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I saw an earlier prototype at a Demosplash at CMU. It was really incredibly cool in certain instances. 3D objects really looked like they were "in" the volume o

by bane 6y ago

I saw an earlier prototype at a Demosplash at CMU. It was really incredibly cool in certain instances. 3D objects really looked like they were "in" the volume of the display and moving my body or head from side-to-side was pretty flawless. That being said, it also had limitations. 3D effects that extended beyond the display (like a tunnel, or some larger effect) lost that depth to me, and there's no up-down 3D, only side-to-side. The one I saw was also not as high-resolution as you might think, the effective resolution was the resolution/elements where each element was a particular angle the display was to be viewed from and the computer had to render the display from each angle simultaneously. The prototype I saw had the effect of looking a bit like 3d objects underwater. Still, it was the closest thing I've seen to a volumetric display outside of a lab, and in the cases where it really worked (things inside the volume of the display) it was kind of jaw dropping. edit here's the pouet page for the demo I saw https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=78756 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=78756 This video is from a handheld camera that moves around the display that's helpful to understand how it works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US7hzM0a21E&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US7hzM0a21E&feature=youtu.be

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
So if you rotate your head 90 degrees the effect falls apart?
- bane 6y ago
  It's more like panning. If you step left right, the parallax effect persists, like walking around an object in a box on table. But if you try to go up/down it appears to rotate with you as the display doesn't have any fields vertically. It reminded me a lot of those "3d" pictures you can get that have a bunch of vertical sections at slightly different angles. They go back to maybe the 70s. There's a funny name for them that I can't quite remember. My understanding is that the "box" that sits on top of the display is purely cosmetic and helps sell the effect, and that the backboard of the display provides everything.
  - objclxt 6y ago
    > There's a funny name for them that I can't quite remember. It’s lenticular printing - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_printing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_printing
  - rowanG077 6y ago
    Lenticular printing?
- numpad0 6y ago
  Looking Glass is just lenticular sheet glued to LCD, same technology as cheap 3D postcards and stickers from the ‘90s made of vertical grated plastic that you tilt left and right and picture changes. Probably not even 3D. Acrylic block part is just a gimmick as well. But reportedly they execute that principle super well, gimmick part included, to the point it looks almost VR.
  - etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
    The interesting thing is that if the lenticular lens is done with mini spheres instead of mini-cylinders, it should be possible to create a more fully holographic effect, given a sufficiently high-res base display. Basically a light-field camera in reverse. (I am sure they have thought of this by now ...)
    - nicd 6y ago
      Fovi3D (http://www.fovi3d.com/ http://www.fovi3d.com/) makes this kind of light-field display based on microlenses. One challenge here is the tradeoff between spatial and angular resolution. If you're generating a 4x4 lightfield starting with a 2160x1440 display, you only end up with 640x360 superpixels. The company I work for (https://www.leiainc.com/ https://www.leiainc.com/) makes a display that can switch between light field and 2D, so you can have the best of both worlds.
  - kn0where 6y ago
    So, it's a much higher end Nintendo 3DS.
    - fenwick67 6y ago
      Except there are 45 images instead of 2.
      - daniel_reetz 6y ago
        Which means 45 pixels under each lenslet.
Answerawake 6y ago
Wow second reference to Demosplash I have seen in a week. Guess its more well known than I thought. Looking at the pouet page, it looks like 2018 was a banner year for Demosplash, tons of prods from that year on there. I went for the first time in 2019. The CMU alumni crew that organize this are a bunch of cool cats. Wish we had demo parties at my alma mater. :)
- bane 6y ago
  Yeah, I missed the other post on the FM Towns emulator or I would have commented. One of the coolest parts of Demosplash is the live old PCs and consoles you can play around on. Partly I think this is because Demosplash is hosted by the vintage computer club. One of the professors at CMU (who coincidentally also is writing the FM Towns emulator and has written a number of demos for Demosplash, of the first ever for those platforms), is a really cool guy who brings a library of almost impossible to play Japanese only PCs to the event. He's done some truly amazing stuff with some of them and they're a blast to play games on. The folks that run it are great, including having a mainframe emulator running on a rPi as the sign-in system, and it should easily have 4-10 times the attendance. I really recommend it if you're just a few hours from CMU and can take the weekend. Even better, enter a competition! IIR, the competitor who brought the Looking Glass display was a VR developer for Facebook, so there's some serious muscle that shows up.
  - Answerawake 6y ago
    >One of the coolest parts of Demosplash is the live old PCs and consoles you can play around on. Partly I think this is because Demosplash is hosted by the vintage computer club. Yea it was a lot of fun playing with the old machines at last year's Demosplash. >One of the professors at CMU (who coincidentally also is writing the FM Towns emulator and has written a number of demos for Demosplash, of the first ever for those platforms), is a really cool guy who brings a library of almost impossible to play Japanese only PCs to the event. He's done some truly amazing stuff with some of them and they're a blast to play games on. Soji Yamaka is a wizard at reverse-engineering these old systems. I am in awe at his drive and ambition in figuring out solutions to preserving these old systems. His submission for the 2019 Demosplash was one of my favorites. We had some great late night chats. >The folks that run it are great, including having a mainframe emulator running on a rPi as the sign-in system HA! I remember that. Geeked out with the founders for like an hour just talking about how they did it. Seeing that at the check in desk was my first introduction to how CMU students leave no stone unturned in nerdy awesomeness. When I was in school, me and my fellow retro geeks would talk about writing stuff like this but we never actually spent the time to learn how to write software for old machines. We would just be trying to survive our own classes and then waste time on other things. The CMU computer club takes the craft to a whole new level. I guess it is to be expected given that they are a top tier school. While the mainframe system they emulated was before my time, I loved the glow of the DEC monitor they used. Took me back to when I first saw one as a child. >IIR, the competitor who brought the Looking Glass display was a VR developer for Facebook, so there's some serious muscle that shows up. Ah man missed it! I don't recall any outside companies attending in 2019. Do you attend every year or was it just a one off thing?
tootie 6y ago
I had my hands on a dev kit for a while. It's simultaneously amazing and meh. Sorta like any current AR headsets. The depth of the field that the display achieves is miraculous. But the image is still grainy and has a really narrow viewing angle. This was last year, but we evaluated it as not quite ready for general use, but incredibly promising. The step up to 8K is probably very valuable, but the viewing angle is the big area for improvement.

