The Looking Glass – Holographic Display
i.lookingglassfactory.com
i.lookingglassfactory.com
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 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]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gvPS1m40gw
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:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WkkZcFWgr4Q
Very primitive and limited but certainly a proof of concept.
Edit: ugh, this is what happens when you don't read a comment fully before replying.
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.
irony: this is in fact "against the laws of physics"
My point is that to say that it's against the laws of physics is as ridiculous as my imaginations of what is possible.
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 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.
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.
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?"
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.
However the advantage of eyetracked lenticular over "The looking glass" would be resolution. (there might be other FOV and effect distance advantages as well)
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?
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 ;)
[1] https://lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php [2] https://lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=32743
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).
[1] https://twitter.com/lexaloffle/status/1027606480030117890
I thought $400 was surprisingly reasonable.
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=78756
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.
If anyone wants the link to the content, it's here: https://youtu.be/US7hzM0a21E
My brothers and I finally decided to pooled our money together to play the machine - the gameplay was weak but the visuals were cool!
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.
At one point, the camera shifted and you could see the image in the device fade out...
Also - it seems the viewing angle is fairly specific?
What would these look like mounted to a wall, perpendicular to the floor? Are they usable?
Whats the limiting factor on size?
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.
What happens if you move your head up and down relative to it (vertical angles), does the object not get vertical parallax?
A sni[ing game would be fun - with a foxhole view where you can move behind occlusions and shoot at small things far in the distance...
The feel is that of a periscope's view though...
I've heard of Linux zealots, but this is something else..
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!
Their website terms it a, "...lightfield display with volumetric characteristics". [2]