For the love of pancakes

In honor of National Pancake day, we’re excited to announce that Pancake Pals, the latest project from Magic Leap Studios, will be released soon with our next software update and the technical preview of the Magicverse SDK.

Pancake Pals on Magic Leap 1 is a pancake-flipping game filled with goofy pancakes, magical pans, and lots of love and rainbows. It’s one of the first multi-user experiences built on our Magicverse technology. Players can flip a pancake with a friend and pull off tasty tricks to earn that all-important high score. Catch your pancake on the back of your pan or toss it super high in the air for a big air bonus. Keep your flip streak going and prepare yourself for all the bonus points in the final flip. No pals to flip with? You can still perfect your flip solo-style, and become one with the pancake. The delicious gameplay, delightful visuals, and smooth music stylings in this zany Magicverse experience could change the way you look at pancakes forever.

Aside from the fact that pancakes are delicious and we have an affinity for all things IHOP, the Magic Leap Studios team set out to make their first multi-user experience with the goal of building a game that would test our Magicverse technology while it was still being developed. When you play Pancake Pals, it feels like a game of catch among friends in spatial computing with characters that come alive. That’s all made possible by a number of behind-the-scenes technologies that are the underpinnings of our Magicverse offering.

Passable World and Persistent Coordinate Frames (PCFs) are the technologies we’ve created that allow digital content to persist in space, and provide a way to bring multiple users into the same shared space. So when you throw a pancake high up in the air, your friend sees it in the exact same place that you do. While some Magic Leap 1 apps have begun to utilize PCFs to implement persistent content, the Studios team was challenged with incorporating them into a fast-paced, physics driven, multi-user experience. The goal was to build something quick, fun, and accessible that would allow them to focus on implementing the multi-user tech in a way that was delightful to a broad audience. With Pancake Pals, when you’re playing with a friend, they see what you see, and can hopefully catch that pancake before it hits the ground.

Once the Studios team designed the multiuser gameplay, they used the Magic Leap Invitations API to allow users on different Magic Leap devices to connect and play together. This type of work feeds back into our Product and Software teams, and directly impacts how we then evolve our systems for external developers.

While flipping pancakes with your friends is fun, having other friends watch you compete is even better. So the Studios team has started working with XR Kit, a component of our Magicverse SDK that allows developers to create cross platform Magicverse applications. While XR Kit is still in development, the Studios team is actively working on an iPhone and iPad app that will let anyone follow along and watch as people flip pancakes back and forth.

Above all, Pancake Pals is a proofpoint to showcase that the Magicverse is becoming a reality. You’ll soon be able to experience these technologies first hand through the joy of flipping pancakes, and these same features are being utilized to develop an array of enterprise applications where users can similarly see and manipulate digital content on multiple Magic Leap and XR compatible devices. That content can understand and respond to the physical world while existing in your space – something that’s not possible with screens today.

Stay tuned for technical tutorials on how the Studios team built Pancake Pals, and check out the game on Magic Leap World when it launches later this year. For now, we hope today brings you a big stack of pancakes to flip the old fashioned way.