Magic Leap is an augmented reality (AR) headset that was highly anticipated when it was first announced. The company promised a revolutionary experience that would merge the real world with virtual objects in a seamless way. However, after its release, the reviews for Magic Leap have been mixed. One of the biggest criticisms of Magic Leap is its high price tag. The headset is priced at $2,295, making it inaccessible for many consumers. Additionally, the device requires a separate puck-like computer called the Lightpack, which further adds to the cost.

I tried Magic Leap and saw a flawed glimpse of mixed reality’s amazing potential

By Adi Robertson , a senior tech and policy editor focused on VR, online platforms, and free expression. Adi has covered video games, biohacking, and more for The Verge since 2011.

Photography by James Bareham | Video by Tom Connors & Becca Farsace

Additionally, the device requires a separate puck-like computer called the Lightpack, which further adds to the cost. The high price has limited the adoption of Magic Leap, as most consumers are not willing to invest such a significant amount of money. In terms of the hardware, Magic Leap is relatively comfortable to wear, thanks to its lightweight design.

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When you write about augmented reality headsets, you’re supposed to start by describing something impossible — like a pastel dinosaur stomping its feet in a quiet office space in Florida. This dinosaur is made of fist-sized blocks that look like candy, and the office belongs to Magic Leap, a mysterious startup that’s been working in near-total secrecy for seven years. I should clarify that the dinosaur also isn’t real. It exists only in the lenses of the Magic Leap One, a pair of goggles that Magic Leap hopes will replace phones, computers, and every other high-tech screen in our lives.

The whimsical anecdote setup is supposed to emphasize how well the Magic Leap One tricked my mind into believing this impossible thing existed, which is what I’d hoped would happen last month when Magic Leap invited me to its headquarters. But it just didn’t happen.

In reality, the dinosaur I see through the Magic Leap One looks genuinely three-dimensional, but pieces start getting cut off when I approach it. When a man walks behind it, I can see him slightly. My headset doesn’t account for relative distance, so it’s impossible for someone to walk in front of the dinosaur, no matter how close they are. It’s still a fascinating, wonderful illusion — maybe the best I’ve seen in one of these headsets, and far cooler than watching an AR model through an iPhone screen. But it’s not the kind of revolutionary (or downright magical) advance that Magic Leap has teased for years. It’s a better version of a thing I’ve tried before, and that thing is still very much a work in progress.

Based on an afternoon with Magic Leap, the Magic Leap One Creator Edition — which ships in the US today for $2,295 — is a functional, thoughtfully designed headset with some very real advantages over competitors like the Microsoft HoloLens. But it doesn’t seem like a satisfying computing device or a radical step forward for mixed reality. Magic Leap’s vision is a compelling alternative to that of Silicon Valley’s tech giants. But there’s a baffling disconnect between its vast resources and parts of its actual product. I genuinely believe Magic Leap has given me a glimpse of the future of computing, but it might take a long time to reach that future, and I’m not sure Magic Leap will be the company that gets there first.

Magic Leap calls itself a “spatial computing” company, but it produces what most people call augmented or mixed reality experiences: hologram-like objects projected into three-dimensional space. Modern smartphones offer a primitive version of mixed reality, and headsets like Microsoft HoloLens offer a more advanced version for industrial and professional use. Magic Leap has a more ambitious goal: it’s building futuristic mixed reality glasses for everyday computing, hoping to beat bigger companies like Apple or Facebook to market. So far, it’s raised over $2.3 billion to realize its vision, with major investors that range from Google to JPMorgan.

The company isn’t just promoting a headset. Since its founding in 2011, Magic Leap has cultivated an enigmatic image that CEO Rony Abovitz compares to the black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey — “where it’s anything you want it to be,” he says. Abovitz has claimed that Magic Leap’s hardware will “transcend what can be contained in a physical product.” He announced the company with a 2012 TedX talk in which he donned a full space suit and spoke for 30 seconds. Today, he won’t even confirm it was him in the suit.

“Our whole thing with Magic Leap One is, we want people to realize this is what computing should look like.”

