AR Design Principles

2025, Magic Leap

The most important moments of our lives
happen in the real world, together with other people.

How might we design so our technology doesn’t get in the way?

Connecting people to place.

Digital life is noisy and distracting. Optical see-through AR can replace screens and bring us back into place. With the right design, it becomes a tool for awareness, connection, and deeper engagement with the world around us. Drawing on a decade of experience, we’ve distilled key principles to guide AR design and help realize this potential.

Real-World Insights

These principles come from years of design research and development, shaped by building two robust first-party apps and testing through real-world pilots. They are hard-won lessons from designing, iterating, and learning in practice.

Core Design Themes

Multi Person Collaboration

  • Social dynamics

  • Pre-visualization

  • Multi-user spatial coherence

  • Co-creation and flow state

  • Remote participation (avatars and multi-device)

Content Behavior

  • Head, body, world, and object-relative

  • Responsiveness to context

  • Adaptation to environment

  • Proximity-based behavior

  • Attention management (foreground vs. background)

Performance Enhancement

  • Hands-free operation

  • Skill amplification

  • Step-by-step guidance

  • Digital twins

  • Location-based persistence

Physical / Digital Integrated Workflows

  • Reducing cognitive load

  • Seamless handoff between tools

  • Spatial annotation on physical objects

  • Real-time data overlays

  • Linking analog and digital artifacts

  • Tangible interfaces

Novel Interaction Paradigms

  • Adaptive interfaces (context-aware UI)

  • Voice commands, hand and body gestures, haptic feedback

  • Multi-modal input blending

  • Environmental triggers (light, sound, location)

  • Intent anticipation

Ergonomics & Human Factors

  • Field of view and visual clarity

  • Cognitive load management

  • Posture and body mechanics

  • Fatigue reduction

  • Reach and interaction zones

  • Safety, accessibility and inclusivity

  • Perceptual alignment (depth, scale, perspective)

  • Intuitive affordances

AI & Spatial Awareness

  • AI Agent integration

  • Contextual understanding of environment

  • Object recognition and tracking

  • Anticipating user intent

  • Mapping of spaces

  • Intelligent content placement

Respect Reality

Technology has helped us transcend time and space. But our devices also pull us away from the present, isolating us from the people and places around us. In building the digital world, we have too often forgotten the real one.

Life’s most important moments happen here, together. Optical see-through technology supports true presence in our surroundings. For us, immersion means not escaping reality but becoming more connected to it.

  1. Maintain Situational Awareness

  2. Acknowledge Boundaries

  3. Blend in Seamlessly

  4. Understand the Moment

  5. Prioritize Privacy

Embrace Human Abilities

The internet flattens reality into a two-dimensional screen, reducing rich human interactions to scrolls, taps, and clicks. In doing so, devices often disrupt our connections with others and our relationship to the physical world.

Technology should adapt to us. By respecting human physiology and extending our natural abilities, AR can restore depth, breadth, and context. With AR, movement, gaze, and speech become natural forms of interaction. When we take inspiration from the body’s dynamism, our experiences can feel equally alive.

  1. Input with Intent

  2. Support Ergonomics & Comfort

  3. Include Everyone

  4. Anticipate Intent

  5. Consider Social Dynamics

Spatialize with Purpose

AR opens possibilities beyond flat screens by adding depth to the design canvas. But with more options comes the need for restraint. Each element should serve a clear purpose: Why is it here? How much is too much?

The right choice depends on context. Sometimes a flat panel works best, other times realistic 3D is appropriate. And sometimes no visuals are needed at all—a well-placed sound can carry the experience on its own. To keep people in harmony with both physical and digital worlds, spatial design must be intentional and purposeful.

  1. Depth and Scale Matter

  2. Define Content Behavior

  3. Nudge with Nuance

  4. Look and Listen

Credits

All work on this site is the result of collaboration. Core team listed below.

 
 

People

Pavani Yalla
Scott White
Chris DeWan
Laurence Dawes
Jeff Lin
Mauricio Talero
Rebecca Paris
Chris Hebert

Orgs

Magic Leap
Many One

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