Earlier this year Leap Motion had been teasing some very compelling AR interface prototypes, demonstrated on an unknown headset. The company revealed that the headset is a prototype dev kit, designed in-house, offering a combined 100 degree field of view, low latency, and high resolution. Leap Motion has begun open-sourcing the design of the device, which they’re calling Project North Star.
Update (6/6/18): Leap Motion has begun the process of open-sourcing the North Star headset. Today the company published a new hub page for project North Star and detailed documentation showing how to construct the headset. Mechanical and electronic schematics and designs have been release on GitHub, and everything falls under an Apache 2.0 license.
Image courtesy Leap Motion
“Our goal is for the reference design to be accessible and inexpensive to build, using off-the-shelf components and 3D-printed parts. At the same time, these are still early days and we’re looking forward to your feedback on this initial release. The mechanical parts and most of the software are ready for primetime, while other areas are less developed,” the company notes on its blog. “The reflectors and display driver board are custom-made and expensive to produce in single units, but become cost-effective at scale. We’re also exploring how the custom components might be made more accessible to everyone.”
The company promises additional details and updates to the open-sourced information “in the coming weeks.”
Original Article (4/9/18): Founded in 2010, Leap Motion develops leading hand-tracking hardware and software. Though their first piece of hardware was designed for desktop input, the company pivoted into VR, and more recently the AR space, exploring how their hand-tracking tech can enable new and intuitive means of interacting with virtual and augmented information.
With AR hardware still in its infancy, the company sought to build their own in-house prototype AR headset, targeting specifications far beyond what’s available to consumers today. This was so they could design AR interfaces, based on their hand tracking tech, targeting the capabilities of future AR headsets. They’re calling this work Project North Star, and plan to open-source the design next week, saying that such a headset could cost “under $100 dollars to produce at scale.”
Image courtesy Leap Motion
The prototype headset uses side-mounted displays with large ‘bird bath’ style optics (similar to the Meta 2 approach), which afford the device a 1,600 × 1,400 per-eye resolution at 120 FPS, with over 100 degrees of combined field of view, and hand-tracking from the company’s latest hardware which tracks at 150Hz over a 180 × 180 degree area.
The version of Project North Star which Leap Motion plans to open-source is actually a pared back version of an earlier prototype which boasted greater specs, but was quite a burden to wear. The team at Leap Motion constructed this earlier version as a baseline of what could be achieved.
An earlier Project North Star prototype aimed to embody top specs, but wasn’t very concerned with form factor. | Image courtesy Leap Motion
“[…] we wanted to create something with the highest possible technical specifications, and then work our way down until we had something that struck a balance between performance and form-factor,” the company shared on its blog today. “[…] The vertical field of view struck us most of all; we could now look down with our eyes, put our hands at our chests and still see augmented information overlaid on top of our hands. This was not the minimal functionality required for a compelling experience, this was luxury.”
With a good look at what could be achieved, the team used masking tape over the lenses to crop down the field of view to get a feel for how much they could reduce the size of the lenses before losing some of the essential experience due to the lower field of view. Once they found that balance they began the process of cutting smaller optics and shrinking the headset, moving from cell phone displays to a custom display system using a pair of 3.5″ fast-switching LCD displays.
“We ended up with something roughly the size of a virtual reality headset. In whole it has fewer parts and preserves most of our natural field of view. The combination of the open air design and the transparency generally made it feel immediately more comfortable than virtual reality systems (which was actually a bit surprising to everyone who used it),” the company writes. “[…] Putting this headset on, the resolution, latency, and field of view limitations of today’s [AR] systems melt away and you’re suddenly confronted with the question that lies at the heart of this endeavor: What shall we build?”
Indeed, with hardware in hand, the company has been focusing on that question; using a wearable camera, it was the Project North Star prototype through which Leap Motion’s VP of Design, Keiichi Matsuda, shot those tantalizing ‘virtual wearable’ prototype videos which we recently called “a potent glimpse at the future of your smartphone.”
