Magic Leap Chief Game Designer Talks Internal Demos and “Everyday Adventure” Format for AR
Graeme Devine is a long time games industry vet, having worked at studios such as Id Software, Ensemble Studios, Microsoft, and more. He’s now been working with Magic Leap for nearly four years. During his keynote presentation at Games for Change 2017, Devine told the audience that a big part of his job is helping the company think about what augmented reality (which Magic Leap calls “mixed reality) really is, and how content should be designed for it.
Devine says each pitch was given a set of criteria:
- Five Mile Test – if you’re five miles from your house and realize you’ve forgotten the experience, is it compelling enough that you’d go back for it?
- Toothbrush Test – is it something people will use every day?
- The Halo Test – will people buy an AR device because of this?
- Innovation – Does it make something in the world so useful that people are sad when they don’t get to use it in AR?
- Does it convincingly interact with the world via world meshing and spatialized audio, and what are the controls?
- Can Magic Leap learn from it?
Devine said the company’s favorite project to from from Pitchfest has been Cat Astrophe!.
“In Cat Astrophe! the idea was you had a controller that was either a water bottle or a laser pointer, or a little cat toy with a bell on it. And you had to herd the cats into their carrier […] and it was 20 cats. And you had these toys down on the floor that they would use and see. You’d put the tube down and they’d recognize it was there and they’d do interesting things,” Devine said. “There was a line to play this Pitchfest demo… people lined up for hours to go and play this thing. And what we noticed was, every single person would use their feet to try and herd the cats. Didn’t do a thing, but they thought it did!”
He continued on to paint a picture of an experience that you don’t turn on and off like other forms of media, but instead, the ‘everyday adventure,’ weaves throughout your real life; at any time an adventure could be just around the corner. This type of AR experience, Devine believes, will “define a generation.”
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