Looking Glass' new lineup includes a $300 phone-sized holographic display
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Dangit, I got excited for System Shock 3 or a new Thief and now I feel let-down.
The market for 3D displays is small, and the market for 3D displays that give up some 2D image quality is very small.
I was disappointed that they didn't use stereo for Pokémon Sun and Moon but then they would had to have decided if Lusamine's hair formed a sheet or a cone wheras the animation is strangely ambiguous about the issue as it is.
Most 3D TVs use a high frame rate panel and shutter glasses, somewhat like Lenny Lipton's (Cornell physics grad who wrote the lyrics for Puff the Magic Dragon)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealD_3D
which uses a double-pumped projector and a device which electrically rotates polarized light on alternate frames so that circular polarized lenses on the glasses work like the shutter glasses. (I'm a little sad that I never got to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_3D)
You don't lose quality in principle from this scheme but you do lose brightness and the real answer is "it's complicated" when you change the frame rate.
Most 3D TV however is in a side-by-side format where half of the horizontal frame is used for one eye and the other half is used for the other eye so you really do lose some horizontal resolution.
My best 3D viewer right now is a Meta Quest 3 on which I've watched Space Station 3D and The Rise of Skywalker though sometimes I think about picking up a used 3D TV. If a monitor or TV supports high frame rates you could get 3D for free if it wasn't for the shutter glasses being rather expensive.
The 120hz refresh rate of those newer displays really opens up when you have a proper desktop GPU to drive them. The past few weeks I've been dusting off my Quest 1 with ALVR over USB and it's great. You can have the goofiest setup (NixOS? GNOME Wayland? Nvidia drivers? Come right in!) and it will translate the Quest's built-in tracking into SteamVR with less than a frame of delay.
Gotta love it when that thing you thought was dead is actually pretty usable thanks to sideloading and a hardworking community. If I hadn't just gotten 2 weeks of VTOL VR out of that headset I might have remembered to resent the $400 I spent on it.
This is not how 3d TVs work, it's only one of the common ways of storing the files.
More and more of these threads feel like there's posters in here that are LLM hallucinations...
https://www.best-3dtvs.com/what-is-side-by-side-3d/
SBS is not the only format but it’s a format you are very likely to get, how the TV converts that to a stereo image is the responsibility of the TV.
[1] https://docs.lookingglassfactory.com/keyconcepts/how-it-work...
The intention was that the UI would reveal extra info (like meta-data about a photo, or calendar details) when you shifted your head POV. Like a gesture that you could do one-handed while riding the bus. (But not discoverable, and twitchy, and tail-wagging-the-dog.)
Given how coarse the tracking had to be so that the UI wasn't constantly shifting, it would have been far simpler and more energy efficient just to use the accelerometer instead of the fancy camera setup. And just use that for some nice parallax effects in the launcher; not as a core UI interaction.
What incredibly lazy and feckless journalism. You're writing a bloody article about the thing, request the damn price and publish it.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230525193416/http://alumni.med...
By imitating Disney, that's how!
But yeah, your impression lines up with what I was hearing 10 years ago too. Magic Leap was leaning waaaaay too hard into a premium market that was too poorly formed to satisfy, with decreasingly valid value prop as the field of VR evolved. Google Glass would bite the bullet, HoloLens found a few government contractors to pick up the bill and surely Vision Pro will peter out with similar slight entrenchment.
Mainstream VR just doesn't make sense, and consumers won't admit it because we're desperate to be wowed. I like my Oculus Quest, but even a perfect version of the headset wouldn't replace my phone or my PC.
https://resources.magicleap.com/en-us/careers
Supposedly they have open roles, but it's probably just for show (since displaying 0 openings would be perceived as a negative signal). Archive.org corroborates not much is changing.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://resource...
and on v2 of the product. If you really want optical AR hardware that's affordable and stylish your best bet is
I think they have a great story for "watch TV in AR" but I don't think their story for AR applications is that good.
If it's not for some strong built-in reason (impossible-to-update firmware has a hard date after which it will crash, etc.), do you think picking up one to experiment with would still be worth it?
Of course, any such method would need to come up with data from the thin air, but it seems there are pretty decent algorithms for doing exactly that nowdays.