Image courtesy Leap Motion
Leap Motion says they have a few tweaks left to do before open-sourcing the Project North Star design next week, including “room for enclosed sensors and electronics, better cable management, cleaner ergonomics and better curves […] and support for off the shelf head-gear mounting systems.”
There’s also a number of areas where Leap Motion says that Project North Star is ripe for further development:
Inward-facing embedded cameras for automatic and precise alignment of the augmented image with the user’s eyes as well as eye and face tracking.
Head mounted ambient light sensors for 360 degree lighting estimation.
Directional speakers near the ears for discrete, localized audio feedback
Electrochromatic coatings on the reflectors for electrically controllable variable transparency
Micro-actuators that move the displays by fractions of a millimeter to allow for variable and dynamic depth of field based on eye convergence
With the open-sourcing of the Project North Star hardware and software, Leap Motion hopes that the design will “spawn further endeavors that will become available to the rest of the world.”
The developers behind Modbox (2016), the VR physics sandbox for SteamVR-compatible headsets, have been experimenting with augmented reality recently, something they say is a perfect fit for the Modbox software.
Developer Lee Vermeulen didn’t wait for VR headsets like the Vive Pro to get an AR function, but rather strapped a stereoscopic Zed Mini to his original HTC Vive in effort to push Modbox forward into augmented reality.
“We are planning to make Modbox into a AR building application, which we feel it’s perfect for,” Vermeulen told Road to VR.
Image courtesy Stereolabs
In VR, Moxbox basically offers users a sandbox to experiment with toys, mods, and a place for impressive object destruction, although the app has taken a slightly more serious tone lately with its recent update which allows multiple users to concurrently script entity behavior much like you can in the Unity game engine. Modbox is currently in Early Access on Steam, supporting HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, although that may change in the near future.
AR games, Vermeulen tells us, “need to match the environment they’re in; so to do that, games usually tend to adjust based on the environment in a procedural way. For Modbox though, we’re creating something that allows people to make games to exactly match their environment, and hook up their AR worlds to their smart home.”
Modbox AR Experiments
While the team hasn’t discussed when they’re releasing the AR version of Modbox, Vermeulen highlighted a few interesting use-cases, including a way to change the color of his WiFi-connected Philips Hue Lights, and to turn each light off by ‘shooting’ it with a virtual bow and arrow:
Here, they show off what a self-made AR version of Space Pirate Trainer (2017) might look like. Drone battle in the living room anyone?:
These AR experiments are possible because Vermeulen previously mapped his environment and placed the virtual items in himself, something that requires a little DIY, but entirely possible thanks to the application’s numerous entities including weapons, objects, and NPCs.
Below we see Vermeulen importing a NPC and playing catch with a virtual basketball. To create the effect of ‘pulling’ the NPC from his monitor, he set a virtual camera to match the monitor’s position, making it seem like a magic window.
Virtual reality developers eyeballing augmented reality can get started using this setup, although admittedly the ZED Mini camera + VR headset combo actually overshoots the mark somewhat. It relies on a gaming computer’s elevated graphical capabilities, and presents the user with a comparatively wide field of view not possible on current AR headsets. The Vive controllers, which have 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) positional tracking, are also unique to VR at the moment, although Magic Leap One is said to ship later this year with a single 6DoF controller which could allow for many of these sorts of interactions.
Just like in the early days of virtual reality, the first developers to create something fun and useful are kind of like the first miners to a gold rush. So while AR headsets still have a ways to go, seeing these early stabs at solving the question of content gives us an exciting look into what could be the near future of AR head-mounted displays.
Despite some reports last year suggesting that Microsoft may have discontinued HoloLens, the company has affirmed its work on a new version of the AR headset.
Back in July of 2017, HoloLens’ Director of Science, Marc Pollefeys, wrote that the company was working on a new version of HoloLens’ so-called “HPU” (holographic processing unit) chip, which is the nerve center for the headset’s many external sensors. Deep within that announcement was the subtle mention that the newer chip is “designed to work in the next version of HoloLens.”
