We watched the first piece of public-facing content Magic Leap has released so you don't have to, and, well, you didn't miss much.
To be fair, the company's new video show, called Magic Leap Live, isn't designed to entertain. Instead, it's meant to educate and inform developers who may be interested in developing for the Magic Leap One: Creator Edition. Still, after all the other mysterious product glimpses and colorful talk from the company's CEO Rony Abovitz, it was a surprisingly sedate and bare-bones affair.
Streamed via Twitch, the show, which the company is planning to broadcast on the first Wednesday of every month, kicked off at 2 p.m. ET. At its peak, it snagged a little over 600 viewers, but after about 40 minutes of mostly very general talk about spatial computing, design philosophy, and spatial audio, the viewer count plummeted to about 389 viewers.
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Of course, not only was the show is speaking to a very niche audience of developers, early adopters, and augmented reality enthusiasts, but Magic Leap picked a rather bad time to try to draw developer attention: right in the middle of Facebook's F8 conference.
As the Magic Leap show streamed, sessions at day two of the F8 conference were also streaming live, with developers and business owners hanging on the company's every word, looking to see what new paths might be available to engage the site's over 2 billion users. It's hard to compete with that, even if you're riding the hype that Magic Leap currently enjoys.
And despite the low number of viewers, the steam was very choppy throughout the broadcast, cutting out frequently, leading to a few complaints from viewers in the chat area. Nevertheless, Alan Noon (the monthly show's host, seen in the black shirt in the image below), a senior learning resources technical artist at Magic Leap, and Brian Schwab, who works in the company's Interaction Lab, were both relatively personable and engaging.
Perhaps the oddest part was that the hosts spent an hour talking Magic Leap and the world of immersive computing, without ever showing headset in question. At all. In fact, when one of the hosts began making a point about spatial computing, instead of whipping out a Magic Leap One device and at least showing a non-operational version of the headset and how it might help illustrate his point, he used a toy dog and a toy dinosaur. Yes, really.
Not even a new video show catering to the company's most interested followers can get Magic Leap to toss aside its finely crafted veil of mystery (for now).
All in all, for the show's maiden voyage, it wasn't a bad effort. But if you're already obsessed with Magic Leap, and a member of its developer forums, there wasn't much revealed or answered that you probably haven't already found or figured out on your own. However, the hosts did confirm that if you want your Magic Leap software demo showcased on the show, you can add the #MadeForMagicLeap hashtag to your social media posts and they'll take a look.
The next show is June 6 at 2 p.m. ET. And it's likely that subsequent shows will go into more detail regarding developer concerns, questions, and experiments. But is this appointment viewing? Probably not (yet). But that's the thing with Magic Leap; you never know when the company will drop a new surprise, so the genuinely hardcore Magic Leap devotees will probably tune in again, at least until they can get their hands on the actual hardware.
You can watch a replay of the May 2 stream below if you missed it.
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