Alliancing for Ecosystem Competition: What Google and Magic Leap’s partnership can bring to the XR market?
The era of big partnerships moves forward, with another major declaration of a strategic technology partnership between Google and Magic Leap that aims to combine Magic Leap’s Augmented Reality (AR), optic, and manufacturing expertise with Google’s technology platforms to collaborate to bring more AR solutions and experiences to market. This partnership also followed another prominent trend: the creation of an ecosystem and the focus on more scalable solutions for enterprise clients.
In an official press release, Magic Leap reveals that their focus is to “advance immersive experiences to the developer ecosystem and for customers,” empowering solutions relevant to the context. Not being exhaustive with the details, companies, however, demonstrate that partnership holds powerful potential as even those considered the market giants gather to take the XR industry to another level.
As a leader in transparent optics technology, Magic Leap is recognized for its ultra-lightweight eyepieces, which have made groundbreaking advancements in text legibility, color fidelity, and quality at scale. The company spent significant effort researching and patenting its optical techniques.
Source: NVIDIA IGX x Magic Leap 2 x Medical iSight
This is not the first notable partnership of Magic Leap, as their business-focused AR+AI collaboration with NVIDIA announced earlier this year offers a full-stack toolkit for developing and running AI-enhanced AR apps at the edge, mainly focusing on the development of advanced medical solutions, AI-powered AR apps for manufacturing and “AI-ready AR” for better remote rendering and data processing allowing multiple users netter content interaction.
Google has been known for its VR projects since 2016, with diverse formats such as the discontinued Daydream virtual result platform. However, the long-awaited XR input from Google may be on its way right now. According to the most recent information, Google invited Meta to partner and “contribute to” its upcoming XR platform, but Meta refused as it had plans for the launch of Horizon OS, partnering with numerous renowned hardware creators such as Lenovo, ASUS, and many more.
Read also: Three Trends That Shape XR Today: Apple & Meta Scenarios
Nevertheless, Google recently unveiled its view on the future of wearable technology, showcasing AI-powered smart glasses with a cutting-edge heads-up display (HUD). The teaser was part of the announcement for Project Astra, a real-time multimodal AI assistant designed to understand context and assist users with diverse tasks. While presenting Project Astra, Google only showed a brief demo of AI smart glasses. Google claims it will be launched soon, and only a prototype was used for I/O. However, the company might aim for far more complex spatial interactions enhanced by generative AI. Before, Samsung Electronics confirmed plans for a new XR device in collaboration with Google, powered by Android and a Snapdragon Qualcomm chipset. With the latest news about the partnership with Magic Leap and the details of the partnership remaining undercover, many media suspect that Google and Magic Leap may come up with the releaseof the super lightweight (which is well-envisioned in the market) “truly smart glasses” that will take the hardware race to yet another tier.
Lucid Reality Labs is looking for this development as we admire how partnering efforts in complex ecosystem approaches shape the future of immersive technology and numerous domains globally.
About Lucid Reality Labs
Lucid Reality Labs is a visionary XR development company that crafts complex solutions through spatial technology. Immersive solutions with impact – from concept & design to development & support. With a strategic focus on Healthcare, Life Science, Aerospace & Defense, and many more. We equip industries with the boundless potential of immersive technology.