But HoloLens, still the only widely available AR headset today, has been going strong, and perhaps even accelerating—Microsoft has been expanding HoloLens’ availability ever since, now offering it for sale in 41 countries, and recently debuting options for rentals and even a certified hard hat offering.
We announced last July that the next version of HoloLens will further incorporate AI into our custom silicon in the HoloLens the Holographic Processing Unit or HPU for short. This continues our journey of enabling computers to truly perceive their environments, and we’re just beginning. The computing power delivered by the cloud is one of the catalysts accelerating AI, and this is the year that the mixed reality cloud becomes real. Cloud-assisted AI for understanding physical objects is happening today. Combining this with mixed reality will enable us to deliver persistent mixed reality experiences with people, places, and things. [our emphasis]
The company says that the new, custom, HPU chip will include an AI co-processor which is designed to efficiently run deep neural networks, which are algorithms for pattern recognition and machine learning (and potentially key to solving some of the biggest challenges facing AR today).
Given the premise of Kipman’s blog post, ‘What to expect for Mixed Reality in 2018’, he may even be hinting that we’re likely to see a ‘HoloLens 2’ headset this year.
Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz took the stage at the Code Media conference last night to talk a little bit more about the company’s upcoming AR headset, Magic Leap One. While we now know the headset will probably cost the same as a premium computer, Abovitz also co-announced with NBA Commissioner Adam Silver that Magic Leap would be collaborating with the NBA and Turner to develop an AR app for the headset.
As it’s planned now, the NBA app is said to let users spawn virtual displays playing regular 2D televised games “at any size, and in any location combined with supplemental graphics that allow fans to enjoy their favorite stats, replays and commentary” says Jeff Ruediger in a blogpost, Managing Director of Magic Leap Screens.
When asked how sport-focused VR video stacks up to Magic Leap’s upcoming NBA AR app, Abovitz said this:
You don’t lose the social aspect of being together [when using Magic Leap One]. If you actually shut out the world completely, then I think it’s very isolating, so we’re not isolating you at all. You can watch a game, go to your kitchen, grab a beer, and you’re still watching the game. Say ‘hi’ to friends, go back and sit down, and it’s aware of what you’re doing, like if you want to get up and go do something, it can just pause everything, because it knew you got up and went somewhere.[If] you went upstairs to get something, suddenly the game reappears upstairs […] It takes everything you know about regular television and amplifies that.
At launch, Ruediger says, the NBA Magic Leap One app will have a curated list of archived NBA games featuring matchups from recent seasons, and a selection of highlight clips.
Other than the complete surprise that a Magic Leap One headset can actually fit on Shaquille O’Neal’s head, a standard “Magic Leap large” Abovitz called it, Shaq also talks a bit about some of the prototype tech he saw using the headset.
“When I went to Magic Leap, I put on a pair of [Ones], and I watched a full-court game right here,” Shaq points to a table to illustrate. “Not flat; Lebron was right here. I seen Lebron take a shot, like it was the most amazing thing. And then I went over here,” Shaq motions to another surface to illustrate, “and I’m watching the Orlando Magic play the Los Angeles Lakers.”
Check out His Royal Shaq-ness below:
The NBA app is also said to integrate volumetric video of Shaq, bringing the 7’1″ (2.16 m) Goliath into your living room.
In an interview today, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz danced around questions regarding pricing of the forthcoming Magic Leap One AR headset, saying its pricing should be thought of like a “premium computer,” and that the company is likely to have multiple tiers of the headset to reach different segments.
Speaking on stage at the Code Media conference in Huntington Beach, CA today, Abovitz said that details on pricing and a more specific 2018 launch date for the Magic Leap One headset would be coming this Spring. While he wasn’t ready to pin down dates or pricing, he did give some hints, possibly confirming prior reports stating that the first headset would be priced around $1,000 or more.