The Magic Leap One Creator Edition is aimed at artists and developers, but Abovitz stresses that it’s a “full-blown, working consumer-grade product,” not a prototype. AT&T will even offer demos to customers in some of its stores later this year. “We think it’s at the border of being practical for everybody,” says Abovitz. “Our whole thing with Magic Leap One is, we want people to realize this is what computing should look like — not [laptops], not TVs, not phones.”

The Magic Leap One is a three-piece system that includes a headset called Lightwear, a small wearable computer called the Lightpack, and a handheld controller. The headset is studded with tracking cameras for mapping your environment, as well as inward-facing eye-tracking cameras. The darkened lenses are inset with small glass waveguides, which Magic Leap calls “photonics chips.” These chips are manufactured at Magic Leap headquarters, a former Motorola factory. Abovitz says Magic Leap can comfortably produce tens of millions of chips on-site, while the rest of the headset is manufactured by a third party whose name and location he resolutely refuses to discuss.

Lightwear eschews the visor-like style of most mixed reality headsets, favoring a cyberpunk-y design with big round lenses, which lead designer Gary Natsume says are supposed to evoke the “universal sign” of glasses. “If you can start drawing two circles, and everyone says ‘Oh, that’s Magic Leap,’ that’s our goal,” he says. The system has a headphone jack, but by default, it pipes audio through small built-in speakers near your ears.

The headset looks far from utilitarian — it’s like something a hacker would wear in a Shadowrun larp. But against all odds, it’s surprisingly comfortable. You put it on by stretching an expandable back, then settling it lightly over your head. Buyers can pick from two sizes, which offer the same eyepieces with different head strap sizes and interpupillary distances. Swappable nose and forehead rests make smaller adjustments possible. You can’t wear normal glasses with the Magic Leap One, but you can order prescription lenses that clip magnetically into the headset.

Possibly the only computer that comes with a reality button

Part of the comfort factor is the Magic Leap One’s relative lightness, since the bulkiest electronics are offloaded into the Lightpack. The little puck computer is permanently wired to the headset, and it includes an Nvidia Tegra X2 chipset, 8GB of memory, 128GB of storage, and a battery with up to three hours of use time. The battery is partly detached to create a slot in the center of the device, so you can clip it onto your pocket; if you don’t have pockets, you can also snap it into a thin shoulder strap and wear it that way.

Otherwise, the Lightpack is a smooth gray disk with a USB-C charging port and buttons for power and volume, as well as a universal pause button cleverly labeled “Reality.” Natsume says the Lightpack is specifically slightly smaller than a CD-ROM, so people won’t mistake it for a CD player. Given the Magic Leap One’s mildly ‘90s-retro look, that seems like a legitimate concern.

The Magic Leap One is designed for an eclectic range of inputs. It supports some third-party controllers, and the Lightwear cameras track limited hand motion, although I only tried this feature briefly. Abovitz even says Magic Leap will release a “biomarker toolkit,” which will let apps extrapolate breathing patterns, tone of voice, pupil changes, and pulse rate from microphone and eye-tracking camera data.

But the default interface is a single remote-style controller informally called the “totem,” which includes a front trigger, a bumper button above the trigger, a round trackpad on the top, and a tiny home button behind the trackpad. It looks a lot like the controller of the Oculus Go or Samsung Gear VR, except that it’s fully tracked by the headset cameras, so it offers a full range of motion. It’s not quite like having a virtual hand, but it’s a versatile system nonetheless.

Like every mixed reality company, Magic Leap eventually wants to make a normal-looking pair of glasses that can be worn everywhere. For now, the headset is only guaranteed to work indoors, and it includes Bluetooth and Wi-Fi antennas, but no mobile data options. AT&T has already committed to selling a future version with wireless data plans, though, and Abovitz says you can use the current version “at your own risk” outside. “We wanted to teach people how to begin to live a life like this. You don’t suddenly want people running across the street,” he says.

