Our inaugural edition of “What We’re Reading” comes at the end of week that saw the passing of a musical legend. But before we get to the Prince obits, there’s the matter of selecting …

The Best Thing We Read This Week!

Easy choice, really. Wired Magazine’s Kevin Kelly produced an epic piece on mysterious South Florida startup Magic Leap that serves as a great explainer on the state of the Augmented and Virtual Reality markets. It’s titled “The Untold Story of Magic Leap: The World’s Most Secretive Startup.” Marxent Product Manager Vince Kilian sent the article to the entire staff, saying, “Take 20 minutes to read this article when you have downtime, its lengthy but very informative about everyones favorite secret startup Magic Leap.”

Also Worth Your Time …

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality have become of great interest to media companies and news organizations. The New York Times offered an in-depth look at how media and entertainment companies are hoping to shape the VR and AR platforms in its piece, “Virtual Reality Lures Media Companies to a New Frontier.

Also being lured into the VR and AR space is Verizon, who purchased VR video specialist RYOT and immediately tasked it with developing innovative news and information pieces for it’s Huffington Post property. The Wall Street Journal broke down the deal in their piece, “Verizon’s AOL Buys Virtual Reality Video Specialist RYOT.”

Marxent Senior Designer Ryan Roche pointed to a piece on The Verge, titled “Mark Zuckerberg says Augmented Reality glasses are ‘what we’re trying to get to’.” “The commitment and work put into VR from Facebook is inspiring,” Ryan says of the piece. “What they have in mind for VR and what Marxent can provide just goes to show the breathe of value that the medium can provide.

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“The Stunning Allumette is the First VR Film Masterpiece,” written by Wired’s Tim Moynihan, caught the eye of Marxent Project Manager Patrice Hall, who said, “A few cool things about this: It takes a while for emerging tech like VR to mature. Films like ‘Allumette’ are signals that VR has evolved from new hotness to full-blown creative medium and meaningful storytelling. I love seeing examples like this to tuck away as creative inspiration for elements in our apps. Bonus: they used a stop-motion style, and the article promises interactivity with some elements of the scenes.”

We Read Books, Too …

Believe it or not, we do like to turn off the WiFi and do a little reading “the old fashioned way.” Marxent Marketing Creative Director Joe Johnson is currently engrossed in sci-fi novel “Ilium,” by Dan Simmons. “No spoilers,” Joe promises, “but it’s a novel set in (not)Ancient Troy that touches on quantum computing, travel, warfare, the nature of what it means to be human, the power of literature, and ultimately, the entire nature of reality.”

In the non-fiction department, Patrice Hall is working her way through Stephen Hawking’s physics classic, “The Illustrated A Brief History of Time, Updated and Expanded Edition,” about which she says, “I decided to read this classic after reading Brian Greene’s ‘The Elegant Universe’ a few years back. This edition adds new discoveries and beautiful illustrations to the original text. One of the early moments when I knew I really found a team where I fit in was a team-wide lunchtime discussion about black holes, time travel, and gravitational physics. I’d never found a group before with so many people could have a high-level discussion on a topic like this. I think that shared intellectual curiosity shows in the way we all work together.

R.I.P. Prince …


The stunning, untimely death of musical icon Prince had everyone talking. Marxent CEO Beck Besecker pointed to the above video of Jennifer Hudson singing “Purple Rain” as a fitting tribute. There were also great obituaries popping up on outlets like the New York Times, CNN, Billboard, and Time.