“[Magic Leap One] is a premium computer, so I would think of [pricing] that way,” Abovitz said when pressed on pricing. He later said that, over time, the company expects to have multiple tiers of AR headsets. “Think of [Magic Leap One] as prosumer-ish, and then we’ll have even higher-end for, like, hyper-pro, and then we’ll have, like, [lower] wide mass market [tier].”
Asked if he would consider $200–$300 a “mass market” price, Abovitz quickly answered “no,” before elaborating. “I think Magic Leap is like… think higher-end mobile phone to higher-end tablet zone, [that’s] probably our [price] floor.”
The Magic Leap One AR headset, featuring a battery/compute pack, and controller | Image courtesy Magic Leap
When the interviewer then pointed to his $1,000 iPhone X as an example of a “high-end mobile phone”, Abovitz didn’t disagree with the comparison. He went on to justify the value proposition of the device.
“[…] the number of devices it’s potentially replacing… if you actually add all that up, at some point—we’re not saying for ML One […]—your phones, your televisions, your laptops, your tablets, that add up to thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, [they] all get virtualized,” Abovitz said. “So the economy of what we’re building can actually replace—not on day one, but over the next, let’s say, gen two / gen three—a whole suite of consumer electronics.”
Responding to the interviewer’s question about who the target audience is for the initial launch of Magic Leap One, Abovitz confirmed it will be open for sale to anyone from the outset.
“Magic Leap One, we call it Creator Edition, it’s [for] people who are enthusiasts developers, creators, brands, artists, partner; people that want to get an early taste of what the future looks like,” he said. “It’s not necessarily for everyone right away […] it’s not a dev kit in the sense that… we’re not blocking [anyone from buying it].”
If you haven’t touched your Lenovo Mirage AR headset since Christmas, now may be the time to jump back in for the latest content expansion to the lightsaber-intensive Star Wars: Jedi Challenges.
The content expansion, which is now available for free, is the first major update to the app since it was released back in November alongside the smartphone-driven AR headset.
New content includes:
New Lightsaber Duel – Players can duel two elite Praetorian Guards featured in The Last Jedi. This is the first time Jedi Challenges players will duel two characters at the same time.
New Planet for Strategic Combat – Three thrilling new levels of Strategic Combat set on Crait, a brand new planet that debuts in the film, will come with the update. Battle new enemies and vehicles including the formidable First Order AT-M6 walker.
New Content in Assault mode – All-new enemies and levels will be introduced, including the First Order Stormtrooper Executioner and Riot Control Stormtrooper.
Introduction of Porgs – Players will be rewarded with fan-favorite porgs in augmented reality.
image courtesy Lenovo
The Mirage AR ships with a lightsaber controller, which is localized with the help of the headset’s on-board cameras and a separate tracking beacon. Besides the obvious implication of lightsaber duels, Jedi Challenges offers a smattering of minigames, including HoloChess and an RTS game called Strategic Combat.
As far as we know, this is the only app currently available on the Mirage AR (not to be confused with Lenovo’s ‘Mirage Solo’ standalone VR headset), still making it an expensive gimmick at $200. Although if you’re a Star Wars superfan, that “collectible quality” lightsaber might be just enough to entice the credit card out of your wallet.
Dell and AR headset manufacturer Meta announced a new partnership, allowing Dell to be the first third-party seller of the Meta 2 Augmented Reality Development Kit. Dell says that through the partnership, they’ll also be able to provide both the Meta 2 Dev Kit and the tools necessary to create immersive experiences to businesses involved in sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing and construction.
The Meta 2 is a ‘tethered’ AR headset featuring an impressively large 90 degree field of view, something made possible by its use of a single 2560 × 1440 LCD panel displaying on dual large semi-spherical combiners. The headset, which requires a cabled connection to a computer to drive it graphically, features on-board hand interaction and positional tracking sensors, a 720p front-facing RGB camera, 4 speakers and 3 microphones.
The AR headset has been available from Meta since they started shipping near the end of 2016, but with the new partnership, Dell is not only going to sell the Meta 2 Dev Kit on its site, but also offer a number of hardware bundles targeted at professional users, including bundles with Dell Precision workstations and Dell Canvas PCs.
