Magic Leap on sale starting from $2295, ships only in the US

Finally, the day has come. After a lot of words, flying whales, rock throwing guys and a lot of debates, Magic Leap has been released. You can buy it on the company website. Really, in the past years I thought this day would have never arrived… and instead, sometimes the unexpected happens.

Let’s start with the bad news: the device is expensive and costs $2295. No one expected something cheap since augmented reality is an innovative technology, but we hoped for a price of around $1500, since Abovitz suggested that it may cost as a high-end PC. Anyway, Magic Leap One will still be $700 cheaper than HoloLens… not that bad. That price means that obviously this device won’t be tailored at consumers, but at prosumers and enterprise… basically the same market of HoloLens, with the difference that Magic Leap with its marketing seems already to aim at attracting the interest of the average consumer (interview on Rolling Stones, video with Shaq O’Neil, etc…). HoloLens already has a strong reputation in the industrial sector, so I think that in the beginning, Magic Leap may encounter some resistance there, but thanks to its smooth design and the over-use of the word “creator”, maybe it may attract the interest of all those segments where design and creativity count (e.g. interior design, art, fashion, etc…).

The truly bad news is in the shipping: the device ships only to selected ZIP codes, that is, it ships only in the US (and only in selected locations… starting from only six cities). If you are in countries that are closer to the US, you can register and reserve your device for when shipping will happen in your country. If you, like me, instead live far away from the USA, you’re just f**d up. Again, Microsoft did the same with HoloLens… we European are always so unlucky…
I guess the reason for this choice is that the company wants to make things gradually, step by step, evaluating how the device goes in the US to then distribute it worldwide. Furthermore, shipping only to close regions makes all the shipping management far easier. So, I understand this choice.

If you buy the headset, you get in the box all the full kit to use your device, that is:

• Lightwear (the Magic Leap glass)
• Lightpack (the Magic Leap computational unit)and Charger
• Control (the Magic Leap controller) and Charger
• 2 USB-C Cables
• AC Power Cable
• Wrist Lanyard
• Cleaning Cloth
• Fit Kit (a set of padding and nose pads: you can use those to adapt the Magic Leap one to the specific shape of your face);
• (Optional) Shoulder strap (that serves to attach the Lightpack PC to your torso, so you don’t have to put it in your pockets. If you buy the device now, you get it for free;

The device comes also with a one-year warranty. This is the first truly good news: HoloLens developers edition comes with the if-it-breaks-we-do-nothing warranty and you have to buy the pro edition to have coverage from Microsoft (but it costs $5000!). Magic Leap instead gives you a standard one year warranty, and this is great for all the innovators and especially all the companies that want to experiment with it: buying a $2000 gadget with no warranty is a too high risk. Included in the glass price there is also the license to publish your content to Magic Leap World, the app store of Magic leap.

The headset comes in two sizes and the purchaser will be contacted by the company before shipping to select the desired size depending on the dimensions of the head. The headset is not suitable for who wears glasses, so prescription lenses will be available in the future.

UPDATE: According to this Wired article, the headset needs all these fit adapters because to work well, needs to fit perfectly the user:

The problem, we figured out, was the fit. Each set of goggles comes with five nose pieces and the ability to add prescription lenses. Magic Leap’s experience is so closely linked to a person’s physiology, these goggles will need to fit perfectly to work. This is a challenge for a company trying to introduce a new type of tech. So, Magic Leap has contracted with former Apple executive Ron Johnson’s startup, Enjoy, which sends customer service people to deliver new tech gadgets and help users set them up. Enjoy representatives will deliver every Magic Leap headset, fit it, and provide a tutorial on how it works.

Talking about other good news, we have all the full specifications of the device, that is (let me copy and paste a bit):

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My opinion on the specifications is that they are rather good: 3 hours of battery is in line with many other mobile headsets and the CPU+GPU combination seem quite powerful. They didn’t use Qualcomm’s reference design, they went for a powerful mobile hardware. The only problem is that I agree with others that say that a dedicated chip to do environment tracking as Microsoft has done with Hololens seemed a better opinion to make the job of CPU+GPU easier and allow for more polygons in the scene.

The shop already sells the glasses (you can buy up to three, for bigger quantities you have to contact the sale center) plus various accessories and replacement parts. Some of them are quite expensive… the controller costs $290 for instance… I think it is a bit overpriced (what’s inside that to make it cost so much? One of the Infinity stones??). Companies that want to buy the Magic Leap One for enterprise usage, had better also to buy the Priority Service Plan for $600, that guarantees a faster repair time for the device plus early access to Magic Leap products and events. This means having a faster fix of all problems, and big companies need absolutely that. Today I see live also Magic Leap Care, the assistance service of Magic Leap.

The website also features some experiences that have been announced for Magic Leap One: they are exactly five, not too much for a marketplace… but I think the company has shown only the most important ones:

• Invaders: A steampunk shooting AR game developed by Weta Workshop (this won’t be included in the initial release of Magic Leap One and will come later on, as specified here);
• Project CREATE: A creation tool with which using your controller you can not only create 3D models, but also animations and stories. It is a tool to let you unleash your mixed reality creativity… and if it is as in its trailer, it seems very cool to me;

• Social: A social experience (a very original name, indeed);
• Tonandi: an artistic musical experience developed in collaboration with Sigur Ròs;

• Helio: a Web AR solution, that aims at making the web go out from the classical 2D pages, to offer 3D elements that can be blended with the real world. You can, for instance, take a 3D model of a piece of furniture from a web page and put it inside your home. This is, in my opinion, the most interesting experience, since I think that Web 3.0 will be immersive.

Some of these experiences (like for instance “Social”) do not feature any footage on the website, just some concepts, and drawings. It’s strange anyway that the website does not mention Rock Throwing Guy… it became so popular in the last weeks that I started thinking it could be the killer app for AR.

And then there is also a lot of fluff, really lots of fluff, in the typical Magic Leap style. Take for instance this sentence

Magic Leap One’s unique design and technology lets in natural light waves together with softly layered synthetic lightfields. Both the real world and virtual light rays initiate neural signals that pass from the retina to the visual part of the brain, creating unbelievably believable experiences.

Raise your hand if you, like me, at the “unbelievably believable experiences” had the impulse to punch your display. Anyway, I don’t want to comment this further today, today let’s talk about practical stuff.

You may ask me: should I buy one? Well, the problem of buying it is that it is really a dive into the unknown: we have NO REVIEW of this device, it could be awesome or terrible. But if I was in the US and I had the money to buy it, well, I’d buy it. Because this way I could experiment with it before most of the other people in the world and also show my customers that I have cutting edge technology. And being the platform so new, my apps could also have a visibility advantage. The device seems quite good per se: if we remove all the surrounding fluff, it seems like a slightly better HoloLens with a slightly lower price. But this is just a preliminary judgment before reading news and/or trying the device myself. If you’re interested in reading more about it or buying it, I invite you to go to Magic Leap website.

UPDATE: Ian Hamilton of UploadVR has done a great job in collecting some recent reviews of journalists that have tried Magic Leap. You can find them here. From these first impressions, it seems that the device is better than the competition, like the two-years-old HoloLens, but not THAT better. Many praised the colorful visuals, the fact that virtual objects can be occluded by real objects and vice-versa, but no mind was blown by the experience. So my judgment remains the same.

Magic Leap has finally shipped… I think that now everything can happen in this world… 😀

(Header image by Magic Leap)