No, it's not really new. Small form factor is relatively new but even then the issue lies in yield and quality control.
Projector light engines include potentially many light-beam forming condensing and projection lenses precisely to concentrate light into a uniform quadrilateral. That's not new. The industry continues to advance, though.
Even holographic projection isn't new. This is just that, except the light is (sort of) taking the reverse path.
Technically there is no reason why it can't also project light outwards simultaneously. However light guides aren't really reversible like that: the light usually exits through a small fraction of the guide's external surface area. Reversing that means the entire external surface area is potentially collecting light, which would result in some undesirable caustics in all scenarios I can imagine. Light engines are in part designed to account for this (by reflecting or sinking light into an absorber) but this is still pretty different from what Zeiss is promoting.
For a small permanent installation where you are in control of the lighting I could see this working relatively well, but I have a hard time imagining you could get close anything resembling photo quality without a lot of environmental treatment. Conversely holographic projection is pretty doable on a mobile platform like a headset.
This is pretty new only in that it's probably at least an order of magnitude more difficult to accomplish and thus hasn't been viable up until now. Fundamentally none of the concepts are new, as far as I can tell.
As an example look at your nearest window and imagine it divided into a grid of uniform pixels. Each pixel is a small mirror that reflects a point of focus (wherever you are) to a another, smaller point on an imaging sensor somewhere in the frame. This would look pretty jarring (and jagged) to most people, until you layer a complimentary piece of glass on top of it to make the exterior flush. The two pieces of glass would be high enough precision that once you put them together they are effectively one piece of glass. Ta da.
This is effectively the same process as making any other multi-lensed glass, and that's Zeiss's wheelhouse.