NY Magic Leap Meetup

To those of you who have either a passing or intense interest about Magic Leap, we thought it would be good to tell you a little about our group.

Magic Leap has been in the press for a number of years now. They got investors to part with a lot of $$$ and pour it into a startup for a completely new kind of technology. There had to be something really compelling for this to happen. Even as the Magic Leap One has just been released into the wild, the company has made clear that this is just an interim product intended for developers, early adopters, and enthusiasts. 

So why not wait for the product to sport improved features like wider field of view, offer a wealth of Apps, and of course, become more affordable? I will answer it in two short words: Spatial Computing.

What Magic Leap has done is to rethink computing so that the immersive environment is really as much an operating system as it is a platform for running apps. They took to heart the notion of seamlessly melding the virtual created content with the real world so that the two are not perceived separately. In that sense, the term MR for Mixed Reality (or as I sometimes think, "Melded" Reality) is more appropriate for the Magic Leap than AR or XR.

One of the objectives of our Meetup is to shine a light on the very things that differentiates this from other products/technologies. Part of this is to literally try out something entirely new whether it's for fun or to inspire a novel approach to a pragmatic technical problem.

Another objective of our Meetup is to learn about good use cases. Some of these will be gleaned from trying well thought out and nicely built apps. Others will originate from specific verticals be it healthcare, education, entertainment, storytelling, or any other area of focus.

Part of the developer toolkit includes Google searches, YouTube videos, StackOverflow, forums and other online resources. These are essential, but for very new technologies the information and insights to specific development problems can be scant. Having a community of people who can share experiences and lessons learned can be valuable and more importantly, timely.

Another purpose of our Meetup is to make available a wellspring of current information about new features, and what's coming down the pike.