploy Augmented Reality apps.

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Paul Reynolds

LinkedIn | Twitter

Torch

The Conversation

In this conversation, Paul and I talk about his time at Magic Leap, including his experience with the original hardware demo called The Beast, and the excitement and chaos in those the early days. We get into his work building developer tools, and how he translated his insights at Magic Leap into his vision at Torch.

We explore why and how he’s making it easier for designers to prototype and deploy spatial experiences and who’s using mobile AR today.

Paul encourages us to take this moment in the birth of a new computing paradigm seriously – both as a huge opportunity and huge responsibility.

Jason McDowallAR smartglasses, consumer, VR