Details of the Magic Leap mixed reality headset have finally been unveiled by the project’s developers during a Twitch stream. The AR goggles will be powered by one of Nvidia’s Tegra X2 chips, bundling Nvidia’s Pascal graphics tech alongside ARM cores for the CPU side of things. The usually tight-lipped devs also hinted at a launch sometime this summer.
The Magic Leap was a tech darling back when VR and AR first started making a comeback, even grabbing Google’s attention with its promises of delivering a game-changing headset resulting in a $502 million investment from the web giant, among others. Only days ago, telecom company AT&T partnered with the AR company, too.
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Details are still a little thin on the ground – as we’ve come to expect from the secretive startup – but what we do know is that the headset’s Linux-based Lumin OS will run from an Nvidia Tegra X2 system. This incorporates a Pascal GPU with 256 CUDA cores with two all-purpose processing cores: one is Nvidia’s Denver2 ARM chip, and the other is an ARM Cortex-A57.
This chip is an updated version of the Tegra X1 chip, which most notably powers the Nintendo Switch, and utilises the older Nvidia Maxwell GPU architecture.
Memory, price, field of view, and battery life are still a mystery, but the Magic Leap team hinted during the Twitch stream (via: The Verge) that devs would have some control over power demand through programming and how the Nvidia Tegra X2 chip is utilised. FoV was one of the factors holding back user experience with Microsoft’s HoloLens, and is a major hurdle for any AR headsets vying for adoption.
The stream also showed off a tech demo of a golem throwing rocks at the user, and utilising hand gestures, which is one of few fully-fledged tech demos we’ve seen since the controversial 2015 Magic Leap concept video put together by FX company Weta Workshop.
The AR goggle devs also narrowed down the 2018 launch window during the stream. The Magic Leap One Creator Edition headset will now launch this summer, which assumedly means we get to see what the company’s AR tech is really like, and whether it has been worth nearly $2.3 billion of investment, before the end of September.