All the way back in 2015, a company called Magic Leap announced an augmented reality system that would work to merge the virtual and the real, called mixed reality. They’ve worked on it pretty secretively since then, and the system didn’t ship as was told. It’s now almost 2018, and the developer is back again to assure us that their augmented reality goggles, the Magic Leap One creator edition, are on the verge of shipping out. What does this mysterious eyewear do? Some rather interesting things, if it delivers.
Taken from the website, the Magic One will allow users to pull web content from the screen and suspend it in the air, work multiple screens at once and take them with you or save them to a real-world location and walk away for a bit, bring gaming into real-life environments, and meet with other people like they were in the same room with you. Some of those features are a bit more believable than others, but the way the goggles handle their job is by creating a digital reconstruction of the real world and placing its objects in that copy. That’s the layman’s term of it, anyway.
There are three pieces of the tech. The goggles themselves, which look less dorky than most of the VR tech we’ve seen, but not quite “cool.” The light pack that drives the software and can clip to your belt, and the one-handed controller that resembles a Wii Nunchuk without the control stick. Again, the product is due to ship out some time next year with its creator portal and SDK, and consumers will be able to see (and hear) for themselves if the wait was worth it. No word on an exact date or a price as of yet. Augmented reality isn’t as new as virtual reality, so it’s more believable that longer strides are being made with it. Keep your peepers open for more as it comes.
Matt Eschbach is a PC, Mac and Android indie game developer and fiction writer. His works have won multiple monetary awards from various contests. Graduating college in 2012 with a major in Game Design, Matt spends his time making stuff up and then building it. His favorite hobby… is sleeping.
