Loving Magic Leap: A Veteran Virtual World/VR Developer Explains Why

Magic Leap's launch has attracted some snark, but a veteran virtual world/VR developer half convinces me to give the Leap another look. Dulce Baerga is CEO at River Studios (clients include pop legend/VR pioneer Björk) and a longtime virtual world user/developer (she's Kandy Roussel in SL) and after putting it through its paces, she is quite impressed. Virtual world fans, she tells me, will particularly love "the XR aspect of the device. The fact you can pull things out of VR space and place them in your RL environment."

For her, the device's integrated web browser is also a winner:

"WebXR works awesomely in their Helio browser... I was placing digital furniture assets into my RL space just like I would in Second Life. I pulled them out of WayFair's webVR page and placed them in my RL space." (See video below.)

She's also impressed with Magic Leap as a content creation platform -- with some caveats:

"I also played with the creator app and testing its physics and tracking." (Video above.) "Overall it’s pretty solid, only losing tracking when get up close and when there are too many holograms interacting.

"I love the level of mesh detail it creates, but it can’t see glass or anything high gloss, and it doesn’t do well with dark shadows. Some uncanny phenomenas happen with meshed people in the RL space who have a hauntingly ghost-like quality. The device will also mesh rays of light creating ghostly solids that wipe away the closer you look the vertices."

She acknowledges the marketing hype has hurt the Leap's reception with developers, but argues that they shouldn't hold over-inflated marketing against the device:

"Devs want to be blown away with whales in their living room and instead they got low poly rock monsters," she says. "But honestly, Magic Leap 1 is the best AR headset to date, now let’s see what Microsoft delivers with HoloLens 2."

I ask her if it's just a matter of focusing on practical AR applications like the furniture app (above) versus deep realistic immersion more typical for VR, that Magic Leap can't (at least not yet) provide.

"At this moment in XR history I would have to agree with that statement," Dulce tells me, "but once the hardware catches up to the immerse software we’ll start to see more realistic immersive experiences."

Comments

[TonyVT Skarredghost]

I agree with her. It is a good device indeed. The hype and the exaggerated promises have ruined its reputation.