Magic Leap One, also known as Magic Leap 1, is a spatial computing device that combines augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies. It was developed by Magic Leap Inc., a Florida-based technology company. The Magic Leap One consists of three main components: a Lightwear headset, a Lightpack computer, and a handheld controller. The Lightwear headset resembles a pair of goggles and is designed to be lightweight and comfortable to wear. It contains an array of sensors, cameras, and speakers, which allow the device to track and interact with the user's environment.

Magic Leap 1 Augmented Reality

Please note: Unfortunately, most glasses wearers will not be able to easily use the magic leap 1.

Magic Leap 1 is a powerful and lightweight standalone Augmented Reality headset. It consists of three components: the headset (Lightwear), a small battery-powered wearable computer (Lightpack), and a controller.
The headset is powered by the Lightpack, which hooks into your belt or pocket so no PC is required to use the headset.
To control the Magic Leap, you can use the physical 6DoF controller which has a touch sensitive trackpad and trigger button, or you can enable hand-tracking and use your hands for simple gestures that don’t require precise input.
Before using the headset, make sure to complete a visual calibration so that the headset learns to track your eye movements.

For users: The headset connects via wifi and additional applications can be downloaded from the magic leap library within the headset.

For development: You can deploy a unity or unreal application to the Magic leap 1 from a connected computer. You can find our information about developing for the magic leap AR headset here: https://developer.magicleap.com/en-us/learn/guides/developer-portal

Key Specs:
• Display resolution: 1280 x 960 per RGB eye
• Degrees of freedom: Inside/out 6DoF
• Eye tracking infrared sensors
• Refresh rate: 120Hz
• Field of view: 50 degrees
• Weight: 316g
• Storage: 128GB
• 3-hour battery

This package includes:
1 x Magic Leap 1: Lightwear (heads-up display) and Lightpack (Processing system)
1 x Magic Leap controller
1 x Controller charger
1 x Lightpack charger
2 x USB-C cables
2 x Power Adaptor
1 x Setup documentation
5 x nose pads
2 x forehead pads
1 x Magic Leap box

Magic Leap One first impressions review: it’s not a leap, but a step

I thought it would have taken me a lot before I would be able to try the Magic Leap One, but luckily this has not been the case. Thanks to a friend and a bit of luck, I’ve been able to test it and so I will be able to give you my impressions on the device… are you interested?

Last Saturday I visited my former startup partner Gianni Rosa Gallina. If you follow me since a while, you should recall that I had a startup focused on full body virtual reality called Immotionar: we mixed VR headsets and Kinects to let you use your full body in VR. We had full-body room-scale VR in 2014, we were so cool. But while we were great on the technical side, we weren’t good at doing business and marketing (I only started my blog in summer 2016), so in 2017 we closed the curtain on our crazy adventure.

It was a nice ride, and now Gianni, that is an amazing developer, is working in a big company and I’ve started a new adventure in trying to establish a consultancy agency called New Technology Walkers. Anyway, a startup bond is something hard to break, so Gianni and I kept in touch and so on Saturday, I went visiting him and his family. At a certain point, I asked him: “oh, you said me that you have tried Magic Leap… how is it?” and he answered with “You are going to tell me in a while“. And then, as a magician, he took out a Magic Leap One and let me try it. I was amazed.

Thanks to him, I’ve been able to spend half an hour with a Magic Leap One on, trying some apps and demos. And so, I’m now able to give you my first impressions on the device. I’ll try to be the most objective possible about it, trying to ignore all the fluffy hype of the company that has promised us the impossible some years ago and that made me critical or ironic towards Magic Leap various times. Ready, go?

Composition

I guess that you already know this, but I’ll repeat it the same: the Magic Leap One system is composed of three parts:

• The actual headset, the Lightwear;
• The computational unit, the Lightpack;
• The 6 DOF controller, the Control.

The fact that the headset does not contain the computational unit, but it is just basically a display, makes it very light. This comes anyway at the expense of having always a cable that runs from the headset to the Lightpack. The controller is instead a remote that reminds one of some VR headsets like the Vive Focus.

Appearance and design

Magic Leap One is cool to wear. Deal with it. In my opinion, this is one of the greatest innovations that it has introduced in the AR ecosystem. Yes, it is still not as cool as a pair of Rayban sunglasses, but shooting a photo with a Magic Leap on, everyone seems cool. That’s why, after its release, I’ve seen a lot of people posting selfies with this device on and many of them also keeping a photo with the Magic Leap One as the profile pic (Charlie, I’m talking about you :P). That also helped a lot the marketing of the product, that seemed immediately “the cool thing to own”… until the first reviews came to light.

Duck Face, Magic Leap One on and I’m ready to make lots of girls to fall in love with me 😀 😀 😀

With HoloLens or Meta, there is not the same sensation: they look more like tech gadgets or lab glasses. I’m not saying that they are bad, but they have not the same style of Magic Leap. And I think that if we want XR to be widespread, we need to make it stylish, to make it trendy. That’s also because Mister President walked the runway at Shanghai Fashion Week: to show that VR can be a fashionable gadget.