The Meta 2 Augmented Reality Development Kit will be available for sale on Dell’s website starting on February 15th for $1,500.
image courtesy Meta
Looking to target medical professionals, Dell is also delivering Medical Holodeck, an app that uses Dell Canvas and the Meta headset to let medical professionals collaborate in AR. Further appealing to pro-level users, Dell is also planning to introduce “AR in a box,” a platform which will help its partners and sales people “show off new Dell Meta AR innovations to potential customers.”
“We’re very excited for this partnership with Dell. Dell users will now have the opportunity to get their hands on a seamless AR solution that is considered the best on the market by many,” said Joe Mikhail, Chief Revenue Officer, Meta. “This is a major element of Meta’s ecosystem development initiatives. We are certain our partnership with Dell will deliver our game-changing technology into many creative hands and drive productivity measures to both developers and corporates alike.”
In a surprise move, Magic Leap finally released images and info regarding their upcoming Magic Leap One AR headset today. Hard specs are still thin on the ground at the moment, but it appears that press embargoes on information are finally being lifted as the company looks forward to an official release of its Creator Edition headset in 2018. Magic Leap gave Rolling Stone the rock star treatment in their exclusive tour of the headquarters, which includes a hands-on with the headset.
With a few stipulations about what Rolling Stone reporter Brian Crecente could talk about, he was able to share a few details about the physical form of the AR headset from his trip to the company’s headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. There, he was given a one hour-long demo using Magic Leap tech.
The Hardware
According to Crecente, the headset is “lightweight, modern-looking, if not exactly stylish,” adding that it’s “certainly much sleeker than anything virtual reality has to offer.”
The headband is said to hold the goggles in place using what the company calls a ‘crown temple’ design.
To put on the goggles, a person holds either side of the plastic crown in their hands and pulls apart. The crown spreads apart into a left, right and back piece. Then you slide it onto your head like a headband.
A small oval which appears to be a speaker can be seen in the image below. Rolling Stone reports the headset contains a “tiny, high-end speakers built into the temples of the device,” which provides spatial audio.
Lightwear’s field of view (FOV) is a different story. Crecente compares it to a “a VHS tape held in front of you with your arms half extended.”
image courtesy Magic Leap
Two cables come out of the back of the headband and merge into one, Rolling Stone reports. The cables measure four or five feet in length before connecting to the system’s mobile computer, aka ‘Lightpack’. The Lightpack is composed of two rounded ‘pods’ “connected smoothly on one end to form a gap between them.”
Crecente says the 6DoF motion controller is a “rounded bit of plastic that sits comfortably in your hand and features an array of buttons,” including a touchpad and haptic feedback.
The Lightwear and Lightpack are almost toy-like in their design, not because they feel cheap – they don’t – but because they’re so light and there seems to be so little to them.
The precise nature of the display tech that the headset is using is unknown, however Crecente interestingly says that objects didn’t look transparent (a major challenge with AR displays), which means either a very bright display (and/or a demo in a very dim room), or a totally unique display which can make opaque pixels. The latter seemed to be what Magic Leap was hoping to achieve in the early days of their development, but various reports suggest that tech hasn’t materialized.
It’s uncertain if Rolling Stone actually got a hands-on with a Creator Edition headset, or an earlier prototype, but it’s clear Magic Leap has developed a few key demos to best show off their tech.
Crecente’s hour-long demo took place first in a testing facility separate from the headquarters, which included the sort of ‘4D’ experiences that might find their ways into theme parks, and later in the main building.
This first, over-sized demo dropped me into a science fiction world, playing out an entire scene that was, in this one case, augmented with powerful, hidden fans, building-shaking speakers and an array of computer-controlled, colorful lighting. It was a powerful experience, which showed how a theme park could craft rides with no walls or waits. Most importantly, it took place among the set-dressing of the stage, the real world props that cluttered the ground and walls around me and while it didn’t look indistinguishable from reality, it was close. To see the physical world around me, and then those creations appearing not on it, as if some sort of animated sticker, but in it, was startling.
