Magic Leap 2 Review First Look & ML2 Developer Tools Are Here !
Magic Leap 2 AR Glasses are finally here and honestly these AR Glasses are super super cool and it is crazy to know that ML1 was released 4 years ago and 4 years later ML2 becomes available, and yes Magic Leap 2 Developer Pro is available today with early access until September 29th !
So I spent the last week testing the Magic Leap 2, honestly I have so much to show you but I want to focus on a few things today, one is how does this device compares to ML1 and two what are some of the unique features available in the Magic Leap 2 which I believe to provide something completely new to XR (and yes one of those features is dynamic dimming).
Let’s take a look at a Fig 1.0 which shows a comparison between Global vs Segmented dimming where in global dimming a tint is applied over the entire screen and it allows the user to dim the entire real world vs specific portions as shown with segmented dimming.
This is really cool right? But now Let’s take a look at some of the ML1 specs vs ML2 specs to get an idea of what has changed…
When ML1 was released one thing that was distracting was the FoV, if you recall ML1 FoV is (50 D diagonal) and ML2 FoV (70D diagonal).
Display was also improved 1280x960 per eye on ML1 vs 1440x1760 per-eye which gives a notable improvement in image resolution.
The Camera got drastically improved from ML1 vs ML2 12.6 megapixel autofocus RGB camera with 4k video at 30fps or 1920 x 1080 video at 60fps
We also now have double the number of per-eye camera’s for eye tracking, ML1 had 1 camera per eye and ML2 has 2 cameras per-eye
ML1 Operating System was (Based on in-house Linux) vs Android (based on AOSP) which has a huge benefit since Android is now widely used among devs.
The architecture was also changed on ML1 ARM NVIDIA CPUs/GPUs to ML2 AMD x86_64
RAM and Storage got an upgrade of 8GB to 16GB RAM and 128GB to 256GB of storage
AR Glasses Battery life improved from 3 hrs of continuous use to 3.5 + 7 hrs sleep mode, Controller on the ML2 is 3 hrs which I couldn’t find exactly what it was for ML1.
AR Glasses for ML2 are also much lighter, the Weight on ML1 was 316g vs 260g for ML2
The weight is lighter on the ML2 which is great but the flat design on the ML2 is beautiful and everything feels so premium, there are also a fix kit included to fit different noses and foreheads
For audio ML2 also offers Spatial Audio, 4 microphones, & Speakers
Similar to ML1 the ML2 offers USB-C interfaces for Compute pack + controller
With all those specs I didn’t mention sensors, but ML2 offers a lot of sensors which include: 3 Wider FoV World Cameras, Depth Camera, RGB Camera, Ambient Light Sensor, 4x Eye Tracking Cameras, also a bunch of inertial sensors. I am more than sure that I missed some specs but one thing is for sure is that the ML2 is loaded with a lot of tech.
The Controller tracking was changed a lot. If you recall, ML1 used a combination of EM and IMU sensors to track the 6DOF pose of the Controller. The new ML2 controller uses a combination of IR LED tracking and a lightweight SLAM tracker running on the Controller by using two greyscale cameras. Controller tracking should still work when there is no direct line of sight…and I actually tested it and these were the results of using the controller without like of sight…
So with all that technology there must be a catch in pricing right ? Well let me tell you about it…
The ML2 Base is $3,299 USD which will be available via INSIGHT reseller to enterprise AR software developers starting September 30th, 2022, certain countries may see it before the end of the year.
Let’s talk a bit more about what it means to have Android AOSP as a based on ML2 OS, and if you are a software developer these are few changes that could impact you:
mabu (build system) was replaced by Android standard gradle & cmake.
MPKs extensions were replaced with Android APKs.
Many existing APKs can be loaded onto an ML2 without modification (`adb install ….apk`)
Many natively supported APIs were now replaced by Android standard NDK features such as: Logging, Sensor Data, Keyboard, Mouse, Permissions, Battery, and lastly Android Studio can now be used to develop extensions to the ML2 SDK including deployment and debugging.
As far as software for ML2 you now can use “The Lab 2.0” which was recently renamed to “Magic Leap Hub” and if you remember we had the lab as well with ML1 and this tool provides a consolidated hub for all utilities available for ML2, some of them are:
Device Bridge: to connect to the hardware, run remote commands, logs, battery, etc
App Simulator: to test your experiences in a mock environment to avoid having to build every time and honestly it was a time saver with ML1.
Device streaming: also available on Magic Leap Hub and it is worth a mention because the first thing we may want to show is our cool developed apps running in ML2, one thing I wish was possible is to show dynamic dimming which unfortunately doesn’t work during streaming.
So all of The mentioned tools are cool and helpful but How do we go about creating apps for the ML2 ?
Currently you can develop for ML2 by using Native C or Unity. With Native C you can use Android Studio to create your own engine for ML2 or extend ML2 features for Unity via plugins, and why would you do that?
Well ML2 C API offers more features in their C language than what’s available with the Unity SDK, however if Unity has everything you need then you can start with this game engine by using C# as its core scripting language and you can also you can use your IDE of choice such as Visual Studio, VSCode, Rider, etc
Well there you have it, Magic Leap 2 now available, we have super crazy cool XR technology now, it is cheaper than HoloLens 2 which starts at $3,500 USD and without doubt the most powerful AR Glasses available in the market today. Tell me what you think, do you like it? Would you buy it? Let me know in the comments below as I am curious to know what everyone thinks. Also, don’t forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell for more videos, thanks everyone and see you on the next video !
Thanks for reading !
