Developers are going to get their first devices
Magic Leap has taken to drip out new information about its first AR headset every month or so, but it’s just decided to open the faucet a little more, spilling a whole bunch of nuggets on its developer Twitch stream.
The first big nugget is that the Magic Leap One Creator Edition will be shipping this summer. That’s more specific than what the company had previously said, which was before the end of 2018, but still not specific enough as there’s no date. Still, progress.
Read this: How Magic Leap is building an ecosystem
The other big thing is that the Magic Leap one will be powered by the nVidia Tegra X2. That would make it more powerful than Nintendo’s Switch video game console, which runs on the Tegra X1. In fact, Alan Kimball, Magic Leap’s lead of developer technology strategy, says one of the Tegra X2’s cores will be dedicated to graphics while another will be dedicated to logic. The other six cores will be used for various other functions. Basically – it’s powerful.
That’s not all, either. AT&T today announced that it will make a strategic investment in Magic Leap. It’s not clear what that means financially, but will be the exclusive US consumer distributor for the headset. AT&T will also use its network to help power Magic Leap devices when they’re on the go, including its budding 5G network.
It’s important to note that this agreement is for consumer devices, not the Creator Edition, which is aimed at developers. When Magic Leap devices are available for consumers, you’ll be able to test them out at AT&T stores in Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and more to follow.
So when will we see a consumer-oriented Magic Leap device? It’s hard to say; we don’t even know a price for the Magic Leap One – other than it won’t be more expensive than a high-end phone. But CEO Rony Abovits teased on Twitter that more information about ML Next is headed our way later this week. ML Next is Magic Leap’s mysterious next device.
Finally, Magic Leap showed off some video demos of new features in the SDK, which include the ability to recognize hand gestures. It can recognize both gestures and different points of the human hand. However, it’s still hard to see how this translates – or what the field of view is – without actually getting our hands on the device.