Comfort

IMHO, the other great innovation of Magic Leap. There is a great attention to ergonomics: the device comes with various pads and add-ons to configure it so that to fit perfectly the face and the nose of the user.

And have I said you that is light, haven’t I? It is DAMN light if compared with HoloLens… when I took it in my hands, the first impression I had, has been “Is it true? How can it be so light?”. Then Gianni reminded me of the Lightpack and I got it. Yes, of course: all the computational units are in the external computer, not in the headset, that’s why it is so light.

And thanks to the above two points, the headset is very comfortable.

Me wearing the Magic Leap One: the Lightpack makes sure that the headset is super light. Here I was using the cable in the wrong way and it was really a nuisance to me, but things got better when I put it on my back

But don’t forget the “no free lunch theorem“: all of this must come to a price. The first price is having a mini-PC attached to your pocket: this is usually not a big issue, anyway, since it is quite light (unless you don’t have pockets to attach it to… in that case, you have a problem). The second price to pay is the cable between the mini-PC and the headset. If you don’t set up this cable in the right way, it is a great nuisance all the time and it ruins your experience. If you setup it in the right way, letting it pass behind you, along your back, then it is only an occasional issue. In the end, I haven’t loved that much the cable and I hope for a wireless solution for Magic Leap Two. There is a reason if John Carmack has said that they discarded this design for the Quest on purpose after various focus tests.

A final note on the setup instructions: I really don’t get why they have made a glass that should be kept not perfectly horizontally, but slightly oblique so that it points towards the floor. This way, it is easy for everyone to install it in the wrong way.

Visuals

When talking about visuals, there are two questions that everyone asks:

1. Do the virtual elements seem real as in the video of the whale in the gym?
2. How is the field of view?

Let me answer both questions:

1. Forget about whales and elephants: the virtual elements do not seem real at all. They are just a little bit better than on HoloLens: they are there, in your environment, but they have some kind of transparency… they seem a bit like opaque ghosts in the room. This is a problem of the technology and Magic Leap couldn’t do anything to make it better. Furthermore, the computational power of the device only allows scenes without too many polygons, so you can’t run a high-poly photorealistic scene. Even here, anyway, we are at a level higher than HoloLens’s one, thanks to the NVIDIA Tegra X2 contained in the Lightpack, that is more performant than the chip contained in the old HoloLens. This lets you experience scenes that are a bit more complex than the ones that you can live on Microsoft’s device;
2. The field of view is 40° Horizontal and 30° Vertical. This means that it is slightly bigger than HoloLens, but nothing special. It is still like a window to the augmented world. But Magic Leap One is great in masking its limitations: more or less, when the FOV window ends, it begins the frame of the glass, and this triggers a nice mechanism in your brain, that accepts the fact that there are virtual elements only if you look through the glass. Let me explain that better: in HoloLens, you have a transparent glass all around your vision, so you can see all the real world, and in a certain abrupt region, the virtual elements pop up. This is annoying because there is this confusing augmented window out of nowhere. On Magic Leap, you are wearing glasses with a thick frame, so you don’t have all your vision. And the augmentations more or less happen only in the region that is inside the frame, so your brain thinks “what I see inside the glasses frame is augmented, what I see outside it is just the real world” and this makes more sense to it. When playing with the device, I had a sensation similar to the one that I have in HoloLens only in the lower part of the augmented window, that for my vision was too distant from the frame of the Magic Leap One and so the above considerations didn’t hold, leaving me unsatisfied about vertical FOV. So, FOV is not exceptional at all, but I appreciated the clever masking mechanism.

Multifocal display

Magic Leap uses a waveguide display, exactly the same type of HoloLens. And, exactly as in HoloLens, it is possible to view the lights of your rooms reflected with rainbow glares on the lenses.

The innovation is that it is a multi-focal display with two depths of field: near and far. The system works this way: your eyes are tracked continuously by the system and when it detects that they are crossing on a near object, it activates the near focus display and when they are relaxing on a distant object, it activates the far plane. Theoretically, it should mimic what happens in real life, so you should never notice this happening, it should feel natural.

I wanted to absolutely see it working, so in the end, I had an idea: while playing Angry Birds, I put the sling near my face, exactly on the line of sight between me and the constructions of the pigs, that were far away from me. This way I could choose to look at an object and see the other becoming blurred. From this experiment, I noticed that:

• Two focus planes are not enough for this mechanism to feel natural and we need more;
• When the focus-switching mechanism works, it is great, everything feels real;
• When the focus-switching mechanism glitches, so it selects the wrong focus plane or selects the right one but with a noticeable delay, it is really bad. My eyes crossed and my brain got crazy for one second or such everytime this happened.

