Last week, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz teased his Twitter followers with some "fun and cool stuff" to share in the coming days. On Monday, he made good on that promise, sort of.
If you're a fan of Sigur Rós, he hit the right note, but if you were expecting to see what the company's first flagship device would look like, well, you might want to skip this track.
The secretive startup invited venerable music publication Pitchfork to preview Tónandi, an app Magic Leap worked on with the Icelandic alternative rock group for the past four years.
As the site describes it, Tónandi projects virtual sprites into the user's view, accompanying music composed specifically for the app. As viewers can interact with the images, the music responds in-kind, acting like sliders and switches on a soundboard. According to the report, the virtual objects also respond to hand input from the user and appears to recognize the environment around the user.
"The tónandi [virtual objects] adjust to account for a table with oversized hardcover book on top of it," writer Marc Hogan reveals. "At one point, waving my hands near the table allows me to summon up the roar of lead singer Jónsi Birgisson's signature bowed guitar; in another corner, banging on virtual white puffy wisps releases different tones of what is unmistakably his voice."
The existence of the project was previously hinted at in October in a leak of a pitch deck from the company for a proposed launch event.
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Unfortunately, due to the non-disclosure agreement that is evidently tethered to the device prototypes, Hogan was forbidden to write about the device itself. So we are no closer to knowing what the device will look like or when, exactly, the rest of us will get a chance to even consider buying it.
Tónandi is the second app unveiled for Magic Leap's device. In conjunction with New York Comic-Con, the company also revealed that mixed reality comics from Madefire will also be available whenever the device launches. At this point, with two apps unveiled, we can presume that Magic Leap's inaugural offering will lean more towards entertainment than productivity.
In the meantime, here's some Sigur Rós to serve as the soundtrack to your daydreams of when Magic Leap's device actually launches.
And check out a quick video of the experience here:
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