I've seen this thing in real life and it's astounding.
In the early versions, it was clear that the magic was happening by projecting slices onto the surface of multiple sheets of plexiglass.
In this production version, the glass is 100% transparent, and the slices of image appear to be a seamless 3D whole. Aside from the fact that it's not in open air, it's just like looking at a real hologram. As you move your head, you're seeing a different point of view, and the object looks like it is really inside that block of glass moving around.
I don't think I've seen any consumer gadget that seems so thoroughly from the future in the last 10 years.
I have one of these and it's a very cool effect. Looking at a single image, the resolution seems impossibly low. But as VR developers discovered, getting the brain to accept an image is much more dependent on the "solidity" of the image than on the resolution or texture detail, and this device nails that. Plus with a moving image, your brain is good at integrating texture information over time and your experience will feel merely "grainy" and not super blocky.
I once put a lot of work into researching how to build an "open air" 3d hologram like they have in the movies and came to the conclusion that it is basically against the laws of physics. This is because its impossible to bend light beams in free space.
There are however a lot of cool tricks and hacks, 3d holograms are a really cool subject, this Looking Glass product looks fantastic I want one.
One of the biggest problems these kinds of holograms in a box have is, even though horizontal scrolling works fine, being able to look at it from the top and bottom does not. Here [1] is a video of a 3d hologram in a box based on a rotating mirror that has a head tracker for viewing from different vertical angles. It's really cool but the thing rotates so fast it's also extremely dangerous.
Another approach for open air 3d holograms is to create a series of small explosions that emit light by shooting dangerous high powered lasers into the air and using plasma emission. See [2]
Finally here is a cool video of some fan based holograms [3]
There's no reason we couldn't come up with something creative once the technology was there. For instance, a magnetic field could keep matrix of tiny particles in the air that could be targeted with lasers that cause the particles to emit light.
There's already something along those lines, heating the air enough to form plasma:
> For instance, a magnetic field could keep matrix of tiny particles in the air that could be targeted with lasers that cause the particles to emit light.
irony: this is in fact "against the laws of physics"
Yeah, I think what he means to say is ultra minituarized matrix of billions of high powered phased arrays all synchronized to keep billions of charged aerogel-type mm^2 "pixels" with a different angle of refraction as you rotate it and a different excitation at different ... just make it up as you go along, its decades away at best!
Sounds like you've thought about it though. If we can imagine it, perhaps it's possible. Could anyone have believed that we could control the color of millions of tiny dots on a thin flat surface 100 years ago?
My point is that to say that it's against the laws of physics is as ridiculous as my imaginations of what is possible.
I thought there might be a way to use constructive and destructive interference of a large number of sources to build an open air 3d hologram out of pure light. If light didn't have to travel in a straight line, and we could control the index of refraction at any point in space, this would probably work.
Standing sound waves could achieve this. Albeit, the change in refractive index is small.
Another possibility would be using molecules having a high refractive index when exited. A laser tuned to that would probably work. But that's not exactly in air.
Maybe it's difficult to get the actual light out into the open air, but there's nothing stopping view dependant parallax from making an image appear "in front" of the display, with the annoying limitation that your object will still be occluded by the bounds of the display.
Failing that, you can easily bend lightwaves in open air with a strong enough gravitational field. So there you go, you just need a way to generate enough black holes and position them very precisely.
Or... a way to modify the density (and therefore index of refraction) within a volume of air, with perhaps, standing waves.
> This is because its impossible to bend light beams in free space.
This isn't strictly true, depending on how you define "free space." In fact, you can bend light at will if you can control gravity. Gravitational lensing is the basis for measuring the mass of distant planets and other such astronomical things. So, all you need to do is curve space-time. Thanks Einstein.
I was a Kickstarter backer, and have been developing experiments on it nearly full-time since it arrived about a week before Christmas. It was, amusingly, the first time I've tracked a package minute-to-minute since we used to watch Santa's progress via NORAD on Christmas Eve.
The crazy thing is that the hype was justified: it is pure magic. There's lots of negative peanut gallery elsewhere in this thread; they are just wrong and totally missing the point of what this team and device have accomplished, which is delivering a genuinely novel experience out-of-the-box, for about $500, with both a reasonable selection of samples on launch day AND a proper Unity SDK with good examples. It's one of those rare crowdfunded projects that shipped exactly on time (!), the drivers work, and the support forum is full of helpful people who reply to questions in a timely manner.
My only regret is that I didn't spring for the opportunity to buy a 15" for $2000 when I had the chance.
Coincidentally, I backed the Leap on Kickstarter back in 2011 or whenever it was, as well. They've updated the software but never [needed?] to release a v2 of their hardware.
