7 ms·

High-resolution holographic interface [video]

83 points by danboarder 5y ago

soco 5y ago
Maybe I'll have again one day a 3D TV set... even though I didn't like much the glasses, I really miss watching 3D movies at home. And this one promises 3D without glasses!
- codezero 5y ago
  I somewhat miss the novelty of the 3d camera+screen on my old HTC android phone. It's a fun nice-to-have but there wasn't enough media that worked with it except what you recorded, which also wasn't the best thing to watch in 3D :)
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    That's always an issue with new media tech. The same chicken and egg thing existed when 720 and later 1080+ TVs were released, there was practically nothing to watch on them at first. I think 3D has more issues to deal with than 3D but if there's TVs out there in large numbers the media will probably follow.
    - toast0 5y ago
      I'm 98% sure they stopped making 3d tvs, so you can't find a 2019-2021 3d tv; although I think some current model projectors might be capable. I don't think there were enough sales to encourage enough media production to encourage sustainable sales to encourage continued display manufacturing. I'm biased because I wear glasses and wearing two sets of glasses is a negative experience anyway. The many different incompatible glasses made it unlikely to find prescription lenses with the right filters to make it possible to wear a single pair to see the screen and get stereo vision, so I was always going to hate it.
      - rtkwe 5y ago
        Yeah 3D is a bit different than the strict resolution increase because it isn't just an upgrade to the cameras it changes how things are filmed and framed (look at every 3d movie it always has the obvious "ooooh it's coming out of the screen" shot you can pick out even in 2D).
        soco 5y ago
        There was enough 3D content (aka movies) for me to watch in weekends. No need for the news to be in 3D. And I was using the polarized glasses which were pretty fine for a relaxing (and low expectations) evening.
- sethammons 5y ago
  I actually enjoyed Avatar in 3d at home. My wife? Not so much. As a family we may have watched it that way twice. Since then, the 3d glasses have sat in a drawer.
asxd 5y ago
Can anyone provide a basic description of how this technology works? It certainly sounds amazing.
- nimazeighami 5y ago
  It’s 100 year old technology called a lenticular film that’s bonded to a high resolution display. Making a lenticular film that small is tough but not rocket science. The software is doing most of the magic interlacing the images properly.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    It’s not rocket science, it’s laser science.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    My senior year of high-school I made a similar display. I purchased a lenticular screen, coated it, and modified a projector to make a much smaller image than intended. Alignment was tough, but I ended up with about 4" of useful horizontal space with a fairly narrow viewing angle. There really isn't any magic, it's just a lot of pixels to push. I was able to do a Utah Teapot to 2 views at 400x600 on a 100MHz 486 (it was an 800x600 projector).
- mikewarot 5y ago
  The 3d input is transformed into a series of 45 views. At any point you're looking at on the screen, you're seeing one of those views with your left eye, and a different view with your right eye. The optics to do this kind of thing have been around for a while in one dimension. They seem to have a much higher resolution display with all these tiles in it, multiplexed, and driven by a custom display processor. I expect the price to stay high, and this not to become a consumer purchase.
hexsprite 5y ago
I'm sure it's awesome, but watching their marketing video it's not obvious that it's worth $15k.
CobrastanJorji 5y ago
I don't understand these units. It says the display is "7680px x 4320px". Shouldn't there be a third dimension? Or is it displaying 2D images with a depth indicator (i.e. no pixel can be directly in front of another pixel)?
- jjk166 5y ago
  It says No. of Views: 42-100, but it uses 2 display ports each capable of 7680x4320, which suggests it takes just two images and interpolates between them.
- jonplackett 5y ago
  I think it works like a lenticular - the 3d only works horizontally (because our eyes are on that plane). So the 7680 pixel resolution is divided into pixels being sent in a variety of directions to create the depth. We have one at work and it’s quite cool. But also quite small even though we have what was previously the large one.
- TheCoreh 5y ago
  There is some sort of film on top of the display that allows "selecting" pixels based on viewing angle. This is not unlike those 3D postcards that were a fad some time ago, or the Nintendo 3DS, only a much more sophisticated version of that.
  - CobrastanJorji 5y ago
    The 3DS is really neat. It does do the postcard thing ("parallax barrier"), but only to make sure each eye gets a separate image. It then uses face tracking to get a much more accurate idea of exactly where the eyes are and renders the image with that in mind, so slightly moving or turning your head adjusts the image appropriately.
- nomel 5y ago
  There aren't voxels, so you can't represent the depth in a simple quantized way. You can use VR for a similar example. Each eye gets its own perspective as an image at some resolution. 3d comes from your eyes relating the pixels in each image. Sure, there's a minimum angular resolution for each pixel, so there's a minimum resolving power for the depth, but you the end up with a bunch of rays rather than bounded boxes, with the resolution depending on things like the convergence of your eyes. This case is similar, with how close you are also affecting things.
E-Reverance 5y ago
This looks great for if you want multiple people viewing something, but I wonder why these [1] single person holograms never took off. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
- nomel 5y ago
  Those single person "holograms" aren't 3d. They offer a perspective shift that tracks a single point on your head, and look great in video, or with one eye closed, but are 2d when viewed with the eyes. For 3d, you need to give each eye a different perspective. These holograms are 3d, since each eye is presented with an image that matches its own perspective.
