After making the pivot two years ago from entertainment to enterprise, AR headset vendor Magic Leap announced its plans to initially focus on three key areas: healthcare, manufacturing, and the public sector.
According to Lisa Watts, Magic Leap’s VP of product marketing and developer programs, workers in these fields are already becoming accustomed to donning new forms of wearable technology, and, she claims, there are a growing number of use cases with the ability to drive near and long-term return on investment.
However, speaking exclusively with TechInformed, Watts hints that firms outside these sectors may soon be joining the Florida vendor’s customer list.
“Our customers tend to be more innovative businesses who are looking for a powerful tool to drive business transformation,” she says.
“We have additional partnerships underway that are leveraging the Magic Leap platform to build their own market solutions and can share more details in the coming months,” she adds.
According to Watts, more firms outside these sectors are likely to come on board after the release of Magic Leap 2, which, at just 260 grams, will be 20% lighter than its previous incarnation, the manufacturer claims.
“We know that solutions outside of these three verticals will be developed for Magic Leap 2 and we’re excited to see them come to market. Despite our focus, we are not ruling out new market opportunities and we will continue to evolve our business,” she says.
While many enterprises continue to innovate with AR, for the technology to have a transformative impact on enterprise it needs to be able to scale. To support this, Watts says that it’s been necessary to forge partnerships with other firms and a wide range of developers, to expand its ecosystem.
New partnerships have been struck with several firms including real-time engagement platform Agora, which provides developers with the tools to add features to stream voice and video; digital twin and reality capture innovator NavVis; Google Cloud (although ML remains cloud agnostic) as well as virtual workstation vendor VMware.
Two other Magic Leap partners, NVIDIA and Unity, are companies which are heavily invested in the metaverse – and it’s interesting to hear Magic Leap’s take on this, which (as you’d expect from an augmented reality company) places the emphasis on a real-world overlay.
As Watts says: “We firmly believe that the real benefit of the metaverse, often missed in the excitement and buzz of virtual reality, is the ability to integrate and overlay digital content into our physical world.
“This can benefit creators and designers – architects and engineers. As well as educators and students and many applications that are hard to fathom right now as the technology works to catch up with the vision.
“In other words, if the metaverse is going to come to life, it must be grounded in the physical world,” says Watts.
Below, we detail two current applications of Magic Leap’s platform as well as a ‘command and control’ demo for the public sector – which offers a glimpse of some of the features available on Magic Leap 2.
PBC Linear is one of Northern Illinois’ largest machine shops but finding talented machinists has been a challenge for the manufacturer in recent years, according to the firm’s director of manufacturing engineering Tim Lecrone.
“Even ten years ago we had enough employees in our company with 20 to 30 years’ experience so we could bring in an experienced staff member and couple that person with the new employee for training on a machine for four to six weeks.
“But now this workforce has retired and this has created a shortage of employees that could do our training for us,” he explains.
After being introduced to AR training software outfit Taqtile, Lecrone said his firm was able to grasp how it could take that tribal knowledge and turn it into a set of augmented instructions that could be duplicated.
Taqtile’s learning platform Manifest is used with Magic Leap’s AR headset to enable manufacturers to capture knowledge from operators, engineers and managers and then distil it into a set of augmented instructions.
Manifest is used as a tool to define procedures in a simple way, with the capture process typically including 30 to 40 steps, that takes the learner roughly six hours to complete. The platform contains instructions, photos, videos, pointers and the means of being able to contact experts in real time.
“One benefit is that the trainee operator is able to see an exact instruction in a document and nothing’s getting lost in translation from the person giving it instruction,” Lecrone observes.
He adds that the factory also reduces wastage and saves money on parts that would previously have been scrapped during the training process.
“When you have a newer operator running the machine… It’s very easy to scrap, $200 parts and to scrap 50 or 60 of these $200 parts in one shift,” he explains. “AR mitigates this as the operator can look at the part or run a quick check to make sure the machine still operating correctly.”
Surgeons at UC Davis Children’s Hospital in Sacramento, California used Magic Leap technology to prepare for the separation of twin babies, Abigail and Micaela Bachinskiy, who were joined at the head.
This complex surgery was planned over a ten-month period ahead of the 24-hour procedure and involved a 30-strong medical team.
The team ‘rehearsed’ for the operation by creating a 3D reconstruction of the conjoined twins from MRI and CT scans, which were uploaded and viewed on the Magic Leap 1 platform using Brainlab’s Mixed Reality Viewer software.
This set up allowed the surgical team to explore inside the babies’ heads. The view inside the model displayed a complex network of blood vessels which the team needed to detail and separate long before the twins entered the operating theatre.
Dr Michael Edwards, US Davis Paediatric neurosurgeon described how the model was able to show them the twins’ unique anatomy from every possible angle. “You can look from the top, the side and the bottom and you can rotate the 3D model. You can walk into the 3D model and backwards to see where you are.” he said.
The twins were finally separated following a 24-hour operation in October 2020.
At Brainstorm Tech 2022 last month Magic Leap’s CTO Julie Larson-Green introduced an immersive demo for Magic Leap 2 exploring how a team of experts could gather remotely in the event of an emergency.
Magic Leap’s ‘Command and Control’ scenario has been designed to allow operators to manage remote sites from afar; in this case it was used to train people how to fight fires caused by climate change.
The demo showed wildfires around the world on a topographical map that utilised instruments aboard NASA satellites. It also integrated information like terrain data and wind speed into one place.
It was also possible to switch between different overlays that showed the spread of weather and fire across the landscape.
Larson-Green – who joined the company Magic Leap last September – said that the technology will be used in the future to train first responders, as well as workers in manufacturing, health and defence, among other industries.
The beauty of AR in this is kind of set up, she claimed, is that “with VR you’re occluded so you can’t take a cell phone call or emergency call but with AR you can see the real world and interact with it.”
She added: “We’re working with a lot of different developers on tools to create these kinds of scenarios – independent software vendors and individual enterprises.”
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