February 25, 2020 – Magic Leap Studios has today unveiled its first multi-user experience on the Magic Leap 1 – Pancake Pals, a pancake-flipping game in celebration of Pancake Day. It’s one of the first multi-user experiences built on the company’s Magicverse technology, and in it, players flip pancakes with a friend to earn a high score.
Pancake emphasis aside, the company states that the reason the Magic Leap Studios team set out to make the game was to build something that would test the Magicverse technology while it was still being developed. When users play Pancake Pals, it essentially feels like a game of catch among friends in spatial computing. However, this is all made possible by a number of behind-the-scenes technologies that Magic Leap states are the underpinnings of its Magicverse offering.
Passable World and Persistent Coordinate Frames (PCFs) are the technologies Magic Leap has created that allow digital content to persist in space, and provide a way to bring multiple users into the same shared space. So when a user throws a pancake high up in the air, their friend sees it in the exact same place. While some Magic Leap 1 apps have begun to utilize PCFs to implement persistent content, the Studios team was challenged with incorporating them into a fast-paced, physics driven, multi-user experience. The goal was to build something quick, fun, and accessible that would allow the team to focus on implementing the multi-user tech in a way that was pleasing to a broad audience. As a result, in Pancake Pals, when playing with a friend, both players see the same thing, and can hopefully catch each other’s pancakes before they hit the ground.
Once the Studios team designed the multiuser gameplay, they used the Magic Leap Invitations API to allow users on different Magic Leap devices to connect and play together. Magic Leap states that it is this type of work that feeds back into the company’s Product and Software teams, and directly impacts how the company evolves its systems for external developers.
The Studios team has now started working with XR Kit, a component of the Magicverse SDK that allows developers to create cross platform Magicverse applications. While XR Kit is still in development, the Studios team is actively working on an iPhone and iPad app that will let anyone follow along and watch as people flip pancakes back and forth.
Above all, the Pancake Pals game represents a proofpoint to showcase that the Magicverse is becoming a reality, according to Magic Leap. Furthermore, the same features that are present in Pancake Pals are also being utilized to develop an array of enterprise applications where users can similarly see and manipulate digital content on multiple Magic Leap and XR compatible devices. That content can understand and respond to the physical world while existing in the user’s space.
Technical tutorials on how the Studios team built Pancake Pals will be released, and the game itself will be out on Magic Leap World when it launches later this year.
Image/video credit: Magic Leap
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Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.