  - E-Reverance 5y ago
    Good point. Although if you combine this with 3D TVs, then you basically get a single person hologram, right?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - rtkwe 5y ago
      Only for one person though which isn't a great thing for TVs which generally have more than one person watching. Also the tracking is a bit of an issue, you'd have to wear a little headset to accurately track your head when they were released. Now you could maybe get away with using a camera for tracking but now you've got the privacy worries of that happening.
    - nomel 5y ago
      Yeah, that's how this system works, using eye tracking instead of a goofy game controller strapped to your head ;) https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/sonys-5000-eye-tracking-spatial-reality-display-can-create-holograms-without-a-headset/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/sonys-5000-eye-tracking-...
- 5y ago
brink 5y ago
As I understand it, this isn't a true holograph; it's just a very convincing imitation by rendering the image from two perspectives every few degrees and displays it on a high-res display that pipes it through a prism to use refraction to create an optical illusion trick. The marketing isn't very clear about that. Still very cool product, tho.
- toxik 5y ago
  > marketing not very clear That’s an understatement. It’s deceptive and underhanded.
RandomLensman 5y ago
Wouldn't it be great to get real holographic interfaces and displays? Not things that are only called "holographic". To be fair, I do like 3d displays and interfaces but I really don't like the indiscriminate use of the term "holographic". Those that have seen real synthetic holograms will know how amazing they can look.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tootie 5y ago
I got to play with a dev kit IRL and they are super impressive up close. The images have real depth and the development environment is standard Unity with just an HDMI out to the display. That being said, the usable field of view is not 180, it's narrower than that. And after building a few nifty demos, we put it on a shelf and never figured out a way to make it useful or interesting.
- thechao 5y ago
  I played with the great grandfather of this device — a black & white ~4” LCD, the size of a pizza box, attached to a 286 luggable. It was cool … but the killer feature is being able to rotate the data — our eyes are still 2D. Turns out, I can rotate data on a regular old monitor. If there was a version with 180° FOV, on a table, it’d be a great gaming table, but the market is … niche?
  - ipsum2 5y ago
    Pedantic correction: our eyes are not "2d", depth perception is a thing. That's why VR hardware is still years/decades away from replicating the real thing. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception
    - tracedddd 5y ago
      What are we missing? I thought VR hardware specifically took advantage of binocular vision so that it gave depth perception.
      - Miraste 5y ago
        The biggest component that VR doesn't have is a way of simulating focal distances. Current VR headsets focus at a fixed distance of about 2 meters, which makes reading and examining close objects difficult and causes distant ones to appear flat and unreal. The world lacks part of what lets us see depth. Facebook has very impressive prototypes that solve this [0], but so far they've been unwilling or unable to manufacture them at scale. VR headsets are also severely lacking in brightness and color depth compared to reality or even modern TVs, and they could always use more angular resolution, wider viewing angles, and higher refresh rates. [0] https://uploadvr.com/half-dome-3-prime-time/ https://uploadvr.com/half-dome-3-prime-time/
timhrothgar 5y ago
If anyone is interested in creating holographic technology with us, we're hiring! https://lookingglassfactory.com/careers https://lookingglassfactory.com/careers
thamer 5y ago
8K device… demo video is in 1080p. I realize that this 2D video is not showing exactly what you'd see with this special interface, but it does feature panning scenes where objects show 3D relief – presumably as a way to simulate the 3D effect that this device is capable of. On a large high-resolution screen this looks blurry and low-res, not really a great demo for an 8K display.
- Miraste 5y ago
  It is blurry and low-res, it's 8K across 45 different views that it renders simultaneously. There is an 8K screen in there, but when you look at it you will only see ~850p at a time.
davidivadavid 5y ago
Wasn't the dream of holographic displays to get rid of screens? I mean, granted, that's sci-fi, but the marginal improvement of depth inside a screen seems minimal at best?
cfjgvjh 5y ago
Linus Tech Tips covered them before that gives a pretty good overview [0]. It's a really cool tech and I hope it becomes more affordable in the future. I'd imagine actually feeling like a person is physically present will make Zoom meetings and such a lot less boring. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EA2FQXs4dw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EA2FQXs4dw
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  The small one is $300 with shipping estimate in October. Early Kickstarter pledges have shipped but still working on the rest of them. My batch is currently scheduled for next month. https://lookingglassfactory.com/portrait/ https://lookingglassfactory.com/portrait/
  - mleonhard 5y ago
    What is the process for taking iPhone portrait-mode photos and moving them to the LookingGlassPortrait for viewing in stand-alone mode?
boboche 5y ago
Autostereoscopic, not holographic. That alone is enough for me to not buy it because its being dishonest at best. “Holographic-like experience” would be an order of magnitude more accurate. Now you have a very constrained viewing window, limited depth without fuzzing, especially in front of the display. On the plus side, you get animations, proper colors and interaction. Wish dimenco were still selling their WOWvx displays on 8k and not the current costly integrated kit. 8k allows much better angular resolution, but nothing remotely close to an hologram.

