Magic Leap is holding its first ever developer conference this week, aptly named LeapCon, and during the show’s keynote CEO Rony Abovitz and a gaggle of other execs allowed us to peer into the future of the company’s AR tech.
The Magic Leap One: Creator Edition headset was released earlier this year, designed for eager developers to get in the door early and start building towards a consumer-ready model. So the journey has only started, and at LeapCon we saw what’s coming next. By the end of 2019, Magic Leap promises that its mixed reality goggles will do much, much more.
Hands on: Magic Leap One review
While it’s promising features like avatar personalization and support for video streaming tech MPEG-DASH, it’s the 2019 bit of the timeline that’s sure to get people buzzing. In Q1 of next year, Magic Leap says it will add support for two controllers with six degrees of freedom (right now you can only use one wand) and iris detection login, so it’ll be able to recognize you just by your eyes.
Something called ‘large scale mapping’ is also coming early next year, and while there wasn’t much detail on this, it seems pretty self-explanatory. Magic Leap can map a room pretty nicely right now, but it sounds like there are plans to tackle even larger play areas.
There'll be a spectator view mode too, so others can use their smartphones to see what you're seeing in the headset. Beyond Q1 of next year, the company said it's working on object recognition, which would mean Magic Leap won't only know when something is in the way, but may be able to tell you what it is.
Finally, Magic Leap is going to let developers write apps in Javascript. That may not sound all that exciting, but it should mean more apps and games for us all to play with - and that's what we want, right?
In fact, all of this stuff is an indicator of what we can expect when the company launches Magic Leap Two, which will be the consumer-ready (and hopefully cheaper) version.
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By Hugh Langley
Now at Business Insider, Hugh originally joined Wareable from TechRadar where he’d been writing news, features, reviews and just about everything else you can think of for three years.
Hugh is now a correspondent at Business Insider.
Prior to Wareable, Hugh freelanced while studying, writing about bad indie bands and slightly better movies. He found his way into tech journalism at the beginning of the wearables boom, when everyone was talking about Google Glass and the Oculus Rift was merely a Kickstarter campaign - and has been fascinated ever since.
He’s particularly interested in VR and any fitness tech that will help him (eventually) get back into shape. Hugh has also written for T3, Wired, Total Film, Little White Lies and China Daily.