My reply on this is: it's a mixed bag, and while several of their launch demos indeed make use of Leap, I was somewhat surprised by the degree to which there seems to be an undercurrent of disdain for it in the Looking Glass ecosystem, which is still small enough to be a first-name basis kind of affair. (eg it's a perfect time to get in on something verified awesome)
From my perspective as a Unity dev, getting the Leap integration working was the hardest part. In fact, if I'm honest, I gave up before succeeding.
Here's the double-edged sword: apparently, getting 1:1 mapping between the Leap and whatever you're building is tricky... but kids freaking love it. So, if you're looking to get young people excited or planning to build something that only makes sense with a Leap, then sure... go for it.
However, it's tiring to use for long periods and I find only half-good at continuously tracking fingers. Good news is that there's apparently SDK support coming for depth cameras which could go a long way towards replacing the need for the Leap in the ecosystem. It seems like the hard thing which Leap figured out was the identification of fingers and gesture tracking. There's lots of devices out there which can do cool depth or time-of-flight sensing, but you still have to process a stream and make sense of it in near-realtime. So for a $100 gadget that does a 70% good job of this without a lot of coding smarts required, Leap was ahead of its time.
Sorry, I know this was a bit all over the place and I sound like I'm waffling. Perhaps it comes down to a combination of "is $100 a big deal to you?" + "do you imagine building apps that rely on gesture control?" + "are you patient when it comes to iterative troubleshooting and integration in Unity?"
Thanks, that was very informative. I think I'll just get the display and get the leap separate if I find myself wanting. It's only $90 on it's own anyway. The extra $10 for the case and cleaning cloth is cool, but it's never going to leave my desk so I'm not worried about transport and I already have several microfiber cloths.
The effect is really cool -- I've seen these in person.
It's like a really well-done, high-resolution take on those lenticular plastic 3D images. It does look truly volumetric as long as you're kind of roughly in front of it. But if you go too far off to the side the effect breaks down a bit.
Inexpensive 3D displays that don't require eye-tracking a la the Nintendo 3DS would be quite a nifty development.
I did my own version of the lenticular 3D this as hobby project. You need quite a high resolution (density) display. You also need to configure the output very accurately so that it corresponds to the final desired image for each eye. Because of how an LCD displays color you this is an even more complex translation.
However the advantage of eyetracked lenticular over "The looking glass" would be resolution. (there might be other FOV and effect distance advantages as well)
With lenticular arrays you don't even need eye tracking (in theory), since you can directly synthesize a geometric light field (that is, a bundle of rays around each point with different colors for every direction), but you'd probably need quite a few pixels per lens. If the lenses are <1mm diameter, and you need say >10x10 pixels per lens, that's at least 100ppcm, or >250ppi, preferably a lot more. Latest phones do seem to reach that level.
In the end the satisfaction level needs to be evaluated experimentally of course, I wonder how nice one would be with current technology (say, an iPad Pro display), did you build a prototype?
Yes I built a prototype. You can order lenticular sheets online. I have an iPad Pro but the distance between the LCD to the screen surface is too great to use normal lenicular sheets. A 4k small laptop screen would likely be enough for clean binocular separation however I only had a 1080p 10inch display. While this is difficult at the hobby level this already seems to be widely commercially available http://www.alioscopy.com/en/3Ddisplays.php
Interesting how they're marketing it: as a glasses-free 3D display instead of a holographic (lightfield or w/e) display. That's probably due to the chosen field of view and resolution tradeoff, where you can see only a narrow field of view and angular variation is small (so there are less artifacts, better image quality/"resolution") -- it's a quasi-binocular range field.
However, this seems like a poor strategy: most people already know 3D (binocular) displays and there's not much demand for it, I bet few people would be willing to pay significantly more for lower quality just to get rid of glasses (for those who even crave binocular content). Compare to the potential of having wide viewing angle holograms (even if a little fuzzy) in your living room.
Unrelated: Your blog posts are awesome and you should submit more often to HN ;)
I found this through the Voxatron [1] blog [2]. Looks like they support it now. I think a setup like that would really hype kids up to design and program.
This was my first exposure to it as well, I follow the developer of Voxatron/Pico-8 on Twitter and they were posting videos of it in action a few months ago [1].
Voxatron got an update recently that is beginning to show a lot of promise, but it's still a bit incomplete to make anything more than neat visual scripts or basic drag-and-drop games. However, I would be very excited to see the platform develop further, and to try out a Looking Glass for myself (they're far too rich for my blood for the time being).
$499 (let's say $500 to avoid the mental rounding down bias), +$100 if you want the Leap Motion, +$25 tax, + $50 shipping. My cart is at $673.92 USD. Having a hard time clicking "Checkout", but I'm not leaving the site yet :) Still seems reasonable in my opinion.
This isn't actually "holographic" as such. Holography [1] specifically refers to creating a 3d effect by recording light diffraction and interference wavefronts. At this point though the term has become so corrupted that most people think that holography means any kind of 3d display without glasses - which is definitely not what holography is.
