Sketchfab support comes to Magic Leap One

As soon as we heard about Magic Leap, back in 2014, we wanted to bring Sketchfab to the device. It seemed like an obvious and natural fit.

A few months later, we got invited to Florida to test a very early and secretive version of the headset, and were quite impressed. It was early, but our experience confirmed this had the potential to offer one of the ultimate ways to consume Sketchfab content.

Today was a big day for @magicleap, they got to try @Sketchfab VR! :) pic.twitter.com/aYzw08M9wg

— alban denoyel (@albn) June 20, 2016

Corentin and Alban visiting Magic Leap in 2016

Fast forward to today: I’m happy to announce we’ve worked directly with Magic Leap to bring Sketchfab support to the Magic Leap One via the web.

This is powerful in two ways. On the content side, it means there is now a library of over 3,000,000 3D models – the world’s largest library of volumetric user generated content –  which can be browsed with Magic Leap. On the utility side, it means any 3D creator can explore their own creations on Magic Leap by simply posting them to their Sketchfab account. Sketchfab is integrated with almost every 3D creation tool out there, which means this provides the easiest way to publish from 3D software to Magic Leap via Sketchfab. I make a lot of 3D scans, for example, and can now browse them all in one click in AR.

If you’re a Magic Leap One owner, once you have enabled WebXR on the Helio browser, simply go to sketchfab.com, open a model, and then click on the headset icon, it will open the model using our WebVR mode, adapted for the needs of the Magic Leap platform. Note that for proper scale, you may need to define the VR scale of your models using our VR editor.

Note, the following video does not accurately reflect the quality of Sketchfab performance on the Magic Leap One:

Additionally, we are also natively integrated with Spatiate, the first collaborative creation app for the device. Here is a model created in AR with Magic Leap, and uploaded to Sketchfab straight from the device; and you can follow the Spatiate tag to see what others create.

This is an important milestone in our mission to help 3D content reach massive distribution, and we are excited to see how people use it!