The Magic Leap 2 gets its third big update with more drastic improvements to performance

We spend a lot of time talking about how some of the best VR headsets are awesome, but as with most things in life: there’s another side to the story. The XR industry is growing and gaining traction, but that also means that not every headset ever made will have a chance to join that list.

A great example of that is the Magic Leap 1, which got discontinued fairly recently. We talked about some learning opportunities that future headsets — such as the Vision Pro — may take from the Magic Leap 1’s lifecycle.

But has its own manufacturer taken heed to these lessons?

After all, the ultimate goal of each VR headset is to become more popular and useful. But could that even happen if it doesn’t feel like a complete package out of the box? Well, the Magic Leap 2 happens to be a very interesting case study on the topic.



Now, before I head in and start talking about massive software updates that effectively upgrade entire feature sets, I’d like to say that this concept isn’t anything new to the world of XR. I mean, the Pico 4 recently got an update that significantly improved image quality, so it’s possible even on older hardware.

Here is what this latest update to the Magic Leap 2 brings to the table:

• Tracking improvements: six times better hand-tracking accuracy and a 10% latency reduction, along with a 63% improvement in positional tracking
• Biometric unlocking and authentication: Iris ID is now live and as you can probably tell by the name, it is very much based on eye-recognition. Neat!
• Improved casting and capturing: These will matter mostly to the people who used them, but TL;DR: a lot more options in better quality are available to users
• Dev-focused improvements: it’s now easier for anyone that wants to make an app work with the Magic Leap 2 to do so, especially in the realm of debugging

And I’ve got to say it how it is: getting so many improvements via software updates is always sweet! And this is the third substantial update that Magic Leap has pushed out in the year since its second headset launched.

But hey, this is still a headset priced at $3,299 and while I’m absolutely convinced that it’s a very impressive piece of technology, all of these updates with massive improvements make it feel like a bit of a work in progress.

Luckily, I’m not really the target audience for it, because this is still very much an enterprise oriented headset. So what it feels like to consumers isn’t really important, because in the world of XR enterprise solutions, things are quite different.

While the Quest 3 can launch with a solid feature set and promise AR and MR features down the line, it is still a consumer grade product. Even though Meta is planning to use it as an enterprise solution too, we'll see how that goes.

That being said, Apple isn’t pushing the Vision Pro as a strictly enterprise-oriented product and its price point is comparable to the Magic Leap 2. It’s too early to say where that analogy may be headed now, but in 2024 we’ll have a much better idea about that.