After talking up the Magicverse for the past year and adding new capabilities to Lumin OS to accommodate it, Magic Leap appears to be inching ever closer to actually launching its cross-platform flavor of the AR cloud while introducing a new tool for its development community.

Speaking at the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Thursday, Magic Leap's chief product officer, Omar Khan, revealed that the Magicverse SDK 1.0 release is scheduled to drop in the first quarter of 2020.

A slide from his presentation confirms that the SDK will be available for not only Lumin OS but also for Unity, Unreal, iOS, and Android. This would enable developers to build apps that work between Magic Leap One and mobile devices.

Image by @belaihed/Twitter

Back in the world of currently available products and services, Magic Leap launched the Magic Leap Toolkit for Unity on Wednesday.

Image by Magic Leap/YouTube

Available through Github, the toolkit provides developers with reusable assets, engine prefabs, and other handy tools for building apps and other spatial computing experiences for the Magic Leap One.

The toolkit's purpose is to help Unity developers solve problems while their apps are running, with nine tools available at launch. Developers can troubleshoot network connectivity via the Transmission tool or view log files via the Runtime Control tool, while the Control Input tool dictates button presses and touchpad swipes in real-time.

Meanwhile, the Surface Details tool, perhaps the coolest from a layperson's standpoint, demonstrates how Lumin OS understands its spatial environment based on where users point the controller. For instance, Lumin OS may interpret a coffee table as a chair due to its relatively low height, but a counter is identified as a tabletop.

Conversely, the Control Pointer gives developers a set of properties for determining how the controller interacts with digital objects, including the ability to target, select, and move objects. It also displays physical properties, such as weight.

Other tools include Keep In Front, an add-on that enables virtual objects to stay within the user's view, Place on Floor, a shortcut for providing users with a physical starting point in an app, Ramp Light, a rendering tool that optimizes light in an AR experience, and Spatial Alignment, a companion tool to Transmission for checking visual alignment between multiple connected users.

With these tools, Magic Leap is facilitating the development of apps within the existing framework of Lumin OS ahead of Magicverse, which promises to introduce a whole new paradigm to the company's spatial computing approach.