Audio

Magic Leap One comes with stereo integrated audio. As I have said various times, I am not an audio expert at all, so I can’t judge about its quality. Anyway, it worked and worked well. There is also a 3.5mm jack to add your external headphones (like the ones announced at LEAP Con), but I haven’t tried it.

Controller

The controller is a 6 DOF remote, that somewhat reminds the ones of some VR headsets. But it is much bigger, it is more or less big as my hand. It features a touchpad, a button on the top that turns it on/off and also acts as a system menu, and two triggers, one for the index finger and one for the middle finger. It is tracked thanks to magnetical fields tracking and communicates with the headset via Bluetooth.

The big controller of Magic Leap. SkarredHand next to it for scale

I didn’t like the controller at all. One of the main reasons is that the touchpad is not clickable, you can just use it to slide your thumb and nothing more and this is the opposite of what happens with all the XR controllers out there (Vive, Vive Focus, Lenovo Mirage Solo, Gear VR, etc…). So a lot of time, I tried to confirm stuff by pressing the trackpad, but with no luck and this irritated me a lot. Maybe creating an interface that was similar to one of the other XR glasses would have been a smarter choice.

The two other triggers are confusing as well because they seem to be there without a clear logic. I mean, on the Oculus Touch you have a middle finger trigger, that is used to grab stuff by closing your hand and the index finger that is used to trigger actions: when you use a VR gun, everything is more or less like in the real world. Here you have the two triggers the same, but because of the different shape of the controllers, they didn’t sound intuitive to me at all. During the experience, I never got how to use them at a first glance. And a UX should be intuitive… if I have to follow a tutorial for each experience, maybe there is something wrong with it.

The Oculus Quest touch controllers: this is how I want manual interface in XR. I haven’t found anything better yet (Image by Oculus)

Regarding the controller tracking, I haven’t found it exciting at all… sometimes I found the controller pointing at a slightly different direction wrt the expected one and during all the experience, I found it being tracked in a non-ideal way. I mean, my brain told me that something was wrong with it all the time, even if I can’t explain what (maybe a little lag, or a slight offset). I read that metallic objects can ruin the tracking performances… maybe there were objects causing interferences in the surroundings, who knows.

Anyway, at least there is a controller. With Hololens there is not, and air-tapping is a pain.

Tracking

The 6 DOF tracking of the headset worked fairly well in my experience.

When reconstructing the various environments, I was able to see the meshing system at work and I noticed that it was better than the one of HoloLens: the triangles of the mesh were smaller, the tracking was faster, there were fewer holes and the resulting mesh was also less chaotic. So, it is good, but don’t expect it to be perfect: the mesh had holes and had also an offset wrt the real world sometimes. For instance, when playing Angry Birds, I noticed that the mesh of the floor was actually like 5cm above the real floor.

The nice meshing is the reason why people are all astonished by Magic Leap physics system: if you let an astronaut fly in your room, he can fly behind your table and he gets completely obscured by the table. Then you go looking behind your table and you find the astronaut there, in the position you expected it to be. That works very well because the meshing is indeed good. On Hololens something like that was already possible, but the mesh was more rough and less adherent to the real world so that the illusion was broken more easily.

The problem of the tracking is that the positional tracking is a little more unstable than the one of HoloLens: virtual elements seem all to jitter a bit, and this is especially noticeable when you go closer to them. This is really annoying and ruins a bit the magic to me. With HoloLens, instead, virtual elements are really fixed in place as if they were real.

UX

Dear UX designer of Magic Leap, you had one job. And you did it bad.

The UI of Magic Leap One is all full of cartoons and nice drawings, exactly as its website, and all of this is nice and surely more good-looking and more-relaxing than the cold Windows 10 interface of HoloLens. And again, I appreciated the attention of the Florida company to the visual experience that the user should have, this is really great.

Magic Leap One home menu: it is very nice… until you have to interact with it

But the interfaces… oh, the interfaces are a complete nonsense: it is like every time there should be an action to be done, you have to spin the Wheel of Luck and pick the interaction that randomly comes out. If I have a 6 DOF controller in my hand, I expect to do everything with it, pointing at menu entries and then clicking my trigger to select the menu item. Instead, this doesn’t happen… ehm, no, I mean: sometimes it happens, sometimes not. When I triggered the Main Menu of Magic Leap One, I immediately pointed my controller towards “Dr. Grodborts invaders”, but I saw nothing happening. I looked at Gianni and he said to me “no, you have to swipe your touchpad to select menu items“. SWIPE MY WHAAT. It is a circular menu in 3D in front of me, why should I swipe on a touchpad to use it. I should point at elements! Then, in another experience, I selected a menu item by actually pointing at it with my controller, but then in the resulting submenu, I had strangely to swipe on my touchpad to select the sub-item in a completely incoherent way from what I just did before.

Gianni said, “eh, you have to get used to this interface”. No, I don’t have to get used to anything: a UX is like a joke, if you have to explain it, then it is not good.

