At Magic Leap, we thrive on challenges — especially when solving them brings Augmented Reality (AR) to a wider audience. A challenge we’ve taken on? Making it simple and cost effective to share AR experiences with an audience not wearing AR devices. Here’s how our Magic Leap Spectator™ app can help you showcase immersive AR content to audiences far and wide.
Expanding the Reach of AR Experiences
In a perfect world, everyone would have access to an AR device, and sharing content would be frictionless. But for now, hardware availability still limits how broadly AR experiences can be shared.
Streaming from the device's point of view might seem like a quick fix, but it often results in shaky, disorienting footage that can make viewers uncomfortable. Static camera setups can miss the spatial context and dynamic engagement that make AR compelling. High-end productions can recreate the immersion, but they require studio cameras, specialty software, technical teams, complex logistics, and a large budget.
Spectator was built to solve these AR scalability challenges head-on: by making it easy to record and share AR content from a third-person perspective using tools as familiar and accessible as a smartphone.
Optimized for Ease of Use
Spectator was designed with simplicity and ease of use at its core. Despite the complex technology running under the hood — including real-time pose synchronization, spatial mapping, and device communication — the user experience is refreshingly straightforward.
All you need to use Spectator is the mobile app (available for Android and iOS), a compatible AR device, an AR application with the companion plugin enabled, a local Wi-Fi network, and a simple printed QR code marker.
The marker serves as a shared spatial anchor, ensuring that the content appears correctly aligned from the phone’s perspective. Setup takes only minutes and you’re ready to record.
From there, you can move freely around the scene, capturing the AR experience as it unfolds.
Effortless AR Sharing for Everyone
Thanks to the ease of application integration and use, Spectator makes the cost and complexity of capturing AR content a thing of the past.
Want to capture a live demo for social media, a video for an internal presentation, or a series of how-to clips to educate your users about key features of your application? You can do it with Spectator in real-time.
What once took days of planning, specialized equipment, a production team, and a substantial budget can now be accomplished in hours — or even minutes — with as little as two people: one wearing the device and one holding the phone.
Thanks to Magic Leap Spectator™, you can share AR experiences with the widest possible audience just as easily as you shoot and send videos to a friend.
Learn more about Magic Leap’s experiences.