MAGIC LEAP PROMOTES ITS HELMET OF

VIRTUAL REALITY

Magic Leap One Creator Edition is for artists and developers. It is available in only six cities in the United States. The American press salutes the comfort and the quality of the rendering. .

Magic Leap has always been keen to revolutionize augmented reality and announced it in 2014. Finally, it launches finally this August 8 the marketing of a limited edition and professional of its device called Magic Leap One Creator Edition. Investors like Google or JP Morgan have sometimes doubted its ability to produce a finished product.

Magic Leap One Creator Edition has three gray-colored elements, rounded shapes: the headset (Lightwear), the mini computer to slip in his pocket or to carry over the shoulder (Lightpack) and a controller (Control). The whole is sold for $ 2295, only on the official website magicleap.com and to only six cities in the United States: Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. The Lightwear is available in two sizes and anyway adjustable thanks to five interchangeable nose pads.

The American press (The Verge, Cnet.com) praised the helmet as comfortable. Its particularity is to be equipped with components of a new type: waveguides called by Magic Leap "photonic chips" which focus the light. It also features tracking cameras that map the environment and inward-facing eye tracking cameras. If you can not wear it with your glasses, you can still fix your lenses inside. There is a headphone jack but the sound arrives by default via small speakers placed near the ears. The Lightpack is permanently connected to the headset and embeds a platform Nvidia Tegra X2 with 8 GB of memory and 128 GB of storage, as well as a battery with a battery life of three hours. It has a USB port, a power button, a volume button and another to pause. It can connect in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, but not yet with mobile networks, outdoors.

A still limited field of vision

But Magic Leap manages to insert virtual 3D objects in the real world For American journalists the helmet is very promising and the experience it offers is one of the best in the market. With an image quality similar to that of Microsoft's Hololens, which remains a must in the field.

The field of view (FOV) is 45% higher than that of Microsoft's headset, but it is still limited and does not cover all of your eyes. So less immersion: some virtual objects appear cut or can disappear as soon as you turn your head slightly.

A major flaw also: its high price ... it still costs $ 2295.

It remains to be familiar with a whole new ecosystem: the LuminOS operating system, the Magic Leap World application catalog and the Helio browser.