Magic Leap finally unveils augmented reality goggles, says it’s shipping next year
Yes, you can laugh… but we all thought the first mobile phone users looked hilarious too and those phones would never catch on. Who would invest in building cellphone towers all around a city or a country?
After more than three years, Magic Leap has unveiled what it describes as a “creator edition” of its augmented reality system. The Magic Leap One consists of a pair of oversized cyberpunk-y goggles, a puck-shaped external computer called a Lightpack, and a handheld controller. It’s supposed to accept “multiple input modes including voice, gesture, head pose and eye tracking,” and maps persistent objects onto the environment — “place a virtual TV on the wall over your fireplace and when you return later, the TV will be right where you left it,” the site promises. An SDK is supposedly coming in early 2018, and the hardware is supposed to ship at some point next year.
In some shape or form augmented reality is definitely coming… no more arriving at a function and wondering who the familiar face on the other side of the room belongs to.
