As any creator knows, sketching, experimenting, and concepting are the building blocks on which great works are built. From the back of the proverbial napkin spring all of the greatest feats of creativity. With software, we live in a world where that napkin can be shared and iterated on, and communities that openly collaborate across projects evolve quickly and often unexpectedly. Opening up Concepts to any creator is about sharing the napkin.

New Concepts from Indies and Partners

While preparing to launch Concepts, we worked with some indie developers and partners to release new concepts today. In the Concepts section of Magic Leap World, you’ll now see:

“Spheres” by Toryn Farr, showcases different gestures to manipulate small spheres.

“Compete” by Trevor Rose, a 16yr old developer, brings your favorite games right into your living room. Choose from two classic games: bowling and darts.

Visionaries 777’s "Concept Car" is thinking about the future of mobility. Their Concept introduces a full-electric autonomous concept vehicle where users can toggle futuristic conceptual features on the vehicle. The concept vehicle can even be scaled to fit your space.

And The Dow Jones Innovation Lab has shown off their "Wall Street Journal Stock Data Concept" at places like Davos. They wanted a chance to bring it to the wider world, and launching exclusively on Magic Leap World Concepts like felt like the best place to do that. You can learn more about their concept and check out an interview with the creator here.

“We want to release our concept to the world so that other creators can see how they too might push the bounds of what’s possible with spatial computing today in similar ways,” said Roger Kenny, Innovation Tech Lead at the Dow Jones Innovation Lab.

So what are concepts?

Concepts are free apps with limited functionality meant to garner feedback, experimentation, and support from the broader Magic Leap community. Developers will be able to link their Twitter profile and their project’s GitHub URL for their concept. It’s our hope that some of these experiments evolve into fully-featured apps. When we launched Concepts earlier this year, we went around to many of the Magic Leap Teams to see what projects they could share. The world had seen elephants and astronauts from us, and now we had a chance to share interactive photorealistic models. Now that third-party developers are publishing, you’ll see exciting new ways to use gestures, interaction-heavy concepts, and short, easily digestible experiences. Concepts will generally have a faster approval time through our app approval process and don’t require you to register as a Merchant (although developers publishing concepts still need to sign the Magic Leap publisher agreement).

What aren’t concepts?

As spatial computing evolves, we understand that our community thrives on both experiments and robust applications. Concepts aren’t meant as watered down experiences or to just simplify the publishing process, but rather serve as a place where the right support and exposure can help small ideas grow.

Our goal with concepts is to provide a space for experimentation that tests the limits of what Magic Leap as a platform can (and should) do, without expectations of a larger-scale, production-ready goalpost. Some concepts may forever stay concepts, others may develop into full apps, borne out of smaller ideas. We’re just excited to see where our community takes them and how they’ll collaborate moving forward. If you’re working on something for Magic Leap, and you want to share it with the world, you can learn more about publishing concepts in the Creator Portal.