Details have finally emerged on the new Magic Leap 2 augmented reality (AR) device. On July 13, 2022, Magic Leap CTO, Julie Larson-Green shared key details at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech 2022 conference. She shared details on the technology, use-cases, and even pricing. Check out the full announcement along with the video here.
So what the heck is an AR device? Well as Jonathon Martin (Magic Leap) puts it, AR involves displaying digital or virtual content across the physical world. In the demonstration, you can watch as they insert themselves into a emergency wildfire event, navigating from a bird's eye scene view, down to a first person point of view video stream. I encourage you to check the video out at the link above for more details, but this engineer wasn't quite sold on the gear, well at least not for their stated $4,999 Enterprise pricing ($3,299 Base Edition).
Why was I not sold? Well, for starters Magic Leap doesn't have the greatest record in backing up their announcements with real hardware and software (just take a look at their past performance). Even if we take a fresh set of eyes and look at the technology by itself, it seems to be positioning itself as a wearable device geared towards professional augmented reality solutions. With an industry seemingly pushing towards MR, this is an interesting move and we will have to wait and see if the hardware is able to support their claims when it is available in September.
Taking a step back and just discussing the hardware for a bit, what did they get right? Similar to their first edition headset, they chose to place the main computer in a wearable clip separate from the glasses/headset. This is a blessing for those that get neck or shoulder pain from using some of the other extended reality devices on the market, mainly because of their stated 260g weight. To put it into perspective, the Quest 2 is nearly double that at 503g. The lack of a motion controllers (albeit a touch controller is included) seems for now not to be a hindrance, as they demonstrated a reliable (at least from the video) hand tracking infrastructure. There are plenty more details that have been released, but for now we still need to wait for its release to get a more in-depth review so stay tuned!
Check back often as we share daily news about extended reality hardware, software, and everything in between. Will the Magic Leap 2 beat out other augmented reality and mixed reality devices? Check back in September for a hands-on review!