Looking Glass' new lineup includes a $300 phone-sized holographic display

https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/08/looking-glass-new-lineup-includes-a-300-phone-sized-holographic-display/

by PaulHoule • 2 years ago

68 38 2 years ago

techcrunch.com

PaulHoule7• 2 years ago

... can't wait until I get mine.

clobmclob• 2 years ago

Ditto

PaulHoule7• 2 years ago

I have to admit though that I am wondering how to make content for it. I have a Lytro Illium which is mostly a white elephant and an Quoocam Ego stereo camera. Maybe I need to synthesize images for it.

stavros2• 2 years ago

By the way, what happened to that company that raised a few billion and was going to absolutely revolutionize AR for everyone, and had the most amazing demos ever, and their release was just around the corner?

PaulHoule7• 2 years ago

There was Magic Leap, they did ship hardware, but it sucked.

stavros2• 2 years ago

Ahh, yep! Huh, I wonder how they managed to enchant all those investors with sucky hardware...

metadat• 2 years ago

Are they shuttered yet, or still shambling along?

https://resources.magicleap.com/en-us/careers

Supposedly they have open roles, but it's probably just for show (since displaying 0 openings would be perceived as a negative signal). Archive.org corroborates not much is changing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://resource...

dylan6042• 2 years ago

I thought they were just being coy on naming the Apple VisionPro

Terr_• 2 years ago

Looking Glass' new lineup includes

Dangit, I got excited for System Shock 3 or a new Thief and now I feel let-down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Glass_Studios

tetrisgm• 2 years ago

Flight Unlimited!

ipsum2• 2 years ago

Not a true holographic display, it's just lenticular. Same as the Nintendo 3ds that shipped over a decade ago.

Animats• 2 years ago

That was back when 3D TVs were a thing.

The market for 3D displays is small, and the market for 3D displays that give up some 2D image quality is very small.

PaulHoule7• 2 years ago

The 3DS had a parallax barrier. Personally I got the 3DS around the time that my presbyopia got bad but I thought the images looked really great with my reading glasses.

I was disappointed that they didn't use stereo for Pokémon Sun and Moon but then they would had to have decided if Lusamine's hair formed a sheet or a cone wheras the animation is strangely ambiguous about the issue as it is.

Most 3D TVs use a high frame rate panel and shutter glasses, somewhat like Lenny Lipton's (Cornell physics grad who wrote the lyrics for Puff the Magic Dragon)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealD_3D

which uses a double-pumped projector and a device which electrically rotates polarized light on alternate frames so that circular polarized lenses on the glasses work like the shutter glasses. (I'm a little sad that I never got to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_3D)

You don't lose quality in principle from this scheme but you do lose brightness and the real answer is "it's complicated" when you change the frame rate.

Most 3D TV however is in a side-by-side format where half of the horizontal frame is used for one eye and the other half is used for the other eye so you really do lose some horizontal resolution.

My best 3D viewer right now is a Meta Quest 3 on which I've watched Space Station 3D and The Rise of Skywalker though sometimes I think about picking up a used 3D TV. If a monitor or TV supports high frame rates you could get 3D for free if it wasn't for the shutter glasses being rather expensive.

spondylosaurus• 2 years ago

The 3D effects on the 3DS were surprisingly good, imo. On all but the "New" models, the sweet spot for positioning yourself was pretty narrow, but if you were in the sweet spot things looked great.

gmurphy• 2 years ago

To be fair, while it is lenticular, it's a huge upgrade over the 3DS, which only rendered two views (one for each eye) so it only worked from straight on; the Looking Glass display handles a significantly higher number of views (~45?[1]) so you get continual stereo separation and different viewpoints as you rotate the device. Rendering costs are much higher though!

[1] https://docs.lookingglassfactory.com/keyconcepts/how-it-work...

Apocryphon• 2 years ago

It looks great, but didn't Amazon burn through $170 million for their Fire Phones with a 3D effect that consumers simply didn't care for? It's such a cool gimmick that has absolutely no practical use (except on the Nintendo 3DS).

inanutshellus• 2 years ago

Chicken/Egg problem for sure. Niche effect that Amazon had trouble encouraging app makers to build for (lots of effort for no users), and since there were no blockbuster apps, users didn't buy it.

jhy• 2 years ago

And it was only parallax pseudo-3D. It wasn't anything like the 3DS lenticular stereo effect. Four (!) head-tracking cameras on the front tried to understand where you were looking, and then the UI would shift about in response. There was no convincing 3D effect.

The intention was that the UI would reveal extra info (like meta-data about a photo, or calendar details) when you shifted your head POV. Like a gesture that you could do one-handed while riding the bus. (But not discoverable, and twitchy, and tail-wagging-the-dog.)

Given how coarse the tracking had to be so that the UI wasn't constantly shifting, it would have been far simpler and more energy efficient just to use the accelerometer instead of the fancy camera setup. And just use that for some nice parallax effects in the launcher; not as a core UI interaction.

isk5172• 2 years ago

I'm in the planning phase right now of building my own virtual pinball table cabinet, would absolutely love a 3D display like this to install it in. Course spending close to $10,000 just for the display is a bit much so I'm just going to focus on finding a good 120Hz 4K 43" display and use re-render and infinicolor to provide some depth of field.

nomel• 2 years ago

You might be able to DIY this [1]. You can buy lenticular sheets on Alibaba.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230525193416/http://alumni.med...

isk5172• 2 years ago

Thanks, I'll have to look into that.

jzemeocala• 2 years ago

For a second I thought someone resurrected project looking glass

tiku• 2 years ago

Had an LG Optimus phone with a 3d screen, was a nice gimmick but not really usefull. This will probably end up the same.

rfwhyte• 2 years ago

"The Brooklyn-based startup is making the 32-inch model’s price available on request."

What incredibly lazy and feckless journalism. You're writing a bloody article about the thing, request the damn price and publish it.

matthewfcarlson• 2 years ago

I'm curious how the new Looking Glass Go compares to the Looking Glass Portrait (now $199)

Looking Glass' new lineup includes a $300 phone-sized holographic display

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