Magic Leap's first pair of AR smartglasses, dubbed the Magic Leap One Creator Edition, will debut later this year. It's a device intended for early adopters and developers, and if it really is going to ship in 2018 that means the company needs to get started on building an ecosystem.
On the first day of GDC 2018, the company has announced a technical preview of both its LuminSDK and developer portal. That SDK is available in both Unity and Unreal Engine 4, so you can use whichever you prefer.
The SDK includes a simulator so that you can start building experiences even if you don't have a headset, which means you can start playing around in a virtual environment on your desktop.
Read this: 10 things we learned about Magic Leap
The SDK also gives us a glimpse at some of the technical features we can expect from Magic Leap devices: head and eye tracking, gesture and hand tracking, room scanning and meshing, spatialized audio, microphone input, 6 degree-of-freedom hand controller tracking, and some support for technologies like OpenGL and Vulkan.
This is all very technical of course, which is why Magic Leap is also debuting a community for developers to learn together. There are resources that include tutorials, sample assets and reference documents. Magic Leap is also opening up a community knowledge base that people can join, which will include a series of videos on developing for Magic Leap.
Thus far, Magic Leap has been working with a select few companies through its Early Access Program to create content for its upcoming ecosystem and work on developer tools. This includes The Mill, ILMxLab, Weta Workshop and the NBA.
Now all of this is open to anybody, and eventually Magic Leap is hoping to be able to populate its marketplace, which it's currently referring to as Magic Leap World, with apps and experiences.
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By Husain Sumra
Husain joined Wareable in 2017 as a member of our San Fransisco based team. Husain is a movies expert, and runs his own blog, and contributes to MacRumors.
He has spent hours in the world of virtual reality, getting eyes on Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Samsung Gear VR.
At Wareable, Husain's role is to investigate, report and write features and news about the wearable industry – from smartwatches and fitness trackers to health devices, virtual reality, augmented reality and more.
He writes buyers guides, how-to content, hardware reviews and more.