As the world’s largest telecom manufacturer, when Chinese tech giant Huawei makes a market prediction, they have plenty of room to speak. Talking in an interview with CNBC, Huawei CEO Richard Yu says the industry at large will begin commercializing AR headsets within one to two years, Huawei included.
Like Samsung, Huawei offers a staggering variety of smartphones, laptops, tablets, wearables, and smart home accessories; the company surpassed Ericsson in 2012 as the world’s largest telecom equipment manufacturer, and earlier this summer overtook Apple to become the world’s second largest smartphone maker.
Despite this, Huawei has yet to significantly break into Western markets, although its rapid upward trajectory and premium flagship tech would suggest that will change in due time.
The company has been involved in the VR market since its launch of Huawei VR last year, a Daydream platform device. Huawei then announced Huawei VR 2, a smartphone-tethered device that connects via USB-C to Huawei Mate 10 series of phones.
Huawei VR headset, Image courtesy Huawei
Huawei CEO Richard Yu says though that AR is the company’s next big area of interest, something he says will materialize in the form of AR glasses.
“In the beginning you may feel AR … is nothing. But in the future you will see more and more the value of that,” Yu said.
Yu says the company is focusing on bringing AR to their fleet of smartphones first, which he maintains will let users acclimate to the idea of interacting with augmented reality experiences, games, services, etc.
“The next one to two years I think the industry will commercialize [AR glasses], even for Huawei. We will bring a better user experience product,” Yu tells CNBC.
The company hasn’t been bashful about challenging the dominant players in the industry, namely Apple and Samsung, both of which are likely already in the early stages of preparing consumer AR headsets of their own.
Apple has already brought AR to a large number of its iPhones via ARKit. The company is also reportedly developing its own AR/VR headset with 8K resolution per eye, supposedly slated for release in 2020. Apple recently acquired Akonia Holographics, a startup focused on holographic display and storage technology.
Concurrently, Samsung recently revealed an experimental AR headset at their developer conference last week that has prompted the company to merge the Gear VR SDK and Android ARCore to create a new software development platform, dubbed ‘SXR SDK’.
Insomniac Games, the talented game studio behind non-VR games like Spider-Man (2018) and VR games like Edge of Nowhere (2016) and The Unspoken (2016), today announced their first AR game called Seedling, coming to Magic Leap in November.
Without doubt, Insomniac Games is one of the most experience VR development studios to date, and now they’re turning their experience in immersive entertainment toward augmented reality.
Today at Leap Con, the company announced Seedling, an upcoming title for Magic Leap which is due to launch in november. As an AR experience, the approach is very different from anything Insomniac has done in VR, this time involving alien plants that the user must care for. The studio tells Road to VR that the experience will rely on real-world time, as plants slowly grow and need tending to over the course of many (real world) days.
Image courtesy Insomniac Games
The studio says the game has a story to tell that goes beyond just growing an alien garden, but they’re not saying much about what it will encompass or how it will be told.
Magic Leap is working with Insomniac as a publisher on the title, and while the experience was built by a small team, Insomniac tells us that Seedling has been in development for nearly a year and a half.
Today at Leap Con, Magic Leap spoke briefly about its software roadmap for the end of 2018 and into early 2019, indicating some interesting new features on the way to their AR headset.
With the Magic Leap One headset having just recently launched, the company is continuing to rapidly evolve its operating system and features to achieve its vision of widespread spatial computing.
In a brief preview on stage during the Leap Con keynote, Magic Leap’s Senior Vice President of Software, Yannick Pellet, explored the company’s near-term software roadmap, revealing a some interesting features that developers can look forward to.
Image courtesy Magic Leap
Expected in Q1 2019 are features like two controller support, giving developers the ability to make applications which use a pair or the headset’s 6DOF controllers rather than just one. This will allow developers to give their users more control over applications, and importantly, it’ll more closely mirror the dual controller input capability that many developers have become used to with high-end VR headsets. This could be a challenge as the Magic Leap One controller is based on magnetic tracking, and introducing another active magnetic device could make things complicated.
Also on the roadmap is ‘Iris Detection Login’, a biometric login technique using the headset’s eye-tracking tech to uniquely identify each user who puts the headset on. This could act as a biometric lock for the device (nice to have considering the price tag), or it could be used to identify each user and load up their personal profile automatically without any special login credentials.
Magic Leap One’s core software is called LuminOS, and the company says they’ll be deploying MagicScript in Q1 2019, which will bring Javascript compatibility to the OS. That means Javascript developers can write native code to run on Magic Leap One.
