As of yesterday, the Magic Leap One is officially released. The lucky few that were quick with ordering one of the coveted devices and happened to live in one of a select few cities already have them in their hands. Prior to yesterday’s launch, only a select few members of the mainstream media were invited to try out the headset ahead of time. We rounded up those press impressions over here. And if you want a detailed breakdown of what the Magic Leap One is and what it’s specs are like, you can find that here.
For this article, we want to see what developers are thinking since this is technically just a dev kit right now. We reached out to a few of these developers and found more on Twitter to see what actual, real creators are thinking of the device so far.
OK, the @magicleap is 10x better than I’d even heard from people on my team who got to try it before! Many of the store apps are great, but I particularly enjoyed how Helios lets you put so much web content on walls and in the room! pic.twitter.com/L86QRMAxfy
— Lars Bergstrom (@larsberg_) August 8, 2018
When you order a Magic Leap One AR headset, someone from a startup called Enjoy hand delivers it to you and helps you set it up. According to a Twitter DM conversation with Tony Ramirez, VP of Product Development at Scorpion.co, this was a welcome feature. “Setup was a breeze and I actually really enjoyed having someone walk me through the setup (which I normally would despise),” said Ramirez. “High praise to Enjoy.”
Right now there are a handful of official Magic Leap apps in the Store for early adopters to try out. Most of them are incredibly basic, but that’s to be expected with an early dev kit product.
“Apps so far are very fun to play with, though limited,” said Ramirez. “I’ve spent a lot of time today showing initial stuff to friends and my wife. All very positive impressions so far. Field of view is bigger than I expected, though of course not all-encompassing. I tend to forget about it altogether when I’m in the moment. Biggest issue, as expected for a “creator” edition, is it needs content.”
Enjoying the @magicleap One overall but Create absolutely steals the show! Between the ambient vibe, adorable characters, and a BLACK FOREST CREATOR WAND it’s just amazing. If you only get a quick demo this week, that’s the one to demand! https://t.co/dnCzyIs87e pic.twitter.com/tRepdOIwg5
— Lars Bergstrom (@larsberg_) August 9, 2018
We’ll be going hands-on with the device very soon for ourselves, but in the meantime getting direct developer impressions provides great insight into how the actual creator community is receiving the product thus far. Especially since many of these devs have preexisting experience creating content for other AR headsets and VR devices in the past.
Now the real fun begins @magicleap #AR pic.twitter.com/99L0WgH3ns
— Dan Miller (@DanMillerDev) August 9, 2018
Keep in mind though, that these are very early impressions from excited early adopter creators that are diving into this ecosystem out of excitement and passion for the industry.
“For context: I am NOT a critic,” said Ramirez. “My objective when I buy a product, watch a movie, etc is to enjoy the thing. So the core itself has to be bad for me to not enjoy it. So I put on the ML1 and after a few minutes of playing around, I forgot about the FOV. If I paid attention more to the device than the content, it of course is very apparent that it doesn’t encompass your entire field of vision.”
Also of note is that you need to recalibrate the device each and every time someone new puts it on. That means if you’re showing it to friends and want to take it off and have someone else put it on, they must recalibrate. “My wife put it on, and it become apparent that calibrating this per user is very important,” said Ramirez. Her field of view was cut off until I switched out the nose piece to one her size, and then it was much better. A full calibration improved it further…It seems a VERY obvious next step to add multiple calibrated user profiles, so I would expect that to happen soon and plan on mentioning it in feedback to ML today.”
Lots of cool stuff is likely in store for the AR/MR community from the minds of talented and inspired developers like these. In time, we will hopefully see some really impressive stuff.
sigur rós and @magicleap have been working together for five years, exploring and expanding the frontiers of musical creation within ‘mixed reality’. tónandi is the first fruit of that collaboration, and perhaps even a glimpse of the future of music.https://t.co/6ul2mEQbso pic.twitter.com/SPUrzEeaEm
— sigur rós (@sigurros) August 9, 2018
What do you think of the Magic Leap One so far from what you’ve seen? Let us know down in the comments below!
Featured Image: Sivan Iram
Update: Quotes from one developer have been removed by request of the developer.