I didn’t take the Magic Leap One outside, and I’m not sure how well it would function under bright sunlight or near dark. I tried it in a series of spacious, well-lit rooms filled with furniture that provided clear hard edges for tracking. I played demos built by Magic Leap’s huge team of developers to show off the headset’s full range of capabilities, with an employee on hand to answer my questions and guide me through the experiences. I saw the Magic Leap One at what any reasonable person might assume was its absolute peak performance. And in light of all that, I still left worried.

Magic Leap is best known for its hardware, but the roughly 1,500-person company has a large software team as well, and the Magic Leap One has a functional operating system and starting app suite. Its Linux-based Lumen OS appears as a series of balls floating in mid-air, and the headset ships with a web browser called Helio; a “social suite” with a holographic chat system; an app store called Magic Leap World; an image gallery; a system for pinning and watching virtual screens; and a demo of Dr. Grordbort’s Invaders, a steampunk shooter from New Zealand special effects studio Weta Workshop.

Magic Leap World offers a few more experiences, including an NBA mixed reality app preview; an art app called Create; and an interactive musical experience called Tonandi, made in partnership with the band Sigur Rós. These apps cover some of mixed reality’s clearest use cases, but they’re compromised by the headset’s basic technical limitations.

Field of view is a big problem for headsets, and the Magic Leap One is no exception

The Magic Leap One’s field of view is constantly distracting. Field of view is a huge problem for mixed reality headsets, which can generally just project images into a moderately sized rectangle in front of you, leaving the rest of the world bare. Magic Leap has improved on Microsoft’s HoloLens in this respect — it’s got a 50-degree diagonal field of view, which works out to a rectangle that’s around 45 percent bigger. But it’s not nearly enough to look around the world normally. Moderately sized objects were cut off if I got too close, and full-room scenes appeared only in patches.

The overall image quality, meanwhile, felt similar to HoloLens. Objects looked three-dimensional, but ethereal. Edges glowed slightly, text was a little fuzzy, and some objects appeared slightly transparent. Tracking was generally good, but objects occasionally shifted or jittered. A few times, animated objects seized up altogether, which might have been an issue with tracking, Lightpack performance, or something else. Magic Leap theoretically features multiple focal planes that let your eyes focus more normally than with other mixed reality headsets. But the images weren’t realistic enough for me to judge how well that was working.

All of this, to be clear, is still very, very impressive compared to most mixed reality headsets. Combined with the comfort factor, it makes Magic Leap one of the best (if not the best) pieces of mixed reality hardware I’ve seen. But after all of Magic Leap’s descriptions of its unique hyper-advanced light field technology, it didn’t feel categorically different from something like HoloLens — which was released two years ago, and has a second generation on the horizon. I’m not convinced Magic Leap’s photonics chip is practically that different from other mixed reality waveguides, or that Magic Leap is doing something other companies couldn’t replicate.

I’m also not sure how much the Lightpack’s performance will limit experience size, complexity, and spatial responsiveness. The Magic Leap One is supposed to have fairly sophisticated tracking options. I could put my palm out to block projectiles in Dr. Grordbort’s Invaders, and I could walk around a room to create a rough mesh of my surroundings, then do things like bounce a virtual ball against a couch. But for now, the headset seemingly ignores all non-static objects besides hands. I was told that it could potentially track people moving around the dinosaur I mentioned earlier, but that doing so would require too much power — so the option won’t be available in the first release.

Immersive AR for consumers is 'five or so' years away, says Magic Leap CEO

Magic Leap is seeing commercial success with its enterprise augmented reality headset, but it will take years to get electronics shrunk down into a glasses-like form factor that consumers will want to use.

Magic Leap 2 has gotten favorable reviews as perhaps the best augmented reality headset around. CEO Peggy Johnson says a lot more still has to be done to make such devices into something consumers will want to use.

A viable market for consumer use of augmented reality, where simulated images are overlaid on one's view of the world, as by goggles, is probably five years away, according to Peggy Johnson, chief executive officer of Magic Leap, the pioneering maker of AR gear.

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"If I had to guess, I think, maybe, five or so years out, for the type of fully immersive augmented reality that we do," said Johnson last week in a live Q&A forum on Zoom organized by the Collective[i] Forecast, an online, interactive discussion series that is organized by Collective[i], which bills itself as "an AI platform designed to optimize B2B sales."