What really made my cry has been the use of head tracking: when you select an app in the initial menu with your controller, then the system shows you a 3D gizmo of the app that you have to position in your room USING YOUR HEAD. So, you grab things with your controller, but then you have to move them with your head. Seems logic, no?

(Image by Know your meme)

I got so frustrated by using the UX system of Magic Leap, together with the flawed controller design, that in the end, I was on the edge of throwing angrily the controller on the floor. This has been the thing that ruined my experience the most: more than FOV, more than polycount and all the things that we have all talked about in the last months.

Apps

I’ve tried a few apps:

Dr. G Invaders: it didn’t work because the room was too little. Dear WETA, in Europe we don’t have all the big houses with giant living rooms that you have in the States, so please let us play your game anyway;

Problems

There are some things that further impacted on my experience:

1. The glasses got warm during the time I used them, and I started to feel a non-pleasant warming sensation on my forehead;
2. The headset OS didn’t appear as stable and sometimes the software glitched or halted for some seconds;
3. The computational power is bigger than HoloLens, but not that big enough and when there were too many objects in the scene, the OS lagged a bit;
4. I felt eye strain really quickly. HoloLens makes my eyes dry too, but not this fast and not this much;
5. I had motion sickness. I mean, I’m used to playing games with standard locomotion and I love VR rollercoaster… and this thing gave me motion sickness, that is something that in room-scale AR should not happen. I thought that was just nausea given by something I have eaten, but Gianni confirmed me that he had the same sensation when he tried the device. That’s really bad.

Other considerations

There are hands tracking and eye tracking, but they are almost never exploited.

Final impressions

Magic Leap is 不怎么样, it is a not so special device. I think that in the end, Palmer Luckey was right:

It is slightly better than Hololens in some ways, slightly worse in others, and generally a small step past what was state of the art three years ago – this is more Hololens 1.1 than Consumer AR 1.0.

As someone that has already used HoloLens for some projects, I didn’t find Magic Leap One either magical or a leap at all. It is more like a HoloLens Pro. It has better FOV, better computational power, better environment understanding than HoloLens, and it also has acontroller, hands tracking and eye tracking. But it has also a worse tracking stability, a less coherent UX and an unriper ecosystem. I think that the definition of HoloLens 1.1 is a bit too critic, maybe HoloLens 1.5 gives more justice to Magic Leap. Anyway, after I tried it, I also found it more underwhelming than how I expected it after having read all the possible reviews about it. And my ex-partner agrees with me. I think that some key issues, like the bad controller tracking, the bad UX and the motion sickness can really hurt the user experience.

On the other side, I think that it is also remarkable that a new startup has been able to create such a product coming from nothing. Yes, they got billions, but managing money is anyway a hard task, especially if you have to fight against Microsoft and Facebook in the AR realm.

The neat design of the Magic Leap One glasses

And controller apart, the device itself is not bad. It is remarkable to say that most of the problems that I found (jittery tracking, terrible UX, mediocre apps, etc…) can be fixed in future software updates. The impression that me and Gianni got from these tests is that the device features so many gross errors (like the ones of the UX), that it seems having been rushed out for the release, maybe because of investors’ pressures or because they knew they had to release something before the next gen of HoloLens could be announced. It was not ready, but it was released anyway because waiting for it to be complete would have taken too much time. The good news is that these issues can be fixed, but the bad one is that it will require months, months in which it is difficult to say that Magic Leap is a wonderful device.

The fluff of the company regarding a mind-blowing device that makes you feel virtual elements as real is all fake: this has only been useful to create the hype to sell more devices at launch. But the headset per-se is a nice AR devkit, that lets you buy a device that is a bit better than HoloLens for a slightly lower price. But take in mind that to make a comparison with VR, maybe we are at Oculus DK 2 stage, where everything is a mess, there are few apps, the emulation of reality is mediocre and the UX is terrible.

Should you buy it?

I have mixed impressions on Magic Leap. For sure it is not a disruptive evolution of AR/MR, so there’s no need to rush to buy it, but it is also a nice devkit. Personally, I’ll continue waiting some months to observe the evolutions of augmented reality, both on the smartphone side and on the glasses side, where in the next months we should see something coming from Microsoft, Samsung, and Apple. This will let also give the time to Magic Leap to fix all the software flaws of its device. So, if you are not in a hurry, my advice is to wait.

Anyway, if you want to buy an AR headset to start experimenting with spatial computing, Magic Leap can be something that may interest you, because it is a good devkit and costs less than HoloLens. Furthermore, the company is eager to find developers, so you will have all the possible support.

If you have to work for an external enterprise customer, instead, at the moment probably I will still advise using the HoloLens, because the ecosystem is more complete, there is behind a major company like Microsoft that we’re sure that will be there for the upcoming years, there is a clear business licensing model, there are also tools for industrial environments, a full-fledged SDK and such. It’s a safer choice, IMHO.

Other resources

This has been just a brief hands-on session. If you want to read a more complete review, I advise you to read the one of Lucas Rizzotto and to watch the video by the TESTED guys.

