Magic Leap—which first announced its headset, the Magic Leap One, back in December—could finally offer a glimpse of what the device can actually do during a developer livestream hosted by the company today.

Update (6/6/18, 5:40PM PT): The livestream concluded this morning. You can get a recap of what was (and wasn’t) discussed here.

Captured by Road to VR, image courtesy Magic Leap

Original Article (6/6/18): Magic Leap has been teasing its tech for years now, and people have been suitably excited to see what the company has been able to do with more $2 billion in venture funding. The company finally announced its first product, the Magic Leap One, back in December, but hasn’t offered any clear demonstration of the headset’s capabilities nor revealed any key specifications.

The company is teasing that developers will get to “meet Magic Leap One” today during the ‘Magic Leap Live’ developer livestream which will be hosted today (Wednesday June 6th) on Twitch at 11AM PT (your timezone here).

“Alan Noon will be joined by Shanna De Iullis from our Technical Marketing team to give you a closer look at Magic Leap One,” the company writes on its Twitch schedule.

Here’s the livestream embedded if you want to watch along with us:

While some information about the Magic Leap One was gleaned from the launch of the headset’s SDK back in March—like eye-tracking, room-scanning, hand input, and more—questions remain about the extent of the device’s capabilities, and key specifications like field of view, resolution, and weight are still unknown. One would hope that the livestream might offer some insight into at least a few of these elements, but the company does have a bad habit of spending a lot of time to say very little.

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Magic Leap Shows Prototype Headset Progress Since 2014

Though Magic Leap has publicly launched their developer portal, the company isn’t yet openly selling the device to developers, nor have they announced down a price or release date. However the company’s CEO said back in February that the Magic Leap One would be ‘priced like a premium computer‘, and expected to share more details on the launch in Spring.

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • cataflic

    When we’ll have a simple and cheap way in rendering of at least 2k foveated area, all these hmd will spring out like mushrooms

    • Raphael

      You eat magic ones don’t u.

  • NooYawker

    “Alan Noon will be joined by Shanna De Iullis from our Technical Marketing team to give you a closer look at Magic Leap One,”

    Sounds like more teasing bullshit.

  • brubble

    Alan Noon and this company is so full of hyperbolic shit. It always feels like Im listening to some fast talking greaseball huckster whos trying to sell me a Porsche thats clearly a Yugo. I hope this thing flops hard.

  • Behram Patel

    Didn’t disappoint. We we got a “Close Up” of the kit for sure :P.
    Give them some time.
    b

  • LowRezSkyline

    What a pointless stream of marketing nonsense. Absolutely nothing new announced or revealed. The flimflam artists continue their snake-oil dance.

    • dk

      yep nothing new

  • R3ST4RT

    After watching the live stream I have to wonder if they are prepping for a Holiday release? They’ve said they are still on track for a 2018 release and I don’t see many other times that would create the same impact.

    • dk

      it’s basically an expensive dev kit ….what impact

  • [james ashley]

    >> and key specifications like field of view, resolution, and weight are still unknown.

    To be fair, after two years, Microsoft still hasn’t really said what the FOV and resolution of the HoloLens is. And nobody likes to discuss their weight.

    • But since you can actually buy one and make these measurements yourself these points are no longer unknown. Clearly Magic Leap has learned to not say or show anything that isn’t under NDA because once they do, no one will want to spend the money they think it is worth.

      • [james ashley]

        It’s always good to get your take on things. Totally agree that waiting is painful and even stressful. I’m not sure that keeping certain things NDA is actually unusual for this industry, though, and to be honest ML was much more upfront about much of their hardware in the twitch-cast than Microsoft HoloLens was when they were getting ready to release (or even for months afterwards). Not to bust on HoloLens but even after owning one for over two years, I still don’t know how to measure the resolution without taking it apart — which I am loath to do. FOV is also not so easy to measure without a tape measure, a steady head and a decent memory for high school trig. And nobody likes to discuss their weight.

        • Ha ha & thank you. Agreed that both of these specs are obscure from MS & I hope that ML has learned something, but following ML over the past couple of years does not give me confidence that product will live up to the inflated hype. I am also fearful that this will be $2000 or more. Now that you can buy a $400 – $500 MR headsets that you can use with something like my NUC belt system I rigged up for about $600, you can get a pretty good MR experience around a $1000. You can also order a Dreamworld Vision today (https://www.dreamworldvision.com) and use it with your phone, negating the tethered PC (and probably limited quality as well).

          So for me, if anything in the future that cost more than $2000. It, better offer a wide FOV, some form of dynamic DOF /FL, superb 6DOF & hand tracking. So far the FOV on the ML does not meet this criteria.

          • benz145

            NUC belt system? Sounds interesting, I’d love to hear more.

      • Ian Shook

        I thought we all already knew it was “a VHS tape at half an arms length”. It was either from them, or from somebody who actually tested it, can’t remember.

  • dk

    https://youtu.be/76qlNoB8ixw yeah they r not really showing anything new

    • Why is she wearing the device? Her eyes clearly don’t work correctly as they are both lazy af. She looks like she is wearing a Maleficent mask (cartoon version) and maybe she can use more verbose obfuscating language to seem like less of a tired pitch?

  • hugorune

    Dear magicleap investors, please fire these two, especially Shanna de Iuliis. She makes these glasses look significantly less exciting than a PSVR. The whole thing is perfectly suitable for a 2 million USD funded company. And I‘m afraid, this is where it will end up, soon…

    Did they really arrange the books in the background by the color of their backs?? Wow.