by bane 6y ago

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago

So if you rotate your head 90 degrees the effect falls apart?

bane 6y ago
It's more like panning. If you step left right, the parallax effect persists, like walking around an object in a box on table. But if you try to go up/down it appears to rotate with you as the display doesn't have any fields vertically. It reminded me a lot of those "3d" pictures you can get that have a bunch of vertical sections at slightly different angles. They go back to maybe the 70s. There's a funny name for them that I can't quite remember. My understanding is that the "box" that sits on top of the display is purely cosmetic and helps sell the effect, and that the backboard of the display provides everything.
- objclxt 6y ago
  > There's a funny name for them that I can't quite remember. It’s lenticular printing - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_printing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_printing
- rowanG077 6y ago
  Lenticular printing?
numpad0 6y ago
Looking Glass is just lenticular sheet glued to LCD, same technology as cheap 3D postcards and stickers from the ‘90s made of vertical grated plastic that you tilt left and right and picture changes. Probably not even 3D. Acrylic block part is just a gimmick as well. But reportedly they execute that principle super well, gimmick part included, to the point it looks almost VR.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
  The interesting thing is that if the lenticular lens is done with mini spheres instead of mini-cylinders, it should be possible to create a more fully holographic effect, given a sufficiently high-res base display. Basically a light-field camera in reverse. (I am sure they have thought of this by now ...)
  - nicd 6y ago
    Fovi3D (http://www.fovi3d.com/ http://www.fovi3d.com/) makes this kind of light-field display based on microlenses. One challenge here is the tradeoff between spatial and angular resolution. If you're generating a 4x4 lightfield starting with a 2160x1440 display, you only end up with 640x360 superpixels. The company I work for (https://www.leiainc.com/ https://www.leiainc.com/) makes a display that can switch between light field and 2D, so you can have the best of both worlds.
- kn0where 6y ago
  So, it's a much higher end Nintendo 3DS.
  - fenwick67 6y ago
    Except there are 45 images instead of 2.
    - daniel_reetz 6y ago
      Which means 45 pixels under each lenslet.