I hope you liked this little review of mine and that it has clarified a bit your ideas regarding the Magic Leap One… and if this has been the case, please share it on your social media channels and subscribe to my newsletter to keep updated with AR and VR articles like this one 🙂

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Magic Leap One vs HoloLens v1 Comparison

I’m currently sitting in my room at the L.A. Grand Hotel waiting for the L.E.A.P. conference to start. I’ve been holding off on this comparison post because I had promised Dennis Vroegop I would give it first as a talk at the Techorama Netherlands conference – which I did last week. I will do a feature comparison based on publicly available information, then highlight features unique to the Magic Leap, and then distinguish subtle but important differences that only become apparent from spending months with these devices at the developer level. Finally I want to point out design improvements in the Magic Leap that are so good for Mixed Reality that I predict they will be incorporated into the next version of HoloLens.

Keep in mind that this is a comparison of two different generations of devices. The Magic Leap One is coming out two years after the HoloLens and would be expected to be better. At the same time, the HoloLens v2 is being released some time in 2019 and can be expected to be better still.

1. Field of View

In raw numbers, the field of view of the Magic Leap One is approximately 25% better than the HoloLens. The HoloLens field of view is estimated to be about 29-30 degrees wide and 17 degrees high. The Magic Leap One is 40 degrees wide by 30 degrees high. There is a corresponding difference in resolution, with the HoloLens offering 1268 by 720 per eye and the Magic Leap One providing 1280 by 960 per eye.

The Magic Leap One uses the same wave guide display technology that the HoloLens does, however, so how did they pump up the FOV? First, the ML1 has a more powerful battery than the HoloLens does, and it’s often been claimed by Microsoft that FOV is largely dependent on the power of the projection. This is probably offset, though, by the fact that the ML1 is using more power to project in two planes instead of only one like the HoloLens does (with 6 Waveguide layers compared to 4 in the HoloLens).

Another trick is that the waveguides in the Magic Leap are closer to the wearer’s eyes than they are in the HoloLens. As a consequence, you can wear glasses underneath the HoloLens while you cannot do so comfortably under the Magic Leap device.

In addition to this, Jasper Brekelmans and Dennis Vroegop suggested over coffees along the Amstel River (in a conversation about David Copperfield) that because one’s peripheral vision is closed off in the ML1, the perceived FOV may be even larger than the actual. The theory behind this is that, due to the widespread use of glasses, we have become used to not paying attention to our peripheral vision so much and consequently are comfortable with this tunneling of our vision.

Blocking off the peripheral field of view might cause issues in certain industrial settings, but the general effect is that what you can see as a proportion of your overall FOV is much larger in the ML1 than it is in the HoloLens. Or another way of putting this is that the empty areas of your FOV, as a proportion of your available FOV, is much smaller than it is in the HoloLens.

On top of this, the aspect ratio of the FOV in the ML1 is much taller than in the HoloLens, which may end up doing a better job at accommodating vertical seccaddic movements of the eyes.

Because of the narrower gap between the device and the wearer’s eyes, the Magic Leap can’t accommodate glasses as the Hololens can. To compensate, Magic Leap is developing relationships with online eyeglass manufacturers to provide prescription inserts that can be placed in front of the waveguides and magnetically lock into place. There’s some controversy over whether this is a good or a bad thing. Some developers have expressed concern that this will make demoing Magic Leap at events more difficult than demoing HoloLens, since those with poor vision will either not be able to participate or, alternatively, we will be forced to carry around a large suitcase of prescription inserts to every event.

On the other hand, when I think of what MR will be like in the future, I tend to think of them resembling real glasses (and not electronic contacts, which simply scare me). When they reach the size and ubiquity of modern glasses, it will make sense for each person to have their own personalized device with their appropriate prescription. Magic Leap is on the right track in this case. It’s just in the intervening period that we have to figure out how to share our limited, expensive devices with others.

2. Hardware Specs (It’s all about the battery)

The Magic Leap One is overall a much beefier machine than the current HoloLens. While both the HoloLens and the Magic Leap One advertise a 3 hour battery life, these can mean vastly different things. In order to drive all of its extra hardware, the Magic Leap One needs a much beefier battery. The ML1 is powered by a twin-cell battery with 36.77 Wh, running at 3.83 V. The HoloLens has a 1.65 Wh battery.

For overall performance, the larger battery means the world meshes (i.e. surface reconstruction, world mapping) are much denser and more frequently updated on the Magic Leap than on the HoloLens. The Time-of-Flight depth camera can fire off more frequently and for longer periods.

The larger battery and beefier specs also translate to much better 3D performance. The HoloLens is able to run 30,000 polygons at 60 fps. Beyond that, the fps begins to drop. The Magic Leap runs upwards of 1 million polygons at 60 fps.

