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Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

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Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#51
post #14
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I get your comment. In my mind you can render $x pixels at 60fps. So the number of pixels for each distinct view is: $x / 45.

I think it's a little more complex than that. In addition to rasterizing a large number of pixels, the entire vertex pipeline has to run 45 times to generate 45 projections of the scene's geometry. You're correct though in that the rest of what happens in a frame (physics, animations & other state updates) do not have to run 45x.

This is an application where ray tracing for primary rays should shine. Instead of having to project thw scene 45 times you only need 45 sets of ray bundles, which is really efficient. The acceleration stuctures are shared between views. With a few pixel reordering hacks you can essentially generate all viewpoints as a single high resolution frame.

Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#52
post #18

I've wanted to watch a Broadway play in my living room that was indistinguishable from being in the theater for close to thirty years. I'm excited because this is the closest technology that I've seen that could make this possible. But I'm saddened if this is really the Apple II version of this technology because if it takes another forty years I probably won't live to see it. Always imagined that there would be sens…

In 40 years since Apple II, technology has doubled roughly 26 Moore's, or moresies.

The same shift now-a-days should take only a year and half (40 / 26), which is about how long it would take if you bought 64 Looking Glasses and built a DIY array, and used ML to construct a 3D video from a 2D one, a la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_reconstruction_from_multipl...

Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#54
post #51
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a little more complex than that. In addition to rasterizing a large number of pixels, the entire vertex pipeline has to run 45 times to generate 45 projections of the scene's geometry. You're correct though in that the rest of what happens in a frame (physics, animations & other state updates) do not have to run 45x.

This is an application where ray tracing for primary rays should shine. Instead of having to project thw scene 45 times you only need 45 sets of ray bundles, which is really efficient. The acceleration stuctures are shared between views. With a few pixel reordering hacks you can essentially generate all viewpoints as a single high resolution frame.

This is exactly what I was thinking about.

With raytracing you will almost get this for free.

Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#56

I played with the large size version of Looking Glass at AR in Action conf this January at MIT. It's really cool, and the coolest part is the interaction is intuitive. You really can just touch a point on the hologram and have it react at that point. As others have mentioned, it requires pushing quite a number of simultaneous views of the hologram through a hidpi display, the experienced resolution is not very high a…

Do you remember if the image varies in the vertical plane as well as the horizontal? The demo videos only move the camera horizontally.

if it is stacked screens, I don't see any reason it will work horizontally only. I believe the view angle is still very limited. I'd love to use this for Skype chat or something.

Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#57
post #19

These lenticular autostereoscopic displays have been around for a long time and never quite took off. There have been even 3D TVs (Philips) using this idea. I am not quite sure what is "new" apart of yet again abusing the "holographic" term (hint, it has zero to do with holograms or holography). The major issues with these are the limited viewing angles and the enormous bandwidth needed to both render the individual…

Compression is needed and probably not difficult given that not much extra information is rendered comparing to normal display given the limited view angle. Probably only twice as much as bandwidth needed if compression is done properly.

Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes your pixel distribution has much higher potential addressable resolution than the signal you care about... in which case, why not just display the full raster? Rendering for 2D and display are two different beasts -- but I'll own the fact that I'm not formally trained in this and there may be subtleties -- or even obvious signal processing facts -- that I'm getting wrong. (But if I'm wrong, I'd love to k…

> That assumes your pixel distribution has much higher potential addressable resolution than the signal you care about. It doesn't need that at all. Light fields can be interpolated like anything else, just like bayer filter for color on camera sensors or 4:2:2 color compression on the signal side. But if you're doing 3-D rendering, you can match rays exactly to your distribution on the display if the renderer knows…

With all due respect, interpolating light fields is far less trivial than you make it out to be. It's a 4D field, and naive interpolation leads to loss of detail, and often edge doubling (itself a form of aliasing).

Furthermore, if you're interpolating rays, you're necessarily not doing what you originally proposed, which is to only light up a (random or pseudorandom or evenly distributed) subset of the pixel display elements, presumably to save on rendering cycles.

Let me just say, more generally, that intuition trained on 2D doesn't apply directly to light fields.

Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#59
Holography is a very particular set of 3d image rendering technique. This volumetric display is not holographic. To me it's a frustration. Microsoft's highjacking of the word holography is also frustrating. Such abuse does not server the product and it's inventors.

Truly holographic displays will emerge once we can control ligth interference in the display.

Re: Looking Glass – A new type of holographic interface

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That assumes your pixel distribution has much higher potential addressable resolution than the signal you care about. It doesn't need that at all. Light fields can be interpolated like anything else, just like bayer filter for color on camera sensors or 4:2:2 color compression on the signal side. But if you're doing 3-D rendering, you can match rays exactly to your distribution on the display if the renderer knows…

With all due respect, interpolating light fields is far less trivial than you make it out to be. It's a 4D field, and naive interpolation leads to loss of detail, and often edge doubling (itself a form of aliasing). Furthermore, if you're interpolating rays, you're necessarily not doing what you originally proposed, which is to only light up a (random or pseudorandom or evenly distributed) subset of the pixel display…

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