| Title | Magic Leap Finally Announces a Product, But is It Still Vaporware? | |
| Date | Friday December 22 2017, @07:54AM | |
| Author | Fnord666 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the cockroach-of-the-industry dept. | ||
Magic Leap has announced an augmented reality/mixed reality display. The price is unknown, but Magic Leap says it will ship in 2018:
After more than three years, Magic Leap has unveiled what it describes as a "creator edition" of its augmented reality system. The Magic Leap One consists of a pair of oversized cyberpunk-y goggles, a puck-shaped external computer called a Lightpack, and a handheld controller. It's supposed to accept "multiple input modes including voice, gesture, head pose and eye tracking," and maps persistent objects onto the environment — "place a virtual TV on the wall over your fireplace and when you return later, the TV will be right where you left it," the site promises. An SDK is supposedly coming in early 2018, and the hardware is supposed to ship at some point next year.
Magic Leap invited Rolling Stone to try out some demos, which include virtual characters that can react to eye contact, a floating virtual comic book, and a virtual live performance using volumetric camera capture. The piece seems to refute rumors that Magic Leap was having difficulty shrinking its technology to goggle size while keeping performance up, saying that "there was no stuttering or slowdowns, even when I walked around the performance, up close and far away."
The "puck-sized" tethered computer is an interesting compromise. It doesn't look like it would hinder mobility that much (you could compare it to a Walkman plus headphones), and it's much smaller than "VR backpack" concepts. However, it could be a good sign that you should not be an early adopter of Magic Leap One (which is actually the ninth generation of their hardware internally, according to Rolling Stone).
Some still call it vaporware. There is no video footage of the device being worn, and images have been retouched to "edit out some sensitive IP".
Will it take privacy seriously?
Again, not to be confused with Leap Motion.
Also at BBC, Tom's Hardware, Road to VR, Engadget, BGR, 9to5Google.
Previously: Developers Race to Develop VR Headsets that Won't Make Users Nauseous
Magic Leap Bashed for Being Vaporware
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printed from SoylentNews, Magic Leap Finally Announces a Product, But is It Still Vaporware? on 2024-04-19 07:42:28