On the downside, that more powerful battery rig needs a fan to cool it whereas the HoloLens is passively cooled. In laboratory and medical scenarios where a sterile environment must be maintained, active cooling with a fan could be a problem.

3. The HoloLens and Tracking

The HoloLens uses 4 monochrome cameras (“environment aware sensors”), an accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope in a sensor fusion configuration, and a custom HPU to perform head tracking. The Magic Leap one has a similar setup minus the HPU.

The HoloLens tracking is still somewhat better than the ML1’s. It loses tracking less frequently and digital content is less jittery when seen up close or while the wearer is in motion.

Overall, though, tracking performance is fairly close between the two devices.

4. Magic Leap Extras

The ML1 has a couple of features that are simply outside of the box. One is the eye tracking. There are inward facing cameras that track the wearer’s eye movements as invisible IR flashes.

The tracking is not continuous and is captured at a much lower resolution level than the displays. While they shouldn’t be used for direct user interactions, they are great for providing context for other interactions. It would be great if someone would write a keyboard that uses eye tracking to select keys. In the meantime, I wrote this heat vision demo that uses eye tracking to burn the walls of my house — I think of it as “Superman with a Migraine”. Note the eye-blink tracking.

The other cool extra in the Magic Leap is two planes of focus. Most VR devices have a single plane of focus at infinity. The HoloLens has a single plane of focus set at two meters.

In the magic leap one, when you look at near objects, objects further away (on the outer plane) seem to go out of focus. When you look at objects close up, the objects further away go out of focus. I would guess that the close plane is around a meter and the out one about 3 meters but I’m not really sure. In the Lumin OS .91, there is also a sporadic green shift in the near plane (which I expect will be fixed soon).

5. The Tether

The Magic Leap One is made up of two parts: the Light Pack and the Light Wear. They are connected by a cable. The Light Wear contains all the sensors, projectors and displays while the Light Wear, worn at the hip, contains all the computer bits and the battery.

This is an engineering choice that allows for a much larger power source. Without the tether solution, a large battery would not be possible. Without the large battery, the ML1’s enhanced depth sensing, improved graphics processing and larger field of view would not be possible.

In addition, this design makes the Magic Leap a much more comfortable fit on the head. The weight distribution is better than on the HoloLens, it is lighter, and it doesn’t require extra straps.

The tether solution is actually so effective that I would be surprised if the HoloLens v2 does not follow a similar design. The original one-piece “tetherless” solution Microsoft came up with for the HoloLens was visionary, but severely limiting.

6. Developing

If you have ever developed in Unity for the Android (or really any other device) then you know how to develop for Magic Leap in Unity. You press a button and your app compiles to an .mpk image (Android uses “.apk” file extensions). If your device is attached, you can deploy directly by clicking on “build and run”.

Magic Leap apps can also be built with the Unreal Engine.

HoloLens apps run on a Unity player sandboxed in a UWP app. The development cycle consequently involves exporting your HoloLens app as a Visual Studio project targeting UWP and then building and deploying in UWP. In general (and it may just be me) this has been tedious.

It became even worse when the immersive WinMR devices (or occluded WinMR – basically Microsoft VR) devices came out last year and the basic tools used for HoloLens development, known as the HoloLens Toolkit and then the Mixed Reality Toolkit, was expanded to supported both kinds of device. Because of some issues with Unity, building for WinMR required certain versions of Unity and above while developing for HoloLens required certain versions of Unity and below. And this state went on for several months to the point that finding the correct Windows SDK paired with the right MRTK version paired with the correct Unity version became a closely kept alchemical formula passed from developer to developer.

This experience may not be the same for everyone but it left me a bit traumatized. By contrast, Magic Leap development is simply a pleasure. I can build and see the results very quickly in my device. I can wear the device for hours at a time. I typically only stop development when the ML battery runs down and I have to let it recharge. I don’t have a Magic Leap Hub, which would allow me to charge while I dev, but I intend to get one.

The Magic Leap toolkit is still not quite as capable as the open source Mixed Reality Toolkit managed by Stephen Hodgson and others.

The Magic Leap also has a simulator rather than an emulator for developing without a device. This actually makes sense since the Hololens emulator runs the HoloLens OS in a virtual machine, which might be tricky given the much larger specs of the Magic Leap.

7. Interactions

The Magic Leap supports robust hand and gesture tracking as well as a 6DOF controller. The DOF in 6DOF stands for degrees of freedom. We know not only the direction the controller is pointing in (3DOF) but also its position.

I love the controller. I love it so much it made me finally admit to myself that I hate the HoloLens tap gesture. No one ever gets it right. It’s awkward. It’s uncomfortable and makes me feel like I’m performing a kung fu move.

By contrast, a controller just makes sense. The UX for MR, I believe, should always support three layers of interactions. Mixed reality UX should support hand gestures for ease of use. It should fall back to the controller for precision movements. It should finally fall back on the delta pad on the controller for accessibility.

