The only news Magic Leap has been making lately is about their lawsuit with competing AR glasses company NReal. Although those allegations are legit and something worth taking a look at, that is not why they are making the news today. In the Magic Leap’s latest email to developers, the company gave an inside scoop to what they have been doing behind the scenes for the last few months.
The first thing you will see is the two new games that have been released onto the Magic Leap World, the headsets exclusive storefront. The first is called Undersea and is a vibrant experience that puts fish, coral, and even entire ocean vistas into your space. This is the first time that we have something of this color make it all the way to the Magic Leap One. The next game is PuzzlAR: World Tour. This AR game puts you inside off the Jigsaw puzzle as you try to solve your way out of it. The app was created by and published by ONTOP Studios, as this is the first game published from the Independent Creator Program from Magic Leap. This game makes you literally put the world back together on your kitchen table.
The next release is the Lumin SDK .97. This update includes the new Overture feature. This allows the Landscape part of the app to play in the background. You can also now build your own music app to play music Helio, Chat, and the rest of the landscape apps that are available on the Magic Leap World for the Magic Leap One. This is an update that needed to happen for sometime. Nobody wants to stare at the album art for the entirety of the song when they could make making awesome AR applications.
Magic Leap also gives out the list of the upcoming events for the company and their workshops. At these events you are going to be able to learn to develop the best AR apps not only for Magic Leap’s headset, but for the augmented hardware that has yet to be created. You can register in the links below, or on the Magic Leap developer website as well.
- August 23rd: Developer Workshop at the University of Washington, CoMotion lab in Seattle. Register here
- August 24th: Developer Workshop at Unity HQ in Bellevue, WA. Register here
- August 27-29th: Magic Leap Training – Developer Workshops in Chicago, IL. Register here
- September 27-29: AT&T Business Hackathon in Plano, TX. Apply here
Magic Leap is also working on (just like the rest of the industry should be) hand and foot tracking without any wearables on them. We know some companies already have this figured out, but Magic Leap has been adamant about getting this for their own AR headset. Along with this, they are working on your hands and feet interacting with not only your augmented world, but also with the objects themselves.
None of this is going to be an easy slice of development, but they are hoping all of it can be included in their next version of the Magic Leap One. The first version of the company’s headset was a hit, but they know if they want to get out of the developers hands and into the consumers, they have changes to make. This is the start of something special and Magic Leap seems to be knowing what they’re doing. Even if they are battling in a lawsuit right now, this is something that is not going to be distracting them from their important business going forward.