83 points by danboarder 5y ago

soco 5y ago

Maybe I'll have again one day a 3D TV set... even though I didn't like much the glasses, I really miss watching 3D movies at home. And this one promises 3D without glasses!

codezero 5y ago
I somewhat miss the novelty of the 3d camera+screen on my old HTC android phone. It's a fun nice-to-have but there wasn't enough media that worked with it except what you recorded, which also wasn't the best thing to watch in 3D :)
- rtkwe 5y ago
  That's always an issue with new media tech. The same chicken and egg thing existed when 720 and later 1080+ TVs were released, there was practically nothing to watch on them at first. I think 3D has more issues to deal with than 3D but if there's TVs out there in large numbers the media will probably follow.
  - toast0 5y ago
    I'm 98% sure they stopped making 3d tvs, so you can't find a 2019-2021 3d tv; although I think some current model projectors might be capable. I don't think there were enough sales to encourage enough media production to encourage sustainable sales to encourage continued display manufacturing. I'm biased because I wear glasses and wearing two sets of glasses is a negative experience anyway. The many different incompatible glasses made it unlikely to find prescription lenses with the right filters to make it possible to wear a single pair to see the screen and get stereo vision, so I was always going to hate it.
    - rtkwe 5y ago
      Yeah 3D is a bit different than the strict resolution increase because it isn't just an upgrade to the cameras it changes how things are filmed and framed (look at every 3d movie it always has the obvious "ooooh it's coming out of the screen" shot you can pick out even in 2D).
      - soco 5y ago
        There was enough 3D content (aka movies) for me to watch in weekends. No need for the news to be in 3D. And I was using the polarized glasses which were pretty fine for a relaxing (and low expectations) evening.
sethammons 5y ago
I actually enjoyed Avatar in 3d at home. My wife? Not so much. As a family we may have watched it that way twice. Since then, the 3d glasses have sat in a drawer.

asxd 5y ago

Can anyone provide a basic description of how this technology works? It certainly sounds amazing.