Magic Leap, which pioneered the development of glasses that let a user see rendered objects in their field of view, excited the technorati in 2018 with teaser videos, and billions in funding it received from Google.

But the first version of the product, released that year, was underwhelming. CNET called the $2,295 headset the best AR device up to that point, but also lamented "significant drawbacks to Magic Leap's AR hardware."

Johnson, who came aboard in August of 2020 after many years at Microsoft, and before that, chip giant Qualcomm, has redirected Magic Leap from what was mostly a consumer sensation in that first headset to a very different focus on sales to business users -- "the most immersive augmented reality headset for enterprise," as the company terms it.

"The other big thing that will happen over time is the same thing that will happen in mobile phones, silicon integration," says Johnson, an engineer by training. "That allows you to have a very small, lightweight device, and a very power-efficient device. And we are still coming down that trajectory."

The company released the second version of the headset in September, and the new device, priced nearly a thousand dollars more, $3,200, can be ordered online from multiple outlets. But the focus is to build the enterprise use of the product through partnerships and reseller channels.

Magic Leap's second version enters a crowded market for enterprise AR as well as XR, covering devices that mix AR with VR. Microsoft's HoloLens is among the most prominent, but there are also goggles from Vuzix and Lenovo , and Google's Glass Enterprise 2 .

The Magic Leap 2 has gotten favorable initial responses. CNET's Scott Stein, who had been critical in 2018, wrote in March of this year that the improvements with the second version are meaningful, and collectively, "a small but key step for a company that, like many others, is aiming to solve the riddle of AR glasses."

An early reviewer of the final product, Devindra Hardawar, wrote last month that the second version is "a significant achievement," adding it "is easier to wear, far more powerful and it offers a dramatically larger (and taller) AR field of view than any headset we've seen before" and "should be easier for developers to work with, thanks to a new Android-based OS."

However, much more basic engineering progress is necessary to achieve a consumer-friendly device, said Johnson.

"I think what is needed is a super lightweight device," she said. "I think it needs to look something like glasses."

The Magic Leap 2 benefits by having the processor unit as an attached device worn at the hip, something that won't fly for consumers, noted Johnson:

Magic Leap 2.0 went far in becoming lighter, it's about 20% lighter, it's about half the size, so we really tightened up the metrics, which has been helpful for all day use for somebody in an industrial setting, or even a doctor during a long surgery. But, still, for walking around, I think the device is not quite what a consumer would put up with for a full day. I think we really need to be in that glasses category.

Magic Leap has been re-oriented toward enterprise use cases. Here, a group visualize a wildfire scene with images of terrain and stats overlaid on their view of the world.

To make such a compact device runs into the limits of current electronics, especially batteries:

It's hard to get down to that size. The battery is a constraint. The processor itself -- right now, we have the processor separate from the headset; that's how we make the headset so light, it kind of hangs off your waistband or your pocket. It's a little bit heavier, it can be warm because it's a processor. We just don't think that's wise to build that into headset right now. It's uncomfortable. There are others on the market who have done that, and that's the biggest complaint: it's clunky, it's hot, it's heavy. And so, we've got to solve all of that in order to get these onto consumers.

Johnson, an engineer by training, said the continued path of silicon integration in chips will help:

The other big thing that will happen over time is the same thing that will happen in mobile phones, silicon integration. The CPU that runs our mobile phones used to be a lot of components, and it used to be bigger. And my old company, Qualcomm, puts more and more features into that chip. That allows you to have a very small, lightweight device, and a very power-efficient device. And we are still coming down that trajectory.

There are already a few devices on the market, said Johnson, "that are more of a heads-up display."

Those kinds of devices, while not immersive like the Magic Leap, "might solve an anesthesiologist's problem -- like, I just want to see the vitals in front of my eyes," she said.

"That's really easy to do, that's just putting a little display in front of your field of view, and not blocking anything else. That is something that can happen today."

Johnson reiterated, "But for that fully immersive AR experience that will really be a tool for consumers, I think it's going to be several years, probably five or so."

