The looking Glass display is horizontal parallax only (HPO). HPO is a common information reduction method in the 3D display world. Most holographic stereograms, all rainbow holograms, and all 3D lenticulars are HPO. Occlusion, horizontal motion parallax and stereoscopic cues are preserved, which are our primary 3D cues.
The loss of vertical parallax changes computation from an N squared to N problem. An interactive display like the looking glass provides vertical parallax cues as a result of user interaction (rotating the object vertically with user interaction).
This class of display also does not have accommodation cues, but in the range of 3d cues accommodation is the weakest.
Looking Glass displays are great! Shawn and the team has done careful, practical engineering work to get these displays out there.
Ref: I have a PhD in 3D display technology and worked with holography pioneer Steve Benton and his group at MIT to develop the most advanced holographic stereograms at the time. I own a Looking Glass display.
From back when I researched it, accommodation mismatch is a huge problem for a small (but significant) proportion of the population in terms of nausea or headaches. It's less of a problem for movie-theaters because accomodation is at infinity for the screen itself, so as long as they don't have too much for too long that is much closer to the viewer than the screen, it doesn't cause any issues, but it seems like it would be a major issue for a screen designed to be viewed up close?
The 3D glasses problem doesn't really apply here. With 3D movie glasses, everything is blocked out except for the 3D images. Some people feel queezy when their proprioception and visual input don't match. It's a little like car sickness.
With the screen, they do match, as only what's on the screen is 3D. In that sense, it is like looking at a box with something 3D in it, versus being submersed inside something 3D like with the glasses.
tl;dr With the screen you can move your head around and the world moves with it, so there is no sensory mismatch. But turning your head when going into a 3D warp speed starscape with 3D glasses on might easily cause someone to ralph on the poor sole sitting in front of them.
The issue I'm thinking of was still an issue even with early HOP lenticular displays (IIRC philips had a 7-view one in the 90s), and I seem to recall reading research that specifically identified accommodation/parallax mismatch rather than anything else, which is why large viewing distances do not have this problem.
No, they are not true holograms in the interference pattern sense. I am not fond of the misappropriation of the word, but Looking Glass is hardly the first.
I had hoped plenogram would catch on (to make the connection to the plenoptic function that describes the travel of light in a scene).
The Looking Glass only has 45 discrete views projected across 50 degrees (25 degrees left and right of center). I have one of the smaller ones and it's a very nice effect, but it's not the same as a "real" hologram.
In a sense, if the resolution is high enough. One notable limitation of the angular-pixel approach is that the angular resolution of the pixel becomes diffraction-limited as the pixel size shrinks - the puts you between a rock and a hard place with the twin goals of "small enough pixels that you can't see them" and "enough viewing angles that you can't perceive the steps", even if you had a hypothetical umpteen-zillion gigapixel display. "True" holograms are coherent across their entire surface, so they don't have this limitation.
This isn't even close, though. Horizontal parallax only and only a few dozen angles (over a wide FOV!) puts it more in the territory of lenticulars than true lightfield displays. To be fair that is enough to achieve a 'wow factor', and a true lightfield display is a Hard Problem (that Fovi3d are trying to solve, if you're interested in the state of the art).
It's also the name of a game studio with a number of neat titles, some rock band, and perhaps most importantly, sequel to Alice in wonderland: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
All of which were probably referring to the same concept: viewing the other side of reality
If anything, it's a nod to Looking Glass Studios. Arkane's Prey is intended to be a spiritual successor to System Shock. (I presume that's what you're talking about, even though it's not related to the original 2006 Prey.)
For me it just have incorrect hm "angles" just like misplaced glasses or something like this. 8k won't help much since it is just bigger, not better PPI.
I have one of the smaller versions of the Looking Glass and it's genuinely like looking into the future. It's a remarkable thing to see live. My main complaint is the low resolution (4k divided into 45 layers).
Bigger size and bigger resolution is a great step up here - I hope they get to continue in that direction!
This reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw (2007) Johnny Lee's demonstration using head tracking with infrared led's and a wii remote to implement the same thing. Obviously that limits the effect to the individual's head being tracked, but its amazing its been 12 years since that demo and we're still trying to commercialize the same affect.
It's the same thing in reverse. You can use a camera to capture a light field, and then a screen with a complementary lens to project out (roughly) the same light field.
In fact, given the principle of the reversibility of light, if you had a screen the same size and pixel density as your camera sensor you could use the exact same lens array to output a close approximation of the captured light field, without any post-processing of the captured pixels!
I can’t speak for the 8k one, but I’ve personally seen the small one (9”) and was completely blown way by how good it was.
The viewing angle is very specific; if you’re off to the side it doesn’t work, but the sweet spot is big enough or perhaps 4-5 people to stand in front of.
Given they’ve quietly delivered on exactly what they (as far as I can tell) promise, I see no particular reason to believe the 8k isn’t real.
