Rony Abovitz has been dreaming about a new way of seeing the world since he started Magic Leap in 2011. He raised $1.9 billion in funding, but he stayed quiet about what the company was going to do. Today, he unveiled the Magic Leap One AR goggles for the first time. AR is expected to be a multibillion market, with support from Google and Apple, but Magic Leap is the company that is throwing the most money and people at the challenge today.
Abovtiz’s Fort Lauderdale, Florida, company will launch its “creator edition” in early 2018 with a software development kit (SDK) that will enable developers to get started on applications. But in a brief interview with GamesBeat after the announcement, Abovitz said that the company hopes that everyone will become a kind of creator of applications for the AR headset, as it is intended to be interactive and not passive form of entertainment.
The goggles are attached by a wire to a disc-shaped external computer dubbed a Lightpack, which you hang on your belt and carry around with you. It also has a handheld controller that resembles a touch-sensitive remote control. The puck does most of the processing, while some is also done in the headset. I haven’t used it yet, but the headset is aimed at bringing together digital animations overlaid on the imagery of the real world. It is ambitious, but the challenge is cramming a lot of technology into a tiny accessory, making it one of the biggest computing challenges of our time.
The device can receive a variety of inputs via voice, gesture, head position, and eye tracking. It places persistent digital objects on…