nimazeighami 5y ago
It’s 100 year old technology called a lenticular film that’s bonded to a high resolution display. Making a lenticular film that small is tough but not rocket science. The software is doing most of the magic interlacing the images properly.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  It’s not rocket science, it’s laser science.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  My senior year of high-school I made a similar display. I purchased a lenticular screen, coated it, and modified a projector to make a much smaller image than intended. Alignment was tough, but I ended up with about 4" of useful horizontal space with a fairly narrow viewing angle. There really isn't any magic, it's just a lot of pixels to push. I was able to do a Utah Teapot to 2 views at 400x600 on a 100MHz 486 (it was an 800x600 projector).
mikewarot 5y ago
The 3d input is transformed into a series of 45 views. At any point you're looking at on the screen, you're seeing one of those views with your left eye, and a different view with your right eye. The optics to do this kind of thing have been around for a while in one dimension. They seem to have a much higher resolution display with all these tiles in it, multiplexed, and driven by a custom display processor. I expect the price to stay high, and this not to become a consumer purchase.

hexsprite 5y ago

I'm sure it's awesome, but watching their marketing video it's not obvious that it's worth $15k.

CobrastanJorji 5y ago

I don't understand these units. It says the display is "7680px x 4320px". Shouldn't there be a third dimension? Or is it displaying 2D images with a depth indicator (i.e. no pixel can be directly in front of another pixel)?

jjk166 5y ago
It says No. of Views: 42-100, but it uses 2 display ports each capable of 7680x4320, which suggests it takes just two images and interpolates between them.
jonplackett 5y ago
I think it works like a lenticular - the 3d only works horizontally (because our eyes are on that plane). So the 7680 pixel resolution is divided into pixels being sent in a variety of directions to create the depth. We have one at work and it’s quite cool. But also quite small even though we have what was previously the large one.
TheCoreh 5y ago
There is some sort of film on top of the display that allows "selecting" pixels based on viewing angle. This is not unlike those 3D postcards that were a fad some time ago, or the Nintendo 3DS, only a much more sophisticated version of that.
- CobrastanJorji 5y ago
  The 3DS is really neat. It does do the postcard thing ("parallax barrier"), but only to make sure each eye gets a separate image. It then uses face tracking to get a much more accurate idea of exactly where the eyes are and renders the image with that in mind, so slightly moving or turning your head adjusts the image appropriately.
nomel 5y ago
There aren't voxels, so you can't represent the depth in a simple quantized way. You can use VR for a similar example. Each eye gets its own perspective as an image at some resolution. 3d comes from your eyes relating the pixels in each image. Sure, there's a minimum angular resolution for each pixel, so there's a minimum resolving power for the depth, but you the end up with a bunch of rays rather than bounded boxes, with the resolution depending on things like the convergence of your eyes. This case is similar, with how close you are also affecting things.

E-Reverance 5y ago

This looks great for if you want multiple people viewing something, but I wonder why these [1] single person holograms never took off. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

nomel 5y ago
Those single person "holograms" aren't 3d. They offer a perspective shift that tracks a single point on your head, and look great in video, or with one eye closed, but are 2d when viewed with the eyes. For 3d, you need to give each eye a different perspective. These holograms are 3d, since each eye is presented with an image that matches its own perspective.
- E-Reverance 5y ago
  Good point. Although if you combine this with 3D TVs, then you basically get a single person hologram, right?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    Only for one person though which isn't a great thing for TVs which generally have more than one person watching. Also the tracking is a bit of an issue, you'd have to wear a little headset to accurately track your head when they were released. Now you could maybe get away with using a camera for tracking but now you've got the privacy worries of that happening.
  - nomel 5y ago
    Yeah, that's how this system works, using eye tracking instead of a goofy game controller strapped to your head ;) https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/sonys-5000-eye-tracking-spatial-reality-display-can-create-holograms-without-a-headset/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/sonys-5000-eye-tracking-...
5y ago

brink 5y ago

As I understand it, this isn't a true holograph; it's just a very convincing imitation by rendering the image from two perspectives every few degrees and displays it on a high-res display that pipes it through a prism to use refraction to create an optical illusion trick. The marketing isn't very clear about that. Still very cool product, tho.

toxik 5y ago
> marketing not very clear That’s an understatement. It’s deceptive and underhanded.

