Over-the-Top Inside Magic Leap Developer Conference

A giant astronaut dominated the crowd of eager participants preparing to sign up for the first official Magic Leap developer conference this week. With lanyards around our necks, we all cast a sinister glow of colored devices attached to our insignia, as if we were heading for a rave around 1988 or a party at the corner of Haight and Ashbury.

As the line wended its way into the Magic Box in downtown Los Angeles, you could feel the wait. For the assembled developers, it was a long time.

Graphics everywhere trippant reinforced a real theme "there". In fact, the whole morning was a strangely unreal experience with speakers on the stage inviting us constantly to "open your mind". Video game designer Robin Hunicke read a poem about what appeared to be "Philosophy 101" lectures by Rony Abovitz, CEO of Magic Leap, and futuristic resident Neal Stephenson. Stephenson then presented a prototype of a game where goats were nibbling a couch.

If you have 3:15 (this is not a type of error), you can watch the entire speech below. I escaped after 2.5 to view the demo schedule.

Enter the Magicverse

According to Abovitz and Stephenson, Magic Leap wants its legions of developers to create content (because there is not much yet) for "The Magicverse": an intoxicating mashup of the multiverse, Meta and The Matrix (of course) .

This vision includes sensory computing in the field, bright field, sound field, haptics, high fidelity and co-presence (spending time together in our worlds while wearing reality helmets). augmented or virtual), a sort of layered digital mesh extended over our cities.

"Hey," Abovitz said on stage, summing up his big ideas. "We need a burning man [of our own] so we can do a vision quest! "

The crowd applauded wildly. They understood the Burning Man concept, even though they never went there. This was an idea that they could take behind.

Billion dollars baby?

Does the Magic Leap One Creator Edition (delivered for 2300 USD) worth the $ 2.3 billion invested? To be honest, I do not see any difference compared to Microsoft HoloLens, but read well the excellent in-depth evaluation of the device from my colleague PCMag, Will Greenwald.

But more specifically, is augmented reality, as opposed to virtual reality, the next computer model, as the speakers said?

Who knows? It could be.

Overlaying the real to the unreal (AR) is an interesting prospect with potential for money. Which, let's face it, has not been very well seen in the world of virtual reality so far. However, this might not be as madly exciting (or as mystical) as Magic Leap has suggested.

I've tried fascinating AR solutions, Kopin anti-retention glasses for high-level cyclists at startups such as Vuforia and Baobab. These examples of RA mean business. But they are not exciting. Everyone knows that you need glittering magic before the market is really excited – it's there that the author George RR Martin comes into the picture.

Climb aboard the browser

As the opening notes headed towards their last hour, I slipped back and headed for the demos. This was where the interesting things were: the party room you were looking for. Behind a thick black drape from the floor to the ceiling was a huge 3D printed sculpture that looked like a dystopian future (in a good way).

There, I met Jeff Fullerton, Partnership Manager at Meow Wolf, the entertainment company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who intrigued George RR Martin so much that he invested Throne Games millions in the business. Fullerton showed me how to ride in The Navigator, handed me a Magic Leap One, told the bright neon control panel and told me to "look forward".

(Image: Kate Russell)

A mesh of AR mesh appeared in my field of vision while I followed (a little) the story of a lost planet called Eemia. I do not know what it really was, but I did not care. I thought it was cool, I felt transported, and that's what Xtended Reality (XR) is all about.

The Navigator "is our first foray into the next generation of technology," said Fullerton. "We have been doing research and development for two years at a tractor manufacturing plant in Santa Fe, in a 70,000-foot tractor manufacturing plant, where we use a high-power laser to cut those huge sheets of paper. 39, steel and this layer increased ".

(Image: Kate Russell)

Meow Wolf was an early development partner of Magic Leap and can attract a whole new audience to his platform, especially with the opening of two other unique sites in Denver and Vegas by 2020.

But will he earn money?

Experiments like The Navigator could become the version of this generation of arcade gaming rooms where I spent much of my youth in Brighton, England. But I do not really see how that would become enough of a real business for Magic Leap.

Meet the virtual humans

In the end, despite all the fantastic futuristic fantasy speeches, the only truly viable business models for AR (not to mention the other "R's") are the military, manufacturing and medicine. As I've seen with Kopin, who works with Raytheon, and ScopeAR, who has industrial contracts, superimposing a digital increase to your IRL environment has a real use case.

Dr. Skip Rizzo, from the USC Institute of Creative Technologies, and his development partner, Arno Hartholt, spoke at a panel. We have already met with J wrote about Dr. Rizzo's work with VR to help soldiers struggling with PTSD after visits to Iraq and Afghanistan, and about providing virtual coaches to the community. United States Veterans Initiative.

Like Meow Wolf, Dr. Rizzo's team at ICT was an early development partner on the Magic Leap platform and tested new and interesting ideas. They have ported their virtual human technology into Magic Leap's AR interface and are currently testing it, in partnership with the Dan Marino Foundation, to help people with autism find a job. Check it out in the video below.

I spoke with Dr. Rizzo, by email, before the conference. Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation:

Dr. Rizzo, how long have you had access to the Magic Leap Development Kit?
We had access to a Magic Leap prototype in spring 2018 after a long series of discussions in collaboration with Magic Leap and the Dan Marino Foundation.

What is your opinion on this?
Magic Leap One has been an awesome device to use. This opens your eyes to the future of mixed reality systems that will continue to evolve over time! I think Magic Leap One (and the inevitable versions of its successors) will become a real working system, especially for its use in this type of prosocial applications.

How does it fit into your work at USC?
We have been developing the VITA Interaction Training Agent (VITA) for a few years now, but we have been content to present virtual human content on a flat screen monitor or television. We can now place a virtual human in a real relevant environment. We believe that by exploiting such a real context, the effects of the training could best translate into actual performance when the user is expected to actually interact during a job interview with a real person! This work aims to help people with autism improve their job interview skills.

What have you built for the platform so far and what do you plan to use as part of your job to move forward?
We aim to extend this system to other populations, including veterans, and to help people on the verge of being released from jail time, where they will not be released. Getting a job at release is linked to a reduction in recidivism. I also want to broaden the work to social skills training beyond job interview skills … perhaps create an "obstacle course" in social skills that would usually be helpful for many people at the workplace. people with autism. The integration of virtual humans with mixed reality systems offers incredible possibilities for many types of clinical and general training applications. We have some other ideas on the drawing board that I can not talk about for the moment, but they are very exciting and go in the same "pro-social" direction that we have borrowed in the past.

Is Magic Jumping the future of computer science?

What Mr Rizzo was doing clearly has a purpose (many in fact) and commercial viability.

Fantastic speeches and goat demos aside, it was fun to rub shoulders with developers who were clearly enthusiastic about the potential of the platform. But as Dr. Rizzo has said, it is more likely that when all the hype has stopped, the useful elements of the AR platform will become more performant and less exposed, thus offering real cases of serious harm. professional use for military, medical and manufacturing purposes.

But at that moment, I have the feeling that Rony Abovitz and his team will have headed for the desert to embark on a new adventure.

If you want to "hack (or change) the reality", apply for the mixed reality hackathon hosted by Magic Leap's new partner and investor, AT & T, scheduled for November 9-11 in San Francisco.