For all of my antipathy toward the HoloLens tap, however, I have to say I miss the HoloLens bloom gesture (escape), which I keep trying to use in Magic Leap to no avail. Instead, in Magic Leap holding the controller’s Home button for three seconds is the escape gesture, which I don’t really like. It also bothers me that hand gestures aren’t supported in the core desktop (the Icon grid) – but this is still the Creator’s Edition (translation: dev edition) after all.

[Late edit thanks to SH: it should also be pointed out that the Lumin OS (the desktop layer) currently doesn’t support hand gestures, which I find baffling. For now, you can’t get past the login and other initial screens without a paired phone or a controller.]

Summing Up

So is the Magic Leap One better than the HoloLens v1? Oh yes. By leaps and bounds.

1. The development workflow is much more straight forward and pleasant.

2. The increased battery size and beefier hardware makes it possible to do things, performance wise, that the HoloLens tended to stop us from doing. Phone and tablet level experiences are doable now.

3. The Magic Leap One has a much better interaction model than the HoloLens does. How did anyone ever do MR without a controller? (Actually, everyone used an XBox controller in the end in order to get any sort of real work done, but we don’t talk about that much.)

Is it time to jump back into Mixed Reality development?

If you spent $3.2K to $5K for a HoloLens, then you owe it to yourself to spend $2,300 for a Magic Leap. It’s the device you originally wanted. The HoloLens was a brilliant device back in 2016 and really the first of its kind, but it had limitations. Many of the projects you were never able to realize in HoloLens (in the small dev community that developed around HoloLens, we all know what these are) are now doable with the improved Magic Leap specs. Additionally, your enterprise stories are much easier to sell with the controller. Instead of spending 5 minutes of your precious pitch time explaining how tap works, you can now just let your potential investors and clients go straight into the demo with a controller they basically already know how to use.

Is there a future in spatial computing?

Now there is. There was a brief pause between 2016 and the middle of 2018, but we currently have two great devices available with another shoe dropping soon. Microsoft will be coming out with a HoloLens v2 sometime in the first half of 2019 which I would predict will implement the tethered design Magic Leap is using. This will be an improvement over the current Magic Leap which in turn will be driven to improve its own tech.

Microsoft has an advantage because it started this journey back in the Kinect days and has the resources of Microsoft Research to draw on. Magic Leap has an advantage because, well, they aren’t Microsoft and don’t face the internal political problems a large tech giant does (though no doubt they have their own). More importantly, they have their own U.S.-based production lines (as well as production lines in Mexico) and are less reliant on China, which hopefully means they are capable of much quicker turn-arounds and initial SKU production.

When do we get smaller devices that wear like glasses?

I have no idea, but try to think in terms of 3, 5, 10 years. We always overestimate what can be done in 3 years but always underestimate how much things will change in 10. Somewhere in the middle, we will intersect with our MR futures.

Your comments, corrections and criticisms are welcome in the comments below. I’ll try to keep up with them and incorporate what you say into the main article as appropriate.

It contains an array of sensors, cameras, and speakers, which allow the device to track and interact with the user's environment. The Lightpack computer is a small, portable unit that acts as the brain of the Magic Leap One. It houses the processing power and storage needed to power the device, as well as a battery for mobile use.

14 thoughts on “ Magic Leap One vs HoloLens v1 Comparison ”

Hi James ,
enlightening article , I am still a HoloLens fan , I know Microsoft skipped version 2 do you expect version 3 to be a commercial product ?
I also was shocked by the differential in the amount of polygons
but the FPS were the same do you think MS will close that gap with a better battery and be able to increase FPS Thanks for the article !

Just a few comments. I loved the “Underlying comic book technology” Haha. I wanted to add that the Controller for HoloLens supports 3 Dof as well as Click. (Although the positional data is cumulative) Also, I wanted to point out that the build time using the MRTK’s build window is comparable to the build process from mabu. The size of the project def makes a difference. Also please update my name :p

Stephen — I’ll learn to spell your name correctly eventually. 😉 I always under the impression that the clicker contained an accelerometer but that it was inaccessible.

Well done! Best article by far giving a side-by-side comparison between the devices. I’m very much on the fence in regards to getting a Magic Leap with Hololens 2 on the close horizon. Feel comfortable to say that HL2 will be significantly better than the Magic Leap — but competition is great for every developer, so more power to both devices! We live in awesome times!!

Completely terrible article! Let me first say I wish I had 1/10th the technical knowledge James Ashley has. Which means I have to respect his opinion. Which means I finally realize I have to purchase a Magic Leap which I was trying to avoid. Let me clarify I am glad competition to HoloLens exists and I like that Magic Leap is more consumer-focused than HoloLens. I just didn’t want to spend the money. I agree with almost every point of this article. However, I do not wish that Microsoft adds a tethered compute device. The next HoloLens nor the next Magic Leap will be an everyday wearable device. For HoloLens this means a continued industrial/enterprise focus which, to me, means un-tethered is critical as is peripheral vision and no cable to become snared. Let the next HoloLens sacrifice visual fidelity so it does not become a hazard to industrial, police, military etc. use more than it is currently. Let Magic Leap focus on consumer and entertainment with some industrial applications. Let them both do both someday. So thanks so much James for ruining my plans of a Magic Leap free existence with your technical knowledge and thoughtful analysis. Luckily I have a spare kidney to sell… TLDR (You rock James thanks!)

