Magic Leap first captured imaginations with its promotional material (the video with whale in the gym is, admittedly, impressive) before, more recently, capturing our attention with its soul-crushing price: $2,295 (about £1,750, AU$3,160).
What Magic Leap hasn’t been quick to do, however, was provide a concrete app or game for us to look forward to. But, that could change today.
The catalyst to that change, potentially, is Angry Birds FPS: First-Person Slingshot, a new game from Rovio and Magic Leap that will leverage the firm's augmented reality (AR) technology.
The game, which debuted at a press event in San Francisco, brings the towering strongholds of Angry Birds to your living room and uses the Magic Leap’s controller to fling an avian arsenal at the dastardly pigs.
More than a simple tech demo, Angry Birds FPS is a full-size expansion of the franchise into AR with dozens of levels – giving Rovio a new platform to overrun.
While it’s unlikely that anyone is going to shell out $2,295 for an AR version of a mobile game, Angry Birds FPS could be a sign of what’s to come for the Magic Leap platform. Namely, widespread developer support.
What came first, the content or the developers?
Magic Leap's issue, one that's shared by all AR and, to an extent, VR platforms right now, is that there simply isn't enough content.
VR platforms like Oculus and HTC have slowly but surely added more content over the last year and a half, but developers haven't quite yet embraced AR in the same way.
That being said, while Angry Birds won't make up for the massive gap in missing content, it is a valuable first step for the platform in attracting more developers.
We'll learn more about the game – like how much it's going to cost and when bleeding edge adopters will be able to get their hands on it – at Magic Leap's first developer conference that's scheduled for October 9 and 10.
- Speaking of VR, these are the best VR games in 2018