The roadmap also promises ‘Large Scale Mapping’. While Pellet didn’t go into detail, presumably this means allowing the device to map and understand spaces larger than individual rooms. That could allow developers to build apps which work more reliably across large spaces like an entire home.
As Magic Leap continues to build up the capabilities of their device, developers will be able to make increasingly interesting and useful AR applications with the tools available to them.
Today at Magic Leap’s first creator conference the company has revealed a bevy of AR content built on the headset—some experimental, and some actually launching on the headset soon (or today)—but all up and running on real hardware.
At Leap Con today I got treated to a bevy of new Magic Leap content. We’ll have deeper coverage of one some of these titles, but here’s a rundown of what the company is showing this week with official descriptions from the companies and studios behind the projects. Note that a few of the titles have been known to be in the works but haven’t been seen other than behind closed doors until today.
Dr. Grordbort’s Invaders
Image courtesy Weta Workshop
Become one of the first people on Earth to experience Dr. Grordbot’s Invaders, the game-changing game by Weta Workshop. The evil robots have chosen this building, this very room to stage their invasion. And you’re the first, last, and only line of defense. So you better grab your trust ray gun and blast them right between the bolts.
Something terrible has happened. Someone has made a terrible mistake. A galactic ecosystem has been destroyed. In this new and original IP by the creators and developers of several iconic game universes and amazing characters, players will help repair a dying galactic ecosystem with the help of a mysterious scout field kit.
Luna: Moondust Garden by Funomena
Luna: Moondust Garden is a playful extension of the award-winning, IGF-finalist VR fairytale, Lune, by independent game studio Funomena. This experience brings a new story from Bird and Owl’s charming forest directly into your living room through the wonders of Magic Leap technology. In Moondust Garden, players explore the storybook world of Luna from a new , intimate perspective by bringing its animals & forest right into their own reality. By planting and tending a variety f plants, flowers, trees, and islands within their physical space, players can create a lovely garden where Fox can come out to play.
Brainlab: Survey and Medical Image Visualization
Image courtesy Brainlab
Experience the future of surgery and discovery new dimensions of medical images. Immerse yourself in a patient’s anatomy by taking a walk through the brain with larger than life views. Find yourself transported to a spinal surgery complete with virtual screens for microscope visuals and patient data including scans and vitals.
Wingnut AR Pest Control
Welcome to your first day on the job at Wingnut Pest Control! You’ll be wielding the most advanced, most powerful, most likely not to explode in your hand Wingnut Weaponry ever created! In a quest to rid the L.E.A.P. conference of anything creepy or crawly, do you have what it takes?!
Wacom: Spatial Computing Creation Environment of the Future
Magic Leap and Wacom, the industry leader for digital creative tools, has joined forces to take spatial computing to new heights. Experience a first look at the development opportunities that provide precision drawing, writing, and spatial visualization and manipulation in collaborative setting. What will you create?
Onshape 3D CAD
Image courtesy Onshape
Onshape 3D CAD uses the power of Magic Leap One for professional product design. Users can see and interact with live 3D models during active design sessions. Multiple Onshape users can simultaneously participate using Magic Leap One, web browsers, phones, and tablets. The power of mixed reality CAD offers incredible promise to improve the way products are designed. Onshape is the first and only pure-cloud 3D CAD platform. Professional engineer at thousands of companies rely on Onshape to design all kinds of new products: Formula 1 racing cars, drones, medical robots, quantum computers—just about anything manufactured you see in our world.
Angry Birds FPS: First Person Slingshot
Image courtesy Rovio, Resolution Games
Spatial gaming meets Angry Birds! Enjoy all of the destructive physics-based Angry Birds gameplay in a way that brings the Angry Birds to life like never before. Angry Birds FPS takes the teetering towers of the classic Angry Birds games and drops them right in the middle of your living room. Walk around and inspect each level from all angles to find weaknesses in the igs’ defenses or discover hidden boxes of explosive TNT. The slingshot is in your hand—line up your shot, launch your birds, and bring the towers toppling down.
SketchUp
SketchUp is renowned as one of the most powerful and intuitive design software used by architects, designers, makers, and visionaries to express their ideas in 3D. Mixed reality brings these 3D models to life and enables users to experience and interact collaboratively with design content in an instinctive and natural way. This powerful technology transforms the way we consume and convey information, accelerate the design evaluation process, improve coordination, and enhance communication. This demonstration provides attendees with an overview of a “one-click” mixed-reality workflow from the SketchUp modeling environment into Magic Leap One. The demo illustrates how an immersive, in-context experience facilities effective visualization of complex 3D environments and helps enrich the team understanding about the design and its interaction with the physical space.
