Magic Leap 2 now has a spectator view phone app, and the company has switched to using OpenXR for development.
If you’re unfamiliar, Magic Leap 2 is a transparent optics AR headset, a rarity in today’s market where competitors are focusing on camera passthrough headsets. Priced at $2300, it’s targeted at enterprise applications.
Magic Leap 2 Specs Suggest Best-In-Class Transparent AR
Magic Leap 2’s specs, at least some of them, were revealed this week in a presentation at SPIE Photonics West 2022.
A new Magic Leap Spectator app is available now on iPhone and is “coming soon” for Android phones. If developers add support for it in their Magic Leap 2 applications, the Spectator app will let others in the room see the same virtual objects as the headset wearer in the same positions in space.
The phone app supports recording, so as well as real-time spectating without the need for a second headset, Magic Leap suggests the app could be used for creating tutorials, documentation, or marketing for AR apps.
Aligning the coordinate space of the headset and phone isn’t automatic though. You’ll need to print out a marker, such as a QR code, AprilTag, or ArUco marker, and have both the headset and phone look at it.
Magic Leap is also “fully embracing” OpenXR, the industry standard API, for Magic Leap 2 development. This includes support for the standard Unity OpenXR Plugin, instead of recommending a platform-specific plugin like Meta still does. This change should make it easier for developers building AR apps across multiple headsets.