I'm pretty sure the last time we had here thread about The Looking Glass, someone said it's actually a volumetric display which has nothing to do with holograms beside marketing gimmick which tries to sell it as such display and technology
I've seen one in real life and the left-right 3d is great, and in many cases it looks like there's a solid, low-res object floating inside the box. There's no up-down movement, but its surprisingly effective.
The website UI behind your URL is maddeningly hard to navigate if you're looking for the content. I wasn't even sure what this website was for, but it pointed me in the direction of understanding what the demoscene is [1].
Reminds me of the video game way back in the 90's called "Time Traveler". This was in the expensive section of the arcade and cost around a dollar to play - a huge premium over the nickel machines.
My brothers and I finally decided to pooled our money together to play the machine - the gameplay was weak but the visuals were cool!
That's not holography, period. Let's call things by their names.
They do not build an interference pattern which models the light waves as the object was there.. though that kind of technology isn't that far away.
As someone who used to do holograms, I was quite excited to read the headlines - but once you read more into it - you see that it's just a trick, 'gimmick' even if it works well - it's not pure holography, so, please, don't use that name.
It's 45 views across a total of 50 degrees, that's 25 degrees off-center left and right. And there's only a single vertical angle. What gets displayed in those views is 100% implementation-dependent. There's no standard for how "deep" the objects should look, and there's no standard for the vertical angle either. So whether it will look good on a wall is content-dependent. I suspect that most content being made specifically for the Looking Glass will have a downward viewing angle in mind, as would be natural for having the device on a desk in front of you.
One of the other commenters suggests that it is displaying onto several layers of glass inside the block; I didn't watch the video but I wonder if the surfaces that it is displaying on could be curved in addition to this within the block, so that the image has a wider field of view..
It is not displaying on layers in the block. I have a 15" LookingGlass. The depth appears continuous, not in discrete layers.
The field of view is, to me, very wide. I'm not trying to show it to an audience and it is more than enough to immerse me. It is also important to note that the field of view comes with parallax: you can really see around corners. It is not just a wide field of view on the same stereo pair.
It's definitely not on layers. There's a weird perspective illusion vertically but it's not parallax and you can't "see around corners" vertically. It's a lenticular effect, horizontal only. Check out the Vimeo holographic channel: https://vimeo.com/channels/thelookingglass Each video is a 5x9 matrix and each view is a different angle. If you're working with a 3D object and not a video it's the same deal - it has to be rendered from 45 different perspectives and these are sent to the device separately.
It's 5x9, but that's just how it's stored, right? The actual data comes from a linear array of 45 cameras, right? Or is it a curved array of 45 cameras along an arc?
Right, I think a linear array would work best since it matches where your eyes will be when you move left & right in front of the screen. https://lookingglassfactory.com/how-it-works/ It shows up on HDMI as 2560x1600 but I don't know how the physical panel is laid out.
Could you theoretically run a game like Trials from Ubisoft on something like this? From what I understand of the technology it would be like an ideal use case for it. Seems like an amazing experience at least in theory.
How well does it work with Linux? I didn't see anything about it on the site. It'd be neat to hook up to my laptop, but if Linux isn't supported at all there'd be no point.
Mine should be arriving tomorrow or Monday, I'm intending to try and use it with Linux. From what I can tell, the display more-or-less presents as a normal 2d monitor which expects a tiled grid of views that differ in azimuth: have a look at https://vimeo.com/lookingglassfactory
Correction - the views are interleaved, and the details of that interleaving depend on the calibration of your individual Looking Glass.
https://github.com/lonetech/LookingGlass has a Python tool that grabs the calibration out of the looking glass, and an OpenGL shader that can be used with MPlayer to take the tiled videos from the vimeo link and display them on the LG.
It's a really cool effect in person - I'm totally glad I sprung for one!
The display volume is made up of layers of refractive material, and the software generates 45 perspectives of the displayed model, which are refracted to the appropriate viewing angles. [1]
Their website terms it a, "...lightfield display with volumetric characteristics". [2]
How is it poorly designed? It looks like every other website, it sort of resembles theverge.com. Not a fan of the bold font, but otherwise it looks no different than any other major site.
Amazingly looking.. but haven't we been there before? JooJoo tablet? Anyone remembers it? Then Apple came with iPad and JJ disappeared. What's the chances one of XX Apple future tech Skunkworks teams are NOT working on something similar with billions of dollars in R&D founds?
In the early versions, it was clear that the magic was happening by projecting slices onto the surface of multiple sheets of plexiglass.
In this production version, the glass is 100% transparent, and the slices of image appear to be a seamless 3D whole. Aside from the fact that it's not in open air, it's just like looking at a real hologram. As you move your head, you're seeing a different point of view, and the object looks like it is really inside that block of glass moving around.
I don't think I've seen any consumer gadget that seems so thoroughly from the future in the last 10 years.