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Comment by ebg13 | Hacker News Reader

The thing that strikes me the most is how absolutely terrible they are at showing off their product. Their whole promo video is extreme closeups on 3D renderings that look no different than what my cellphone can do because it's just a boring video of boring renderings and I'm watching it on my boring cellphone. It's like they're trying to show the grand canyon by filling the frame with a small bit of rock.

This shitty gif from techcrunch is infinitely more impactful in every conceivable way despite being a shit quality gif. https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Aug-22-201...

Looking Glass people, if you're reading this, you need to zoom way the fuck out, turn the lights on, and quit with the artsy bullshit fading to black every few seconds because it looks like you're hiding something. You cannot show pictures. You need to show the experience.

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I think this linus tech tips video shows it better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EA2FQXs4dw

Interesting to see the 'modified' image before it's put on the display(https://youtu.be/-EA2FQXs4dw?t=375)

Seems similar to how pixel art worked, and tricks artists used to get a better image with CRTs. https://66.media.tumblr.com/8d2cf7adae94fde97d1a8c9cf78a46a2...

Wow! Their own tech demo make it look crappy compared to this demo. He explains the tech really well and gives great examples/demos.

Watch this video, NOT their own demo if you want to be impressed.

What really kills me is that they clearly shot the screen on a turntable (0:30) which would be the perfect time to show the on-screen image rotating, but no. Black screen.

Too hard to connect the cables for that shot? Didn’t bring a computer to the photo studio?

Another option: short animated loop to create depth from parallax. But the key thing is it needs to show the monitor as a whole along with the image on screen, all moving together. https://imgur.com/eh5u6Gu

Specifically they need to pan the camera around since you cant show off the stereoscopic effect on a regular screen. Heres my favorite demo: https://youtu.be/E8pZlI2WM_Q

Remember the reveal of the Nintendo 3DS?

They did not allow press to take images of the device when the display was on.

They knew images couldn't capture the 3D so they did what this company is doing and used a bunch of vague renderings to try to express how the thing worked.

Since it's probably the same underlying parallax tech powering both, I'd guess the reasonings are the same.

That's a bad reason, and they executed poorly. The techcrunch gif I linked _kills_ the demo (in the good way) in a second. Random schmoe cellphone took their marketing department to school without an ounce of preparation.

Yeah. The 3DS only supports one viewing angle, holding it straight parallel to your face. At that angle, you see 3D; at any other angle, you see distortions. So indeed, the 3DS very hard to demonstrate in a photo or video. But Looking Glass supports multiple angles, which makes the gif you mentioned possible and is also what makes it unique as a product!

It's not really the same tech. More like a super sandwitch of 43 perspective layers. the 3DS uses parallax effect, which requires your head to be in a set location for it to work (I believe?) versus this monitor that actually works via you looking around at it from different perspectives (43 is the number I kept hearing)

Yes 3DS has a few fixed / discrete viewing positions from which the stereoscopic effect will "work".

The later "New 3DS" introduced a face tracker that made the effect work continuously across most of the LCD's viewing angle for a single viewer.

Curious why they didnt go for a similar setup here? Though the looking glass display allows for multiple viewers.

> Since it's probably the same underlying parallax tech powering both, I'd guess the reasonings are the same.

It's not. Looking Glass is an advanced version of lenticular optics, which is 100+ year old technology, except used to create a multiscopic display(many views).

Nintendo 3DS is newer technology, known as parallax barrier. However, 3DS is only two views, which is pretty much only useful for a single viewer.

I believe they are shy to show it in high-quality video because the effective resolution is <900px. See my comment below for the math.

Even in that TechCrunch gif, I believe I can already see pixel borders on the specular shading of the top part of the h.

For an even clearer example, see the frog in full-screen at 3:31 here: https://youtu.be/-EA2FQXs4dw?t=211

(Edited) The frog was on the low-res developer device.

The much larger “8k” version introduced half way through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EA2FQXs4dw has some good tech detail, with the raw pixel mapping shown at 6:30. Calcs seem about right since raw pixel count was stated as 43 million, although it was implied elsewhere they split RGB sub pixels too (which sounds wrong I admit), so maybe 43 million divided by 15? Our eyes are more sensitive to luminance than colour, so maybe they did something there (however, not that I could see from the raw pixel mapping at 6:30).

If they're counting subpixels as separate whole pixels and omitting the fact that the "effective" resolution is much lower because of the 3d layering just so they can say "8k" in their marketing material that's suuuper dishonest.

That's exactly what they are doing. The real resolution is 45x lower.

The frog was on their "4K" device, so the 8K one will only have 30% smaller pixels.

100% / sqrt(2)

I don't think the video quality or display quality is the problem though. The 8k screen itself looks plenty high quality in the Linus video bouncing around this thread. The problem is that their promo material entirely eliminates any sense of the _one_ thing that they bring to the table that makes them special.

They need to throw up a _static_ 3D image that the viewer can easily understand and then move the camera. That's it. That's all they had to do, because literally the one thing that makes this screen special is showing different viewing angles, and they failed wildly.

I have designed lenticular prints in the past and also I'm the person that wrote the vray plugin for rendering CGI to lenticular.

The main thing that everyone wants is a lot of depth, a wow effect. Lenticular technology can only deliver that while your head is static. As soon as you move, you either see stripes move across the image or you need to introduce an unnatural amount of bokeh blur.

The reason for the stripes is that from your eye / camera, different parts of the image have slightly different angles, so slightly different subpixels are visible.

So if they follow your suggestion, they need to ensure that the final video is low quality enough so that you don't see the striping artifacts.

Here's a lenticular print that I had made at 4800dpi, so at a much higher resolution than what a display can hope to achieve

https://www.dropbox.com/s/10nquohksew1fhe/fertig.mts?dl=0

Note the strong blur to hide artifacts, yet you can still see some striping on the background and in the top right corner.

Here's a simulation of the best possible result that one could hope to achieve with 70lpi sheets and 1200dpi effective resolution, which should be close to what this display uses:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1s69k5gmt1n4i5l/simulation_L.jpg?d...

For anything better than that, they need much more subpixels. 2x the pixels for half the banding width.

Sorry for derailing the thread, but would love to read how you make the lenticular prints.

This is very reminiscent of the marketing around Magic Leap, except with this (judging from the actual videos of it in action from other people, which Magic Leap didn't have) there's a real product that pretty much matches the marketing behind the smoke and mirrors. Why are they so afraid to show it off?

I know! It's crazy! Reviewers are like "OMG so amazing! Look at how cool it is when you move around!", and they're in there going "Ok, but wouldn't it be fun if we hid it from everyone and made it look like we're full of shit and have something to hide?"

Thank you, I thought I was missing something when looking at it but I was like looks the same to me.

Given that this is the perfect display to watch porn, maybe they tried to get ahead of the game with their "artsy" approach by showcasing other good use cases like design, science and art.

The first thing I noticed when watching their promo video was that the audio was distorted at anything above half volume...

Their promo video makes it look like a TV with a touch screen.

So true, but i kind of like the unterstatement of it.

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