Hands on: Magic Leap One review

If enough developers get on board, this could be a compelling headset. But we're still awaiting just how much software support the strong hardware will receive.

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Behold the Magic Leap One. After years of secretive development, and a huge amount of hype about its stylish design and holographic imaging, Magic Leap’s premium augmented reality headset is now on the market.

Well, in North America at least. The rollout is starting slow – it’s only available in a handful of American cities from the Magic Leap website initially – though the headset is sure to come to Europe and other regions in the near future.

For now though, very few people have had the chance to try out the Magic Leap One headset, and we’re here to give you our first impressions of using the $2,295 (about £1,700, AU$3,000) contraption, which allows you to see AR images overlaid on the world around you, as opposed to the closed-off virtual worlds of VR.

Our demo was limited to few levels of Angry Birds: First Person Slingshot, an AR experience from Resolution Games that’s available for free on Magic Leap World, Magic Leap’s own store for games and other AR content. Based on the globally popular Angry Birds mobile game, the AR game sees you using a slingshot in three-dimensional space – so what was it like?

• What is augmented reality? Everything you need to know about AR

The headset is equipped with a wide field of view, allowing users to see virtual objects alongside the real world. However, many users have complained about the small sweet spot for viewing, which can lead to a distorted image outside of the central area. The tracking and motion controls of Magic Leap have also received mixed reviews. While some users have praised the accuracy and responsiveness of the tracking system, others have reported issues with tracking objects in certain lighting conditions. The motion controls, which are performed using a handheld remote, have been criticized for their lack of precision and limited functionality. The content available for Magic Leap has been another point of contention. The device launched with a limited selection of apps and experiences, which has disappointed many users. While there are some impressive AR demos and games available, the overall library of content is still relatively small. This has made it difficult for users to find compelling reasons to use Magic Leap on a regular basis. Despite its shortcomings, Magic Leap does have some redeeming qualities. The visual quality of the AR experience is generally praised, with vibrant colors and sharp details. The device also offers spatial audio, which helps create a more immersive experience. Additionally, Magic Leap has shown potential for enterprise use, with applications in areas such as training, design, and collaboration. In conclusion, Magic Leap has received mixed reviews since its release. While it offers an impressive AR experience with high-quality visuals, the high price, limited content, and mixed tracking and motion controls have hindered its adoption. As the technology continues to improve and more content becomes available, Magic Leap may have a chance to redeem itself in the future..

Reviews for "Magic Leap: A Closer Look at Its Potential Impact on Education"

1. John - 2 stars - I was really excited to try out the Magic Leap, but I was severely disappointed. The device was clunky and uncomfortable to wear, and the visuals were very pixelated. The tracking was also quite poor, with objects jumping around and making it difficult to interact with the virtual reality environment. Overall, I felt like the Magic Leap was not worth the hefty price tag and did not live up to the hype.

2. Sarah - 1 star - I have to say, I expected so much more from the Magic Leap. The field of view was extremely limited, so much so that it felt like looking through a small window into another world. The image quality was also lacking, with blurry and pixelated visuals. The device also had a tendency to overheat quickly, which was frustrating. I was really hoping for a revolutionary AR experience, but unfortunately, the Magic Leap fell short in every aspect.

3. David - 2 stars - The Magic Leap was a major letdown for me. The setup process was overly complicated and took a long time to complete. Once I finally got it working, I was unimpressed with the overall experience. The graphics were underwhelming, and the tracking was inconsistent at best. I also had issues with the device losing connection frequently. For the high price point, I expected a much more seamless and enjoyable AR experience. I would not recommend the Magic Leap to others.

4. Amy - 2.5 stars - While the Magic Leap had its moments of excitement, overall, I found it to be lacking in several areas. The field of view was very limited, which made it difficult to fully immerse myself in the augmented reality world. The device itself was also quite heavy and uncomfortable to wear for extended periods. Additionally, the battery life was disappointing, as it required frequent charging. I do appreciate the potential of the technology, but the Magic Leap fell short of my expectations.

Can Magic Leap Make Virtual Reality Obsolete? A Critical Review