Excellent article!
This article convinced me to buy ML . My 2 cents, the secret sauce is not just in the MR headsets but in the Ecosystem and on that front Microsoft has an edge.

“On the downside, that more powerful battery needs a fan to cool it whereas the HoloLens is passively cooled. In laboratory and medical scenarios where a sterile environment must be maintained, active cooling with a fan could be a problem.”
….the fan is not cooling the battery …it’s the same as any device with a fan it’s cooling the cpu gpu and whatever else the heat sink makes contact with… u can see it in the ifixit teardown

Hi, thanks for this article. I’d love to read more about the sound. I was pleasantly surprised by the situation of sound on the Hololens so I’m hoping the Magic Leap does at least as good a job of creating a 360 sound stage. With HL, I was expecting tinny sound, but not nicely spatialised tinny sound.
Thanks again,
Rod

The spatial audio is great on ML. People who have tried both have said the the ML does it better than hololens — though it might be the case that apps like Tonandi and Dr. G simply do a better job of taking advantage of it than anything on HoloLens.

Comments are closed.

my HoloLens course on LinkedIn Learning

The Lightpack connects to the Lightwear headset wirelessly, enabling users to move freely without being tethered to a computer. The handheld controller is used to interact with the virtual objects and environments generated by the Magic Leap One. It features buttons and a touchpad, which allow users to navigate menus, select objects, and perform actions in the augmented reality space. One of the key features of the Magic Leap One is its spatial computing technology. This technology enables users to perceive digital content as if it is integrated into their real-world environment. It uses advanced sensors and algorithms to understand and map the physical space around the user, allowing virtual objects to be seamlessly blended with the real world. In terms of specifications, the Magic Leap One features a high-resolution display with a wide field of view, providing an immersive and realistic viewing experience. It also supports spatial audio, which enhances the sense of immersion by creating three-dimensional soundscapes that match the virtual content. The device is powered by an NVIDIA Tegra X2 processor, which is capable of handling complex computational tasks required for rendering augmented reality content. It also has 128GB of storage, allowing users to store and access their favorite applications and experiences. The Magic Leap One is compatible with a wide range of applications and content, including games, productivity tools, and educational experiences. It is designed to be developer-friendly, with an SDK (software development kit) that allows developers to create their own AR experiences and applications. Overall, the Magic Leap One offers a unique and immersive spatial computing experience, blending the digital and physical worlds seamlessly. With its advanced technology and developer-friendly approach, it has the potential to revolutionize how people interact with augmented reality..

Reviews for "Magic Leap One Specs: Bringing Immersive Augmented Reality to the Masses"

1. Amanda - 2/5 - I was really disappointed with the Magic Leap One specifications. The device was marketed as an incredible augmented reality experience, but I found it to be quite underwhelming. The field of view was extremely limited, making it difficult to fully immerse myself in the augmented reality content. The resolution was also noticeably lower than what I was expecting, resulting in a less crisp and clear visual experience. Additionally, the device was quite heavy and uncomfortable to wear for extended periods of time. Overall, I didn't feel like the specifications lived up to the hype and I would not recommend it.

2. Derek - 1/5 - The Magic Leap One specifications were a major letdown for me. The device is supposed to be at the forefront of augmented reality technology, but I found it to be laggy and glitchy. The tracking was inconsistent and often inaccurate, making it difficult to interact with the virtual objects. The overall performance was also subpar, with frequent freezes and crashes. On top of that, the battery life was abysmal, lasting only a fraction of the time I expected. Considering the high price point, I was expecting much better specifications, and I ultimately regretted my purchase.

3. Samantha - 2/5 - I was excited to try out the Magic Leap One, but the specifications left a lot to be desired. The device itself is bulky and uncomfortable to wear, making it difficult to enjoy the augmented reality experience. The field of view is incredibly limited, making the virtual content feel confined and claustrophobic. The display quality was also disappointing, with noticeable pixelation and a lack of sharpness. The whole device felt like a prototype rather than a polished product. While I appreciate the innovation, I wouldn't recommend it until they improve the specifications.

4. Patrick - 3/5 - The Magic Leap One specifications were decent, but they didn't quite live up to my expectations. The field of view was limited, which made it feel like I was looking through a small window into the augmented reality world. The resolution was decent, but it wasn't as sharp and clear as I had hoped. The device itself was comfortable to wear, but it did feel quite heavy after extended use. Overall, it was an interesting experience, but I was left wanting more from the specifications.

Magic Leap One Specifications: Revolutionizing the Way We Interact with Augmented Reality