Immersive Education | Event Production
Cultivate a Community of Creative Development
In August of 2018, the Magic Leap One launched with great fanfare. This device was one of the most anticipated immersive technology inventions ever to launch – a set of augmented reality glasses with a large field of view, depth of vision, and spatial awareness. One major issue with the launch is that despite a ton of curiosity from the augmented reality and virtual reality community, there was very limited distribution of the headsets. The immersive technology community, at that point, consisted mostly of independent developers or small development companies, and at a price tag of $3,500, very few could afford to purchase a Magic Leap headset unless they had a pending client project paying for it.
Magic Leap’s goal was to engage developers to build creative applications that would demonstrate the power of their AR technology.
VRAR Chicago brought this groundbreaking technology to the community of developers in Chicago, to provide them access to a limited resource, and to demonstrate to Magic Leap that Chicago is the premier market for immersive technology.
What We Did:
Following several months of negotiation, in April of 2019, VRAR Chicago convinced Magic Leap to send their developer relations team, along with 35 Magic Leap One headsets, to Chicago to host their first “Magic Leap Developer Bootcamp.”
VRAR Chicago handled all event coordination to provide this training free of charge to the developer community in Chicago. We booked the location – 1871 – Chicago’s Technology Incubator. We setup a ticketing system requiring a $100 deposit – refunded upon class completion – to guarantee that only serious developers reserved the limited seats for the class. VRAR Chicago partnered with the Chicago Chapter of the VR/AR Association to promote the availability of the class.
The Result:
The full day event was so successful that Magic Leap left two Magic Leap One headsets with VRAR Chicago – to make available to developers in the Chicagoland area for demonstration and testing. Further, Magic Leap expanded the Developer Bootcamp into a national roadshow that toured the country, returning to Chicago in August of 2019 for a four day residency at 1871.
