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After years of speculation, mockery and more and more confusing, the increased Magic Leap helmet is coming into the hands of developers and users – and its first product is a bit of wacky magic.
After officially announcing the availability of the product for pre-orders last month, the company draws the curtains on all the prestidigitation it has been cooking for several years.
The company's first developer conference is scheduled for tomorrow, with a brilliant speech and early morning, but the maker of 2.3 billion-dollar augmented reality headphones left a slew of personalities, Media types (including your humble journalist) take a look at the first official. future content partnerships from its once super secret studios.
Development studios such as Weta Workshop (whose partnership with Magic Leap began nearly a decade ago) and Wingnut AR (Peter Jackson's Augmented Reality Development Studio) revealed new games involving robots respectively. fighting and spider infestations; While Brainlab Medical Imaging Company and the Furniture and Consumer Products Store Design Advisory Service, Wayfair, showcased their Augmented Reality products to showcase the commercial use of Magic Leap in real life. Virtual.
In all, some sixteen companies presented demonstrations during the curtain-raising day.
Earlier this afternoon, Weta presented its Augmented Reality game in preview of the Magic Leap conference and it's impressive. Dr. Grordbort's robot fighting the invaders is the clearest vision of what the Magic Leap platform can do.
Magic Leap has flouted the two companies' vision of what immersive games might be like in its promotional material for years, but the culmination of the development work undertaken by the two companies was about three to five hours. the floors and doors of any room. It's magic (excuse me the easy word game).
According to Weta Games Director Greg Broadmore, the latest game is the result of six years of collaboration between the creative studio and Magic Leap.
Rony Abovitz, Magic Leap's visionary general manager, first approached Weta with a vision of "Our Blue," a large-scale immersive, science-fiction immersive world that Abovitz wanted to help achieve. Abovitz kept in touch with the Weta team and, when he started assembling the pieces for Magic Leap, invited the studio to develop content.
Dr. Grodbort's is the first fruit of this partnership and it's amazing.
Leaving aside the problems that Magic Leap always has with its field of vision and minor mechanical problems (which could have been entirely the fault of this author), Dr. Grordbort presents the Magic Leap headset as a convincing gaming device ( at a price prohibitive $ 2,295 each.
In the game, Dr. Grordbort, who bears the same name, informs users that they are the last hope to save the world from an alien robotic invasion. From there, it's about taking a blaster and shooting at potential invading robots that appear from portals around a room.
To start the game, a user maps his space by browsing through the Magic Leap. Once the device has the right configuration (process that can take up to four minutes – depending on the size), the narrative begins and the user is dragged into the world and play Dr. Grordbort.
"The game helped shape the platform," said Brodmore. "Dr. Grordbort was the problem and Magic Leap was the solution. "
Without Magic's close relationship with Magic Leap, the game from Wingnut's studio was much less robust, but no less enjoyable.
In their first foray into the world of Magic Leap, the augmented reality studio has created a game that allows the user to participate in the strangest professional training session ever.
As a new recruit in an extermination company that deals with some pretty vicious and viscous insects, the user is put to the test to know how to eliminate virtual bugs in a real space. The mapping engines and graphics are exceptional, the narrator guiding a user throughout the game shows the exceptional use of Magic Leap sound technology and the humor of the game recalls some of the best Wallace and Gromit sets.
Starting with a single bat and using a flamethrower, players were introduced to how to kill various crawling animals and make a serum to attract others. I'm not a fan of first-person shooter games (or a lot of players in general), but this Wingnut game was really fun.
And if games were one of the aspects of the spell that Magic Leap was hoping to weave with new users, the cases of commercial use were the other.
In partnership with Brainlab, the company is trying to show how its toolbox can be used in teaching and operation theaters for doctors and surgeons. During a demonstration, users were encouraged to take a look at a replica of the brain scan of a patient with a three-dimensional brain tumor. The device is intended to help physicians plan surgical procedures and understand the potential consequences of different approaches for eliminating brain growths.
Meanwhile, retailer Wayfair introduced users to a demo of its first Magic Leap app. A visualization tool that takes the furniture of a virtual showroom in the real space they would occupy.
This is part of a long-term skunkworks development project set up within the online retailer to explore augmented reality applications in order to sell more products to more people without the need for a room of physical exposure (although Wayfair has launched some popups earlier this month).
Behind all this lies a simple truth. Magic Leap needs content – almost as much as it needs to reduce the form factor and improve the usability of its first headset.
These last two requests exceeded the expectations of the most hardened critic. Apparel devices always look silly, but they feel good and the pack that drives the Magic Leap experience is one of the best: lightweight and portable, and with a battery charge of three hours, among the best sector.
It still takes a bit of assembly, since a user must determine the type of helmet he will need and choose a nasal bridge that raises it properly so that his equipment can function properly. If a user wears glasses, it will require a special order that can be ordered separately as an accessory that fits into the headset.
Other hardware elements included with the Magic Leap include a manual motion detection controller (similar to what users have experienced with a video game console) and a trend pack with the power of processing a laptop .
The device does not need to be connected to a computer, but it only works inside.
Putting aside the limits of the first generation of hardware devices, the Magic Leap is an augmented reality or virtual reality hardware as impressive as I've seen it before. Other companies may have better fields of vision and a more compact camera, but they do not have the variety of content that shines Magic Leap offers. The first partnerships that the company has signed have indeed borne fruit.
And as the deployment of its offers, the company draws lessons from the past portable helmets.
Its first customers – located in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco and Seattle – will receive a home visit from a Magic Leap employee who will explain how the product works in a thirty to sixty minute demonstration. This is the same level of personalized treatment that Google Glass has offered to its early explorers.
One of the benefits of a noise-canceling headset like Magic Leap is that it is much easier to navigate than a fully immersive VR helmet. Another solution is the flexibility it offers in terms of applications from a mixed reality.
"It's the evolution of computing," said Shrenik Sadaigi, director of next-generation experiences at Wayfair – and architect of the company's augmented and virtual reality experiments.
"We see this as a productivity tool," said Sadaigi. "Browse things on the web. It's the computer environment. Your space is your screen and your space becomes another variable on the computer platform. We want people to love the space in which they live. Using mixed reality for the application we are presenting today, we consider it a design experience. "
One of the great advances of the company's platform is the controller and its ease of use, as Sadaigi noted during our conversation. "The controller does a lot of work for you. [The company] gives you something new … it's a bit old, but in a new form. The experience is simplified: drag and click.
The voice interface that the company has built into the device and the scrolling eye function, which is part of the company's complete tracking, help manage more complex interactions.
Behind all this lies Abovitz and his crazy vision of a new computer platform.
"This decision to launch something new, bigger and more ambitious, to change the computer, was a bit crazy. It's like Bilbo Baggins has to leave the county, "Abovitz told VentureBeat earlier this year. "If you spend enough hours in a Magic Leap system, it's almost impossible to get back to your phone, computer or TV. You realize that they are very thin slices. Magic Leap gives you a huge computer volume. When you play with it, spatial computing means that you work in a volume, not just a slice. "
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