Development for AR platforms, be it a smartphone or a dedicated headset like Magic Leap or Microsoft’s Hololens, is typically done with a game engine like Unity, which uses C#. 3D game engines are inherently spatial and thus are already suited to VR and AR development.
Many AR developers however come from a web development background, not game development, and their apps do not center around the types of features a game engine is focused on.
At Magic Leap’s first yearly conference, LEAP Con, they announced a JavaScript-based API & platform for AR “app” development, called ‘MagicScript’. This should let developers with experience in web-frontend development develop for Magic Leap’s operating system ‘LuminOS’, instead of having to use a full-fledged game engine.
Full details of how MagicScript will work have not been revealed, but Magic Leap said that the first version will be released to developers in Q1 2019 according to their roadmap.
In addition to MagicScript, Magic Leap also announced an avatar system, webview (so developers can easily embed webpages in their spatial apps), a hand occlusion mesh system, support for the popular video streaming technology MPEG-DASH, and spectator view support so that others can see what you see from their smartphones.
In their long term roadmap, Magic Leap also indicated that they are working on an object recognition API, which could enable an entirely new class of AR interactions not yet seen on other platforms.
For all the other announcements made at LeapCon, check out our page for all things Magic Leap.
