High-resolution holographic interface [video]

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?

You should let a local hacklab borrow it, might as well get people experimenting with it instead of collecting dust :)

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.

Sony recently launched a product based on this concept: https://electronics.sony.com/spatial-reality-display/p/elfsr...

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.

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.

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.

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.

They use a single standard display with advanced optics to send light from columns of pixels in different horizontal directions. You can see here

https://docs.lookingglassfactory.com/keyconcepts/quilts

the format it uses to display still images. The 8K version is 5 by 9 for 45 separate angles, giving a 3D resolution of 864x864x45(horizontal). As somebody else said, it's not really a voxel because the 3d effect is technically a trick and doesn't work on other axes.

If you think 864p seems low for a 32" display, that's because it is - I've seen these in person and they have terrible pixel density. They're still very cool, though. 3D without glasses or a headset is impressive.

> marketing not very clear

That’s an understatement. It’s deceptive and underhanded.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.