Following years of product teasers, Magic Leap finally made its augmented-reality headset available to a few select customers in 2018. Three years later, a second generation was announced, and now the Magic Leap 2 is going on sale from September.
The basic idea behind headsets like the Magic Leap 2 is to overlay computer-generated graphics onto real-world scenes in front of the user, with the headset cabled to a small portable computer unit and the mixed-reality interactions controlled by a handheld remote.
The headset part of the puzzle looks like a pair of chunky spectacles or steampunk goggles, and offers the wearer a 70-degree field of view, generates augmented content at up to 2.5 million pixels (1,440 x 1,760) per eye at a refresh rate of 120 Hz, offers up to 2,000 nits of brightness and is reported to be the first such device to market with dynamic dimming capabilities, which makes for improved image quality in brightly lit settings.
The onboard sensor suite is made up of a 12-megapixel autofocus RGB camera capable of recording 4K UHD video at 30 frames per second, or Full HD at 60 fps, a depth camera, three "wider field-of-view world cameras," an ambient light sensor and four eye-tracking cameras. Plus there are four inertial measurement units cooked in too, along with accelerometers, gyros, magnetometers and altimeters.
The compute module features a quad-core AMD processor with a 14-core Computer Vision and Image Processing (CVIP) engine and clock speeds up to 3.92 GHz, as well as AMD GFX10.2 graphics and 256 GB of onboard storage.
Per-charge battery life for the setup is reckoned to be around 3.5 hours continuous, or 7 hours on standby.
The base Magic Leap 2 comes with a starting price of US$3,299 and is aimed at developers and professionals, not consumers. A Developer Pro variant is designed for the development and testing of applications and bumps the starting price tag up to $4,099, with devs able to access tools, sample projects, enterprise-grade features and get an early look each month at upcoming releases.
Both the base model and the Developer Pro flavor are not designed to be used in "full commercial deployments and production environments." Those who want to do such things will need to opt for the Enterprise version, which starts at $4,999.
All three Magic Leap 2 editions will be available in the US from September 30. The video below has more.
Product page: Magic Leap 2