Magic Leap One Creator Edition, image courtesy Magic Leap
Heading back to the main building into a room styled to look like a normal living room, Crecente got into the nitty-gritty of the headset’s day-to-day functions:
The demo area also gave me a chance to try a half dozen or so different sorts of demonstrations. My first was a visit with Gimbal, a floating robot that hovered in the mid-field between my eyes and a distant wall. I walked up to it, around it, viewed from different angles and it remained silently hovering in my view. The world around it still existed, but I couldn’t see through it. It was as if it had substance, volume, not at all a flat image. I was surprised to find that the closer I got to the robot, to an extent, the more detailed it became. Getting up close to the floating object didn’t expose pixels, it highlighted details I wasn’t able to see from afar. If I got too close, though, it sort of disappeared or I was suddenly inside the thing. Artifacts, I was told, of a demo that hasn’t yet been polished. I also noticed that the sounds of the whirring robot shifted around as I moved around it, always placing the noise where it should be no matter where I stood.
Much like Microsoft’s HoloLens AR headset, Crecente was shown how to launch a number of virtual monitors. To illustrate the spatial awareness and depth-tracking power of the headset, the company also put together a demo featuring a four-sided television which played live TV on each of its faces, where all monitors would continue playing regardless of whether Crecente could physically see them or not.
There, Crecente got a taste of what it might be like to interact with avatars in AR, as the next demo featured a woman walking through a virtual door. Although there wasn’t any interaction to speak of, it showed the potential just the same.
Crecent was allowed to talk about a collaborative AR project with Icelandic band Sigur Rós which was recently revealed. Called Tonandi, the experience let him conjure a ring of ethereal trees, and experience wisps dancing in the air.
As I wave my hands at them, they create a sort of humming music, vanishing or shifting around me. Over time, different sorts of creations appear, and I touch them, wave at them, tap them, waiting to see what sort of music the interaction will add to the growing orchestral choir that surrounds me. Soon pods erupt from the ground on long stalks and grass springs from the carpet and coffee table. The pods open like flowering buds and I notice stingray-like creators made of colorful lights floating around me. My movements, don’t just change this pocket world unfolding around me, it allows me to co-create the music I hear, combining my actions with Sigur Ros’ sounds.
Crecente says his experience with Tonandi was “effortless.”
While there was apparently much more to experience at the headquarters, Rolling Stone was shown the door after that.
Check out Rolling Stone’s full articlehere, which has more details including interviews with Magic Leap leadership.
– – — – –
The company doesn’t appear to have a booth at CES this year, so it may be some time before we get our hands on Magic Leap One. We’ll be keeping our eyes out for more news surrounding the headset though, so check back soon for more.
After the long wait, Magic Leap, the secretive augmented reality startup, finally unveiled its first AR headset. Releasing first as a ‘Creator Edition’, the so-called ‘Magic Leap One’ AR headset is said to start shipping in 2018.
While the company has shown its tech to journalists and celebrities alike, all impressions have been held within the strict confines of a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Starting today, we now have a better picture of the final form-factor and styling of the headset, although hard specs are still under wraps.
Here’s every pertinent image we’ve scrapped from their site so far:
1 of 5
image courtesy Magic Leap
image courtesy Magic Leap
image courtesy Magic Leap
image courtesy Magic Leap
image courtesy Magic Leap
The headset itself is going by the name Lightwear, which features an array of sensors – exactly how many and their individual purpose, we’re not sure yet. Two cables are seen trailing out the back of the Lightwear headset, although Rolling Stone reports these actually unite in a single cable on its way to the computing unit.
The headset, which has a real-time computer vision processor, reportedly contains four built-in microphones, external cameras to track the wearer and the world they’re in, and tiny high-end speakers built into the temples of the device to provide spatial audio.
image courtesy Magic Leap
Rolling Stone reports the headset will come in two sizes, and pieces like the forehead pad, nose pieces, and temple pads can all be customized to insure a good fit. Before the company launches Magic Leap One, they’ll also take user’s glasses prescriptions to build corrective lenses directly into the headset—possibly hinting at a decidedly premium pricetag.
