Magic Leap One

It’s not perfect — the device still has a lot of room for improvement and it doesn’t beat old headsets on all accounts. But it tries much more than anyone else, giving developers the strongest set of tools available to re-imagine computing. As it stands, the Magic Leap One is rich with technology, but still has flaws and unexplored potential.

I have mixed impressions on Magic Leap. For sure it is not a disruptive evolution of AR/MR, so there’s no need to rush to buy it, but it is also a nice devkit. Personally, I’ll continue waiting some months to observe the evolutions of augmented reality, both on the smartphone side and on the glasses side, where in the next months we should see something coming from Microsoft, Samsung, and Apple. This will let also give the time to Magic Leap to fix all the software flaws of its device. So, if you are not in a hurry, my advice is to wait.

Whether or not it’s cooler than most people think, the Magic Leap One is cooler than the vast majority of mixed reality in 2018. But it still seems a long way from realizing the promise of the medium — and it hasn’t shown that it can bridge that gap.

Augmented reality jumped into the mainstream in 2017 thanks to fun demos on iPhones and Google's Pixel phones, but Magic Leap's sudden reveal points to bigger things happening next year. With a few years of VR having trained creators on how to develop virtual tools, maybe Magic Leap's approach to new mixed-reality interfaces and experiences are exactly where AR, VR and MR need to go next.

For now, and given its price, the Magic Leap One could hardly be described as a compelling purchase. But if enough developers get on board, and the technology becomes cheap enough to get into more consumers’ hands – and in countries other than the US – it may yet prove worthwhile.