Magic Leap, the relatively quiet augment reality company, has announced a new AR headset. Dubbed Lightwear, this standalone headset has a somewhat different design that what we’ve come to expect; and is powered by a hockey puck-sized computer called the Lightpack.
The Lightpack, which acts as the brain of the system, is said to have comparable performance to “a Mac Book Pro or Alienware PC” according to the Magic Leap founder and CEO Rony Abovitz. There is also a buddy compute unit in the Lightwear itself, to supplement to the Lightpack unit.
Accompanying the Lightwear and Lightpack is a touch-sensitive controller. It features a touchpad on the top, and 6-degrees of movement recognition to sense any gestures that will be translated in the AR world.
Of course, Magic Leap is not just pushing its AR creation for games. On its website Magic leap says that the system will be great for day-to-day computing. Among the features the company is looking towards are virtual screens, 3D web browsing and sandbox applications.
Magic Leap will be shipping the first iteration of the Lightwear, called Magic Leap One, sometime in 2018. As for how it will fair against the Microsoft Hololens and Google Glass, we will just have to wait until the first unit ships to early users.
(Source: Magic Leap via Polygon)