Wayfair Spaces
Image courtesy Wayfair
Wayfair Spaces is a design experience that presents users with a palette of room plans curated by Wayfair designers. Users can mix and match these designs to experiment with a multitude of products and ideas for their space. Each scene features products laid out harmoniously in room silhouettes, from contemporary living rooms to coastal kitchens to industry offices. Users can explore these mini-inspired scenes, pull products into their actual rooms and enjoy designing their space.
Meow Wolf’s ‘The Navigator’ and Magic Leap Icons: Scale and Fidelity
From the immersive artistry of Meow Wolf comes a whole new narrative fused with the latest in digital technology. Partnering with Magic Leap, ‘The Navigator’ gives fans a sneak peek into one of their newest exhibitions by introducing an entirely new world to their immensely popular dimensional multiverse. Eemia is a peaceful planet whose orbital stability depends on brace explorers called Navigators and their Mechs. When one of Eemia’s three suns exploded decades ago, the planet was pushed into an ever decaying orbit — becoming encased in ice. A new generation of navigators must lean to pilot the Mechs and save their planet from endless winter. Time is of the essence.
Create v1.1
Image courtesy Magic Leap
Your digital playground just got more magical, with the new Create 1.1 update. We’ve added more cubes, more blocks, more characters and more imagination – enabling you to take your creativity even further. We’ve added Recorder Cube – a function that lets you import your own sounds and save your creations to revisit them at any time. There’s also a brand-new Magic Leap character making his way into the world of Create – join Astronaut as he explores all corners of your world and see what you can discover together.
Super Zeros
Meet Grishneck, a much maligned and disgruntled Orc that was originally destined for the big screen, but has instead been living out his days in a folder called “old assets” with a bunch of other rejected concept art and digital characters. With your help Grishneck can escape the confines of the computer and join us in the real world.
Mica | The Royal Shakespeare Company & Magic Leap Present Seven Ages by William Shakespeare.
I am Mica, the human center of mixed reality. In this experience I enter in a visual and gestural exchange to contemplate my place in your world. Using surrealist ideas of representation and reality I connect you with the culture that feeds me. ‘All the world’s a stage…’ so begins the seminal Seven Ages of Man speech by William Shakespeare: with spatial computing this has never been truer. Magic Leap has teamed up with the Royal Shakespeare Company to explore the future of theatrical performance. Together they will embark on a series of productions that imagine those possibilities. Here they present a groundbreaking theatrical performance on ML1 using cutting-edge experience capture with Shakesperian actor, Robert Gilbert, and an original musical score by award-winning composer, Jessica Curry.
Air New Zealand’s Fact or Fantasy – The Fantastical Game of New Zealand
Image courtesy Air New Zealand
A fun and mobile, shared mixed reality experience that has been designed to re-connect families and friends through the re-invention of the traditional board game and ritual of socially playing together within the same space. Air New Zealand’s Fact or Fantasy showcases New Zealand as a holiday destination through the augmentation of a physical 3D game board with a digital host, story, and competitive quiz game.
ILMxLab, Lucasfilm’s immersive media group, today announced Star Wars: Project Porg, an augmented reality “experiment” built for Magic Leap. In the experience, players will interact with the big-eyed fuzzy creatures introduced in The Last Jedi, with some helpful guidance by C-3PO himself.
Just ahead of this week’s Leap Con conference, ILMxLab has announced the Star Wars: Project Porg “experimental demo” for the headset. As of now it’s unclear if the studio plans to release the experience to Magic Leap owners, or if it’ll be kept for demo purposes only. However, back when the studio first revealed the Trials on Tatooine (2016) VR experience, it did eventually make it publicly available for Vive users after keeping it close to the chest for a while.
Whether or not you’ll be able to download it on Magic Leap right away, the company at least says attendees of Leap Con can expect to see the demo this week. Inside, they’ll need to earn the trust of the porgs by interacting with them, including “[teaching] them how to maneuver real-world environments […].” The iconic C-3PO will be present to help the player learn to care for the critters.
ILMxLab says in the announcement of Star Wars: Project Porg that they’ll be talking more about the experiment on stage during the Leap Con keynote on Wednesday, as well as a session during the conference.
Road to VR will be on the ground at Leap Con to bring you the latest, stay tuned!
