Immediately, after the Magic Leap was made available to the public, we acquired one and began to make prototypes. We made a baseball prototype similar to Totally Baseball, except that there was no locomotion and the defense team’s experience focused more on transitioning to a bird’s eye view to make strategic decisions and using hand tracking to try and catch the ball.

Another prototype, titled Nitro, let players position a miniature construction site on their floor and then drive a monster truck around on it to try to get to the course’s highest point. We made use of hand-tracking again to let users turn an ignition key on their controller and also included a display screen near their controller that lets them see through the monster truck’s perspective (seeing only other virtual objects). This allowed for interesting gameplay. These prototypes gained us enough notoriety to get us invited to L.E.A.P Con and Nitro would ultimately be chosen to be showcased at SIGGRAPH 2019 as part of their public demos exhibit.

We also made this prototype as part of a 48 hour game jam. The idea is that it’s a multiplayer experience between one player in a Vive and another in a Magic Leap. Since the Magic Leap Player could always see the Vive player but the Vive player could be prevented from seeing the Magic Leap player, it effectively turned into the movie Predator. The magic Leap player is trying to sneak around and destroy these little power boxes using his claw-hand but if he moves too quickly he’ll become visible to the Vive player who can then try and shoot him. The Vive player’s laser pistol leaves floating laser pointers in the air that can also be used to try and deny the Magic Leap player from certain areas. Also, the 3D environment used by the Vive player is based entirely around the real world environment that the Magic Leap player sees with his device.