Magic Leap's first actual demo disappoints (video)

Magic Leap is set too soon deliver on their years of promise to revolutionize the mixed reality field, and has said they will deliver their first headset, the ML1, some time this summer.

During the same developer session where they announced the date, they also showed some video capture of the headset in action, giving us our first actual look at how well the device works.

During their live stream on Twitch earlier today Magic Leap confirmed some of the specs of their Magic Leap One headset and showed off a demo of their developer app 'Dodge.'https://t.co/g1wIgmjeKI

?: Magic Leap pic.twitter.com/mjqGzlgX0o

— Within (@WITHIN) July 11, 2018

Unfortunately, the result is less than exciting.  One can easily explain away the need to specify a surface as part of the immaturity of the SDK, but what is striking is that the surface mesh appears to have a rather poor level of detail and that objects placed on the surface had difficulty maintaining a stable position in space.

This suggests that the sensor suite in the headset and the scene processing algorithms are still somewhat behind HoloLens 1, and of course Microsoft is planning to launch HoloLens v2 soon which will include an upgraded sensor suite and AI-based scene processing which should deliver even better performance.

As a reminder, here is the demo Magic Leap originally released, and which was later found to have been faked using CGI.

It remains to be seen if Magic Leap can deliver on their $2.3 billion promise to investors, which includes Google, Alibaba and AT&T,  but it seems the answer will be coming soon enough.