More and more, the world of XR is one of interoperability.

This isn't just a smart-sounding buzzword. It gets to the very heart of this burgeoning industry. Devices, apps and services work together to provide enterprise solutions – no matter how many different hands have produced them.

There are exceptions, of course. Apple remains staunch in its commitment to vendor lock-in. But in general, interoperability and app portability is the name of the game.

The Magic Leap 2 is no different. This industry-leading AR headset has its own ecosystem of apps and services – but it also sits within a broader ecosystem of software vendors, systems integrators, digital agencies and developers.

This means that a huge range of apps can leverage ML2's features.

These features include cutting-edge optics, spatial audio, a tall field of vision and dynamic dimming, which allows you to turn the brightness down in the real world to highlight virtual objects.

These are available to users in all sorts of industries – but Magic Leap is especially targeting the worlds of defence, manufacturing and medicine.

In medicine, for instance, surgeons can use the device to carry out pre-surgical planning with 3D objects. At one event, Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson showed the crowd an MRI scan of her liver. It can support doctors in everything from cardiac catheterisation to knee surgery.

Then there are its applications in the manufacturing sectors. Need to repair a highly complex piece of machinery? You can pull up a hologram of it for reference.

One thing about the AR industry is that it's moving fast. Apps, tools and services pop up constantly – and the field is littered with casualties (remember Google Glass?) as well as victors.

Because it's so dynamic, the field needs to prize interoperability – otherwise, developers will be locked into creating services for individual devices or software companies.

Magic Leap is part of this open, accessible ecosystem that benefits both enterprises and devs across a broad spread of industries.

AR Cloud

The Magic Leap 2 AR Cloud is a set of services that allows different devices to share an AR experience.

The AR Cloud is to headsets what Zoom or Skype is to a laptop – a way of enabling shared experiences across devices.

In Magic Leap parlance, this is known as "co-presenting", where different team members can share the same digital content through spatial mapping.

Spatial mapping is key to AR and critical to its ecosystem. It's a kind of virtualisation tool that takes the real world and converts it into a virtual space.

Let's say you want to turn your living room into an AR experience. The Magic Leap 2 would spatially map it by scanning the room, processing its visual data and then transforming it into a 3D space.

Now, you can use your headset to walk through your living room as though it was there in front of you. This can happen anywhere in the world that has an internet connection.

These "Spaces", as they're known, can only scan and process stationary parts of the environment. If your cat is sitting on the sofa when you scan the room, she might be included – but if she jumps in the air as you walk in looking like a robot, she's out of the picture.

On its own, the Magic Leap 2 can handle five Local Spaces of 250m² each. The AR Cloud dramatically increases capacity, allowing for spatial maps of over 10,000m².

These spatial maps can be managed, imported and exported from the Enterprise Console, where admins can also manage and monitor access permissions to devices.

OpenXR support

OpenXR is a universal coding platform that allows apps to be created and deployed on a variety of devices. This is a boon to developers who want their apps to be easily ported and deployed.

It's especially useful when the industry is hurtling along at breakneck speed and new solutions are constantly appearing.

With OpenXR, existing solutions can be deployed to ML2 and use some of its features automatically without any major adjustments.

These features include the internet connection, IMU, three-axis accelerometer and gyroscope sensors, spatial anchors and motion tracking perception.

Other features can be used, but as with your smartphone, you're in control of permissions. These include voice commands, spatial maps, the device's microphone, eye tracking and depth sensors.

Unified endpoint management (UEM) and mobile device management (MDM)

Unlike its predecessor, ML2 can support mobile device and application management solutions – meaning that admins have better (and more secure) control over the enterprise's devices.

ML2 integrates with a range of MDM systems, giving admins more variety, choice and flexibility in the AR ecosystem.

The Magic Leap Hub

Once known as The Lab 2.0, the Magic Leap Hub is a tool for developers using ML2. Its aim is to centralise tools and utilities to speed up workflows.

The Hub lets you manage devices and access software development kits from a single console.

What's next?

As AR technologies are created and finessed, the ecosystem will only get larger and more complex. Because of this, integration and interoperability will become indispensable.

To take one example, software firm ARway recently announced that it's integrating its AR way-finding solution with ML2.

We also know that Meta is in discussion with Magic Leap. The tech giant wants ML to manufacture its hardware and license its lenses and software.

But while there's overlap between the two firms, CEO Peggy Johnson distinguishes between the two: "The metaverse sounds like another world. Really, this is about being in the physical world and just augmenting that world… I like that version of it."

Whatever advances we see next, it looks like the Magic Leap 2 will continue to be a crucial part of the ever-changing AR ecosystem.

Want to try out the Magic Leap 2? Check it out at our online store today.