RandomLensman 5y ago

Wouldn't it be great to get real holographic interfaces and displays? Not things that are only called "holographic". To be fair, I do like 3d displays and interfaces but I really don't like the indiscriminate use of the term "holographic". Those that have seen real synthetic holograms will know how amazing they can look.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tootie 5y ago

I got to play with a dev kit IRL and they are super impressive up close. The images have real depth and the development environment is standard Unity with just an HDMI out to the display. That being said, the usable field of view is not 180, it's narrower than that. And after building a few nifty demos, we put it on a shelf and never figured out a way to make it useful or interesting.

thechao 5y ago
I played with the great grandfather of this device — a black & white ~4” LCD, the size of a pizza box, attached to a 286 luggable. It was cool … but the killer feature is being able to rotate the data — our eyes are still 2D. Turns out, I can rotate data on a regular old monitor. If there was a version with 180° FOV, on a table, it’d be a great gaming table, but the market is … niche?
- ipsum2 5y ago
  Pedantic correction: our eyes are not "2d", depth perception is a thing. That's why VR hardware is still years/decades away from replicating the real thing. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception
  - tracedddd 5y ago
    What are we missing? I thought VR hardware specifically took advantage of binocular vision so that it gave depth perception.
    - Miraste 5y ago
      The biggest component that VR doesn't have is a way of simulating focal distances. Current VR headsets focus at a fixed distance of about 2 meters, which makes reading and examining close objects difficult and causes distant ones to appear flat and unreal. The world lacks part of what lets us see depth. Facebook has very impressive prototypes that solve this [0], but so far they've been unwilling or unable to manufacture them at scale. VR headsets are also severely lacking in brightness and color depth compared to reality or even modern TVs, and they could always use more angular resolution, wider viewing angles, and higher refresh rates. [0] https://uploadvr.com/half-dome-3-prime-time/ https://uploadvr.com/half-dome-3-prime-time/

timhrothgar 5y ago

If anyone is interested in creating holographic technology with us, we're hiring! https://lookingglassfactory.com/careers https://lookingglassfactory.com/careers

thamer 5y ago

8K device… demo video is in 1080p. I realize that this 2D video is not showing exactly what you'd see with this special interface, but it does feature panning scenes where objects show 3D relief – presumably as a way to simulate the 3D effect that this device is capable of. On a large high-resolution screen this looks blurry and low-res, not really a great demo for an 8K display.

Miraste 5y ago
It is blurry and low-res, it's 8K across 45 different views that it renders simultaneously. There is an 8K screen in there, but when you look at it you will only see ~850p at a time.

davidivadavid 5y ago

Wasn't the dream of holographic displays to get rid of screens? I mean, granted, that's sci-fi, but the marginal improvement of depth inside a screen seems minimal at best?

cfjgvjh 5y ago

Linus Tech Tips covered them before that gives a pretty good overview [0]. It's a really cool tech and I hope it becomes more affordable in the future. I'd imagine actually feeling like a person is physically present will make Zoom meetings and such a lot less boring. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EA2FQXs4dw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EA2FQXs4dw

wlesieutre 5y ago
The small one is $300 with shipping estimate in October. Early Kickstarter pledges have shipped but still working on the rest of them. My batch is currently scheduled for next month. https://lookingglassfactory.com/portrait/ https://lookingglassfactory.com/portrait/
- mleonhard 5y ago
  What is the process for taking iPhone portrait-mode photos and moving them to the LookingGlassPortrait for viewing in stand-alone mode?

boboche 5y ago

Autostereoscopic, not holographic. That alone is enough for me to not buy it because its being dishonest at best. “Holographic-like experience” would be an order of magnitude more accurate. Now you have a very constrained viewing window, limited depth without fuzzing, especially in front of the display. On the plus side, you get animations, proper colors and interaction. Wish dimenco were still selling their WOWvx displays on 8k and not the current costly integrated kit. 8k allows much better angular resolution, but nothing remotely close to an hologram.