Over the last six years, Looking Glass has developed a new type of technology that works like a magical looking glass. A synthetic light field (a.k.a Hologram) is generated by controlling the direction of millions of rays of light, which allows you to see something that is as real as the world around you. The looking glass portrait generates dozens of perspectives simultaneously, which results in a 3D hologram that floats out of the display, viewable by multiple people without requiring headsets.
If you think about any screen that has ever been made, all of those displays run off of pixels that have two properties: Intensity and Color. However, in the real world, the light bounces off from an object that gives it a third property of Direction. With Looking glass display, you can see how the light changes based on your perspective after it reflects off the objects. Looking Glass’s light field technology mimics the behavior of light as it interacts with real world objects before arriving at your eyes.
The Looking Glass displays have about 40-50o viewing angle, so the image flips and distorts once you step outside the viewing cone. The display updates at a rate of 60 frames per second, very similar to majority of the televisions. The Looking Glass software infrastructure has a camera that takes dozens of different views of a 3D scene, bundles them up into a video signal that is deconstructed by optics and electronics of the Looking Glass display. In the past, the Looking Glass had 8.9 inch and 15.6 inch versions where smaller displays were aimed at developers while the 8K immersive display was aimed at industries like medical imaging, holographic mapping, and scientific visualization.
The Looking Glass Portrait
In order to allow the general consumers to own a holographic display, the developers have revealed a new product called Looking Glass Portrait. The holographic display is for both beginners and advanced users including Artists, Designers, Developers, Filmmakers, Photographers, and those of you who are just starting to explore three-dimensional capture and creation.
There are two modes of Operation: Desktop Mode and Standalone Mode. The desktop mode works as holographic second monitor powered by your PC or Mac. You can create, edit, and import media with HoloPlay or make applications with Unity, Unreal, Blender, or Maya plugins. In Standalone mode, you can leverage bult-in Raspberry Pi 4 to run lightweight holographic media. If you are a beginner, you can use iPhone X, 11 or 12 to capture a portrait mode photo using the depth sensor and import it into HoloPlay Studio on your Mac and PC. The HoloPlay studio software automatically converts depth from the Portrait mode photos into dozens of perspectives needed to make a hologram. After conversion, the hologram is automatically stored in Looking Glass Portrait for standalone playback.
In addition to depth photos, you can use any camera to capture series of photos from different angles to capture three-dimensional photos and display them on Looking Glass Portrait. Furthermore, with the iPhone 12 Pro and iPad Pro, you can use LiDAR scanning and Photogrammetry based 3D scans can be played back in the Looking Glass Portrait. Looking Glass is also working on adding support for direct conversion of stereo photos taken with cameras like the classic Fujifilm FinePix and conversion of turntable captures into holograms.
If you have access to a Depth Recorder, a PC and Mac compatible lets anyone with a Microsoft Azure Kinect, Intel RealSense depth camera, or iPhone X/11/12 record, to send and play back 10-second holographic messages in their Looking Glass Portrait.
Pricing and Availability
The Looking Glass Portrait is currently available as part of a crow-funding campaign on Kickstarter. It has already raised close to $1.76 Million (USD) with pledge from more than 6350 backers and 38 more days to go. The option to pledge $199 (USD) for super early bird special is all gone. Currently, a pledge option of $249 (USD) is available, which comes with Looking Glass Portrait and key software including HoloPlay Studio, Depth Recorder, Blender and Maya plugins, Unity and Unreal plugins & all other Looking Glass software integrations. The estimated delivery time is April 2021 and ships anywhere in the world.
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