UPDATED 09:53 EDT / AUGUST 08 2018

EMERGING TECH

Magic Leap One augmented reality goggles ship today for $2,295

The much-hyped augmented reality company Magic Leap Inc. announced the launch of its first commercial product today: a pair of AR goggles named the Magic Leap One Creator Edition.

The company announced that its first headset would ship this summer, and now the goggles have hit the market with a price tag of $2,295.

Although the goggles are designed as a developer kit, aimed at the creators and makers who will build an ecosystem for the device, it is packaged as an out-of-the-box AR system with a lot of extra additional capabilities and content.

Inside the box, buyers will find the Lightwear headset, a belt-attached computer called the Lightpack, a handheld wand controller, a kit for helping fit the goggles properly, chargers, cables and everything needed to get going right away.

Magic Leap’s history has always been somewhat mysterious, but it has also garnered a huge amount of support and hype from investors. The company has raised more than $2.3 billion since being founded in 2011 and after its last round received a valuation of more than $6 billion.

The company also netted telecom giant AT&T Inc. in July as an investor and exclusive retail partner for the consumer launch of its AR products. As a result, AT&T joins Google LLC, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Andreessen Horowitz, Qualcomm Ventures and a host of other investors looking to get in on the action.

On the hardware front, the Magic One is an impressive piece of equipment. The Lightpack comes installed with an Nvidia Corp. Parker chip with two 64-bit cores and four ARM Cortex A57 64-bit cores to support the goggles, plus an Nvidia Pascal graphics processing unit with 256 cores and 8 gigabytes of memory. It supports Bluetooth, WiFi 802.11 and universal serial bus type-C plugs.

Controlling the headset is done with voice and a touch-sensitive trackpad on the wand controller, which also has a trigger button, a bumper button and a home button. The wand also supports six-degrees-of-freedom tracking for position and orientation.

As for software, the Magic One also comes with a gallery of AR experiences and apps designed to jumpstart its ecosystem.

Tónandi is a collaboration between Icelandic avant-rock band Sigur Rós and Magic Leap Studios to create an audio-visual experience that inserts pulsing manifestations into the user’s vision. These “sound spirits,” a translation of the Icelandic word Tónandi, can be “touched” and interacted with naturally, as if they’re part of the real world.

Project Create provides a virtual sandbox in a user’s living room (or anywhere else) for drawing, painting and building stories. With Create it is possible to turn a room into an undersea paradise with sea turtles and undulating jellyfish or stage a fight between a knight and a T. Rex on the coffee table.

For gamers, Dr. Grordbort’s Invaders is coming soon to the Magic One. It is a hyperrealistic action game where the player is pitted against evil robots intent on invading the living room. In this collaboration between Weta Workshop and Magic Leap Studios, players will grab a raygun and save the day.

The Magic One headset also features the Helio web browser, designed for 3-D and spatial web experiences, and the Screens video player that allows for multiple “screens” of any size to be placed in the field of view. Users will also get to experience Magic Leap’s Social app, which provides a spatially aware way to connect with other people using cartoony avatars, powered by Twilio Inc.’s collaboration platform.

To run the user interface and software in the goggles, Magic Leap installed its own specialized operating system called LuminOS. The company calls it “a whole new operating system” that works “in tandem with the brain” in order to provide the best possible spatial computing platform. It will use machine learning middleware and the company will make available a software development kit and development tools to access it.

Also, for developers, Magic Leap will make available Magic Kit, a powerful ever-evolving toolkit containing sample code, tech write-ups and design diaries to help creators quickly learn how to use the features of the Magic One.

To be part of the Magic One ecosystem, developers can sign up for the Magic Leap Creator Portal. There, developers can access software development kits for Unity and Unreal Engine 4 support, find code resources, tutorials and forums for connecting with other creators.

As for everyone else, Magic Leap One is shipping today. At a price tag of $2,295, it will be of interest chiefly to cutting-edge adopters and developers.

Photo: Magic Leap

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