When I met Rony Abovitz at Magic Leap's Developer Conference (aka LEAPCon) in downtown Los Angeles yesterday, I told him it was like meeting all four Beatles at once. He's defined for me and so many other futurists the true meaning of Augmented Reality (AR): invisible, ubiquitous, and wearable computing. I can say, without irony, as much as my youth was influenced by seminal artists like John Lennon, so has my thinking and writing about XR have been influenced by Abovitz.
It's nerd Woodstock here, with Doctor Grordbort's Invaders standing in for Jimmy Hendrix and Rovio's brilliant AR version of Angry Birds as The Who. Instead of destroying guitars, we're shooting angry birds at wisecracking green piggies. Both free titles were released into the Magic Leap (ML) app store yesterday afternoon. Rovio's Angry Birds has 28 levels and is quite complete, capable of generating dozens if not hundreds of hours of gameplay.
Angry Birds, developed by Stockholm-based game studio Resolution, is the first third-party app to launch on the Magic Leap One (ML1). The geometry of Angry Birds is incredible. The physics, how the birds bounce off things, the slingshot variables, are endlessly fascinating. I could have played this all day.
The game features the popular Angry Birds "Red", "Chuck," who has speed power that works well on wood structures and can be activated mid-flight and "The Blues," who can be split into three mid-flight, excellent for crashing down the ice structures.
Angry Birds taps into ML's constant mapping capabilities which allow players to bounce birds off objects or place the game on a table to see blocks tumble to the ground and engage with the environment. You can increase your score with a multiplier that gives more points for shooting from further back. The game invites players to approach gameplay from all angles for the best shot and to get close and interact with the characters.
This conference is critical for Magic Leap. To be successful, the company needs a robust developer community, and they are rolling out the proverbial red carpet for them, starting with a lavish welcome reception under the space shuttle at the LA Science Museum. When the consumer version of the ML is available through AT&T, which supported the original iPhone launch eleven years ago, hundreds of apps will be needed to please a broad palette of consumer tastes and interests. The crowd of developers here has a distinctly indie feel to it, though almost all the demos I saw were from well-known companies like WETA Workshop, Wayfair, and Rovio.
A fully themed Indiana Jones-ish Explorer's Club was created for the unveiling of Dr. Grordbot's Invaders, Magic Leap's flagship title. On display were dozens of props, artifacts, costumes and characters from the Dr. Grordbort's game universe, which was created by WETA Workshop and Games Studio in New Zeland, responsible for popular special effects-laden movies like The Hobbit, The BFG, Pacific Rim, and Blade Runner.
Magic Leap founder Abovitz was joined by Grordbort designer Greg Broadmore and WETA President Richard Taylor to introduce the new title. Broadmore created this retro-sci-fi world of rayguns, rocketships and inter-planetary colonialism in 2007 and released a line of high-end, collectible rayguns (I got Rony and Broadmore to sign the box of the giveaway raygun swag) and merchandise based on the universe. In 2009, Broadmore launched “Dr. Grordbort's Exceptional Exhibition,” an exhibition which toured Hong Kong, China, Germany, France, Switzerland, and New Zealand. He told the rapt audience of press and XR celebs that he was trying to create a visual history of science-fiction, going all the way back to Buck Rodgers. He described XR as a "medium in its infancy," and compared this first effort to Georges Méliès seminar 1902 film Man In The Moon.
The collaboration with WETA began five years ago when Abovitz convinced them to make a game for his "highly irrational and wholly implausible" platform that existed only in his head. Abovitz said he's most excited by the way the game integrates with its surroundings, the same way theater, carnivals, and other live entertainment makes a space for themselves in the real world. "This is a 'tip of the spear' for us," he said. "The needs of the WETA team constantly pushed the engineering team forward."
I had an amazing lunch with Andreas Sennheiser, whose company just released its spatial audio headset, AMBEO, and accompanying app, which provides creators a sophisticated audio creation tool that takes the physics of the real world, like reflected sound, into account. The goal of the new product is to create a "transparent audio experience that blends surrounding audio with digitally created content." Sennheiser, which is best known as the provider of superior professional audio recording equipment for the film and television industry, has been looking at spatial audio for twenty years. They reasoned that as visuals become volumetric, so will sound. I was excited to hear someone was thinking hard about sound because I have been saying for the past year we may be overthinking visuals at the expense of sound. Ultimately, visuals may be subordinate to the kind of practical solution that a combination of AI and Computer Vision might yield.
Abovitz's keynote is just a few hours away. Much more ML news is expected today. ILMxLab is set to make a major Star Wars announcement from the stage. I'm hoping to learn more about how the ML1 performs outside, how social media might work with the ML1, and we might perform everyday tasks like email and messaging, which are central to our digital lives.