The system comes with a small mobile computer that’s clipped to the user’s waist, which Magic Leap calls the ‘Lightpack’. Tethered by a single cable, the company says it offers “[h]igh-powered processing and graphics, streamlined in a lightweight pack that stays right by your side.” Magic Leap founder and CEO Rony Abovitz told Rolling Stone the company is still working on battery optimization.
A 6DoF motion controller, which is dubbed simply ‘Control’, features a touchpad, “force control and haptic feedback.” Rolling Stone says it also features an “array of buttons.”
There’s no pricing information yet – only a signup form to fill out to register your interest in the Magic Leap One Creator Edition.
The company is also releasing access to the headset’s software development kit (SDK) “along with all of the tools, documentation, learning resources and support you’ll need to begin your journey.” This is said to come in early 2018.
In September 2017, it was rumored the multi-billion dollar Magic Leap could be shipping their first device to “a small group of users within six months,” and that the company would also take on a Series D investment led by Temasek Holdings Pte., a Singaporean venture capital firm. The rumor regarding its Series D turned out to be true, but we were left waiting on any word of surrounding the headset itself.
Info is still thin on the ground. We’ll be updating this piece as it comes in.
After the long wait, Magic Leap, the secretive augmented reality startup, finally unveiled its first AR headset. Releasing first as a ‘Creator Edition’, the so-called ‘Magic Leap One’ AR headset is said to start shipping in 2018.
While the company has shown its tech to journalists and celebrities alike, all impressions have been held within the strict confines of a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Starting today, we now have a better picture of the final form-factor and styling of the headset, although hard specs are still under wraps.
Here’s every pertinent image we’ve scrapped from their site so far:
1 of 5
image courtesy Magic Leap
image courtesy Magic Leap
image courtesy Magic Leap
image courtesy Magic Leap
image courtesy Magic Leap
The headset itself is going by the name Lightwear, which features an array of sensors – exactly how many and their individual purpose, we’re not sure yet. Two cables are seen trailing out the back of the Lightwear headset, although Rolling Stone reports these actually unite in a single cable on its way to the computing unit.
The headset, which has a real-time computer vision processor, reportedly contains four built-in microphones, external cameras to track the wearer and the world they’re in, and tiny high-end speakers built into the temples of the device to provide spatial audio.
image courtesy Magic Leap
Rolling Stone reports the headset will come in two sizes, and pieces like the forehead pad, nose pieces, and temple pads can all be customized to insure a good fit. Before the company launches Magic Leap One, they’ll also take user’s glasses prescriptions to build corrective lenses directly into the headset—possibly hinting at a decidedly premium pricetag.
The system comes with a small mobile computer that’s clipped to the user’s waist, which Magic Leap calls the ‘Lightpack’. Tethered by a single cable, the company says it offers “[h]igh-powered processing and graphics, streamlined in a lightweight pack that stays right by your side.” Magic Leap founder and CEO Rony Abovitz told Rolling Stone the company is still working on battery optimization.
A 6DoF motion controller, which is dubbed simply ‘Control’, features a touchpad, “force control and haptic feedback.” Rolling Stone says it also features an “array of buttons.”
There’s no pricing information yet – only a signup form to fill out to register your interest in the Magic Leap One Creator Edition.
The company is also releasing access to the headset’s software development kit (SDK) “along with all of the tools, documentation, learning resources and support you’ll need to begin your journey.” This is said to come in early 2018.
In September 2017, it was rumored the multi-billion dollar Magic Leap could be shipping their first device to “a small group of users within six months,” and that the company would also take on a Series D investment led by Temasek Holdings Pte., a Singaporean venture capital firm. The rumor regarding its Series D turned out to be true, but we were left waiting on any word of surrounding the headset itself.
Info is still thin on the ground. We’ll be updating this piece as it comes in.
