Everyone has an opinion about Magic Leap. It's either a revolutionary augmented reality company that could change the face of entertainment, or it's emblematic of everything wrong with the technology industry -- an over-hyped, multi-billion dollar pipe dream. Last week, we saw the first impressions of the company's long-awaited headset, which splashed a bit of reality on the company's hype cycle. Now that we have a better sense of what Magic Leap's $2,295 hardware is capable of, we can take a step back and consider what the company is actually trying to accomplish. In a brief demonstration, I found the Magic Leap One headset much lighter than I expected, even though it looks like a pair of '80s sci-fi goggles.

Deep inside a nondescript building in Plantation, Florida, Magic Leap has built a gadget that is real, and cool, and can mix three-dimensional virtual images with reality better than any other augmented or mixed-reality headset--whatever you want to call it--that I've seen. The big question now is: what will people do with this thing? The company hopes developers and other creative types will start coming up with answers shortly. Because today Magic Leap will start selling its long-awaited first gadget, a pair of black, tinted, fly-eyed goggles called Magic Leap One. You'll first have to register as a developer--the company hopes a community of developers will emerge to build apps for the headset, as they do for smartphones--and shell out $2,295 for it (for comparison, Microsoft's HoloLens headset, also still aimed at developers, costs $3,000 or $5,000).

The last time I visited Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz at the company's secretive Florida offices, he told me about the time he met Beaker, the meeping beeping scientist on the Muppet Show. The guy was a film director at creator Jim Henson's studio, Abovitz explained enthusiastically. "He's tall, he looks just like Beaker and he acts like Beaker! You're like, 'How do I know him?' And then you find out he was the influence behind Beaker, and it all sort of makes sense," he said.

It's that time of year again: the special season where everybody's favorite mythical creature makes its annual appearance. Seemingly once a year, the secretive startup reveals what it's been up to and, on Wednesday, revealed renderings of its latest AR headset prototype. The company even deigned to allow a Rolling Stone reporter to take the system for a spin. But for everything that Magic Leap showed off, the demonstrations and teaser materials still raise as many questions than they answer. There's a whole lot about the Magic Leap system that we don't know, so maybe let's hold off on losing our minds about the perceived imminent AR revolution until we do.

Magic Leap today revealed a mixed reality headset that it believes reinvents the way people will interact with computers and reality. Unlike the opaque diver's masks of virtual reality – which replace the real world with a virtual one – Magic Leap's device, called Lightwear, resembles goggles, which you can see through as if you're wearing a special pair of glasses. The goggles are tethered to a powerful pocket-sized computer, called the Lightpack, and can inject life-like moving and reactive people, robots, spaceships – anything – into a person's view of the real world. "There's something about hanging out with comics and being able to experience them at your own pace that is very hypnotic," Ben Wolstenholme says Magic Leap, founded in 2011, remains a bit of a mystery, confounding tech writers and analysts with its ability to pull in seemingly endless amounts of investment from major companies and interest from bright minds. While the secretive augmented-reality startup has released a few high-level concept videos that show what it hopes to achieve by injecting virtual creations into the real world, it hasn't shown off a single piece of working technology to the public. It's been so long that some publications have even publicly wondered if the entire thing is a sort of scheme. That, despite the company's ever-increasing valuation – last listed at $6 billion. The whole company rides on the back of founder Rony Abovitz, a bombastic bioengineer who helped design the surgery-assisting robot arms of Mako Surgical Corp. The sale of that company for $1.65 billion funded nearly the first four years of Magic Leap. The last time the company spoke publicly in any great detail was about a year ago, when it invited Wired magazine to its South Florida headquarters to see the tech in action, but not to write about what the hardware looked like. Earlier this month, Glixel received a similar invitation. Abovitz invited me down to visit the company headquarters in Fort Lauderdale to write about the science of the technology and to finally detail how the first consumer headgear works and what it looks and feels like. This revelation – the first real look at what the secretive, multi-billion dollar company has been working on all these years – is the first step toward the 2018 release of the company's first consumer product. It also adds some insight into why major companies like Google and Alibaba have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into Magic Leap, and why some researchers believe the creation could be as significant as the birth of the Internet. Technology like this "is moving us toward a new medium of human-computing interaction," said David Nelson, creative director of the MxR Lab at USC Institute for Creative Technologies.

The hottest ticket in tech is an invitation to a banal South Florida business park, indistinguishable on the outside from countless other office buildings that dot America's suburban landscape. Humanoid robots walk down the halls, and green reptilian monsters hang out in the lounge. Cartoon fairies turn the lights on and off. Even the office equipment does the impossible. The high-definition television hanging on the wall seems perfectly normal. Incredibly, it is now levitating in midair. Get as close as you'd like, check it out from different angles.

The hottest ticket in tech is an invitation to a banal South Florida business park, indistinguishable on the outside from countless other office buildings that dot America's suburban landscape. Humanoid robots walk down the halls, and green reptilian monsters hang out in the lounge. Cartoon fairies turn the lights on and off. Even the office equipment does the impossible. The high-definition television hanging on the wall seems perfectly normal. Incredibly, it is now levitating in midair. Get as close as you'd like, check it out from different angles.

Multi-billion dollar startup Magic Leap, which is building a cutting-edge augmented reality headset, is currently in a legal battle with the engineer who started its first Silicon Valley office. Court filings reveal new secrets about the company, including a west coast software team in disarray, insufficient hardware for testing, and a secret skunkworks team devoted to getting patents and designing new prototypes -- before its first product has even hit the market. The company believes that Adrian Kaehler and Gary Bradski, two VPs at Magic Leap, tried to rip off its technology and talent to start a new robotics startup. Kaehler and Bradski, who sued the company for wrongful termination earlier this year, say that Magic Leap unfairly robbed them of their shares in Magic Leap and broke their employment contracts. Magic Leap countered by suing the pair for misappropriation of trade secrets.

I was jolted awake by the sound of airplanes from the Fort Lauderdale Airport. The musty South Florida air hung thick; the sketchy airport Sheraton air conditioning system offered no relief. It was March 24, and I prepared to make a visit to Magic Leap. By that time, I'd signed an NDA so onerous that I can't tell you much about the mixed-reality technology, how it works, or when it might be available. This is the part I can tell you.