Answerawake 6y ago

Wow second reference to Demosplash I have seen in a week. Guess its more well known than I thought. Looking at the pouet page, it looks like 2018 was a banner year for Demosplash, tons of prods from that year on there. I went for the first time in 2019. The CMU alumni crew that organize this are a bunch of cool cats. Wish we had demo parties at my alma mater. :)

bane 6y ago
Yeah, I missed the other post on the FM Towns emulator or I would have commented. One of the coolest parts of Demosplash is the live old PCs and consoles you can play around on. Partly I think this is because Demosplash is hosted by the vintage computer club. One of the professors at CMU (who coincidentally also is writing the FM Towns emulator and has written a number of demos for Demosplash, of the first ever for those platforms), is a really cool guy who brings a library of almost impossible to play Japanese only PCs to the event. He's done some truly amazing stuff with some of them and they're a blast to play games on. The folks that run it are great, including having a mainframe emulator running on a rPi as the sign-in system, and it should easily have 4-10 times the attendance. I really recommend it if you're just a few hours from CMU and can take the weekend. Even better, enter a competition! IIR, the competitor who brought the Looking Glass display was a VR developer for Facebook, so there's some serious muscle that shows up.
- Answerawake 6y ago
  >One of the coolest parts of Demosplash is the live old PCs and consoles you can play around on. Partly I think this is because Demosplash is hosted by the vintage computer club. Yea it was a lot of fun playing with the old machines at last year's Demosplash. >One of the professors at CMU (who coincidentally also is writing the FM Towns emulator and has written a number of demos for Demosplash, of the first ever for those platforms), is a really cool guy who brings a library of almost impossible to play Japanese only PCs to the event. He's done some truly amazing stuff with some of them and they're a blast to play games on. Soji Yamaka is a wizard at reverse-engineering these old systems. I am in awe at his drive and ambition in figuring out solutions to preserving these old systems. His submission for the 2019 Demosplash was one of my favorites. We had some great late night chats. >The folks that run it are great, including having a mainframe emulator running on a rPi as the sign-in system HA! I remember that. Geeked out with the founders for like an hour just talking about how they did it. Seeing that at the check in desk was my first introduction to how CMU students leave no stone unturned in nerdy awesomeness. When I was in school, me and my fellow retro geeks would talk about writing stuff like this but we never actually spent the time to learn how to write software for old machines. We would just be trying to survive our own classes and then waste time on other things. The CMU computer club takes the craft to a whole new level. I guess it is to be expected given that they are a top tier school. While the mainframe system they emulated was before my time, I loved the glow of the DEC monitor they used. Took me back to when I first saw one as a child. >IIR, the competitor who brought the Looking Glass display was a VR developer for Facebook, so there's some serious muscle that shows up. Ah man missed it! I don't recall any outside companies attending in 2019. Do you attend every year or was it just a one off thing?

tootie 6y ago

I had my hands on a dev kit for a while. It's simultaneously amazing and meh. Sorta like any current AR headsets. The depth of the field that the display achieves is miraculous. But the image is still grainy and has a really narrow viewing angle. This was last year, but we evaluated it as not quite ready for general use, but incredibly promising. The step up to 8K is probably very valuable, but the viewing angle is the big area for improvement.