Obviously wait for the detailed reviews to roll out, healthy skepticism (for example I have no idea what the SDK is like; perhaps it’s only capable of rendering specific types of 3D content)... but this isn’t a scam.
I've used their Unity SDK and it can render most content you throw at it. It has similar limitations to VR - faux-3D but really 2D post processing effects won't work. Sometimes shader tricks will break the expectations of the renderer.
But most regular 3D content will display as expected.
Note that this "only" adds depth. It can't make anything appear to "come out of" the screen, the effect is more like a window. It's not like holograms in science fiction.
Too late for an edit but I was going by what was shown in the video, which very much didn't look it could do that.
That said, that's still basically "3D but without glasses", not exactly the Holodeck "hard light" future tech many people think of when they hear "real hologram".
1. The imagine coming "out" of the screen such that you can even see the image at 90º to the projector
2. The image occluding the physical background.
As far as I understand, such a thing is impossible as seen in the still above (i.e. from a single projector), but can be fakes by using stuff in the air to scatter the light, like this research project (1) or this not-great version that uses fog (2)
Yes, but at least a real hologram creates an actual depth sensation as the eye's focus needs to adapt.
This means 3d impression works even for people
with reduced stereoscopic eyesight, and does not create headaches due to a mismatch of scene depth vs. physical display depth.
Such holographic displays do exist, e.g. www.seereal.com (which BTW recently received an investment by Volkswagen).
There are multiple transparent lcd (or maybe led - idk) screens layered on top of each other. A different image is rendered on each layer to appear 3D. A single 8k video stream is sent to the display. Each 8k image is subdivided into multiple smaller images, one for each layer. So the entire image is 8k, not 8k per layer.
I know one of the cofounders, Alex, a bit. He’s a really earnest and excited person. He’s been working on 3D led tech for a long time. It’s been fun to see how’s his ideas have progressed. I have no reason to doubt their claims.
FYI, they are not the only company working on these types of displays. There is also an Irish company (I forgot their name) working with panels made by Panasonic. I think theirs are higher res than 8k.
That's impressive; and for me a bit reminiscent. I got my doctorate staring at macromolecular structures through various attempts at presenting them in 3d. One of the earliest I encountered was called a "Richard's Box"[0]. That setup was a set of clear plastic sheets on which were plotted 'slices' of electron density which were subsequently stacked-up with suitable sized spacers and you looked down through the stack with an lamp beneath. This approach sounds very similar, but with an active display in place of each sheet of plotter output.
Is this essentially the technology the 3DS used, only scaled up?
(I ask for clarification, not to diminish the achievement. If it is, and it works well, it's still a nice advancement. Nor am I saying it was invented for the 3DS.)
As I recall the 3DS used a lenticular lens: you see different images based on the angle to the display. Wikipedia has some more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_lens
There are two types of "this isn't a hologram" people in this thread. The first is the group of people that think holograms are the things in Star Trek. Those are not holograms, and neither is this.
This is 45 image segments encoded into a single 8k signal. I have a smaller one, and it's amazing, but its 4k image input results in approximately 800x600 equivalent for each rendered angle.
There's overlap between the potential client domains, but this doesn't encroach on the AR domain covered by products like Magic Leap.
And there are legitimate commercial use case for AR - e.g.: automotive manufacturing and building construction.
The biggest impacts to Magic Leap's prospects came from the premature over-hyping of the product as well as microsoft beating them to the punch with the HoloLens.
Off-topic: Can someone please write a Firefox extension that removes that _stupid_ fucking popover on medium "Pardon blah blah give us your money". Does that shit really need to take over the entire fucking screen?
Really nice tip: Click the little keylock on the left side of the address bar when on medium, go into site settings, under javascript block it and medium articles will now load as just pure easy to read text :)
The next version will use microservices where every single character on the page will be downloaded and rendered by a different web worker. Good for concurrency!
Admittedly I am a bit of an idiot here, I didn't see the fact the person was using Firefox, the way I described it is how it is done on Chromium browsers but I cannot find a way to do it natively in Firefox (aside from downloading the NoScript extension). Hope that helps...
This should work (add it to "my filters" in uBlock settings and click the checkmark/apply button):
medium.com##div[tabindex="-1"][aria-modal="true"]
Tested in FF 70 with uBlock Origin and tracking protection enabled.
EDIT: Here's a simple blocklist with more Medium banners and popups. Can be added via "Import…" at the bottom of "Filter lists" tab in uBlock Origin settings. I'll try to update it when i encounter some new Medium stupidity:
Projection is entirely impossible. The photon's path has to back-track through the device; this is true regardless of the type of device you're using to make it.
Real holograms don't project from the surface either. Sci-fi "holograms" are a different thing. Please let's remember that holograms are an existing technology and have nothing do to with sci-fi 3D open-air projections.
I think it can do both, the gif above the caption "It’s the truly futuristic, deeply immersive display we’ve always dreamed of" appears to project in front of the screen.
